It’s hard to name games that are creative, fun, cute, yet gory and smooth to play. I know these are all words that praise todays game, but it’s all true! Hi my name is phant0m and these are my thoughts on… Turbo Kid.

Visuals

This game looks absolutely perfect! The artstyle mixes between colorful and beautiful or dark and sad. Its combination makes the game’s story moments make more sense and enhances the experience tenfold. Also the character design is great! I personally love how much the main character sticks out compared to everyone else. Although it doesn’t really fit in the rest of the world. It definitely just looks nice for what it is, other characters spark details. Enemies look fine and let you know what they’re gonna try as soon as you see them.

Gameplay

The gameplay is the highest point of the game. It not only feels nice to play through this metroidvania it feels awesome to absolutely shred my enemies into pieces of unrecognizable gore! I personally don’t play 2d games often because I usually find them more limiting than other games but this one never made me feel that way. Being able to earn several objects which change the gameplay often makes it feel fresh but also like you have a choice. *Spoiler alert of one of the weapons* but I personally loved being able to switch to a machete and taking down enemies up close instead of at range. The choice is yours during combat. And traversal also feels great. You can reach on ledges to jump onto others or even use some objects which I don’t want to spoil. So once you do get there; just know it changes the game!

Story

This is where my experience turns to a more negative tone. I personally had more fun exploring the world or destroying enemies that I kept forgetting what the story was either about, or got bored (which was probably my fault). I just personally found it too easy to get out of the way of the plotline which is great for many players into freedom, it just really got me more lost, especially since this is a continuation to a 2015 movie also called Turbo Boy, which I didn’t watch and left me confused with how the plot of this game started. Luckily for me I never felt the story was too important and if it did my experience would’ve been ruined much more than the tiny amount it did now.

Characters

The characters didn’t really peak my interest either. although their designs looked cool, their dialogue just didn’t interest me enough to pay attention to their wants and needs. But the way you can interact with them with the 4 given emotes is fun. These emotes don’t add a level of depth to these characters but they provide at least 4 more options to every convo; even if they are short or long.

Music

The game’s music is one of the stronger highlights of Turbo Kid. Not only does its multiple tracks sound nice they absolutely crush it. The soundtrack is super fun and exciting. The main theme especially just made me want to start playing multiple hours! Fantastic job!

Performance

The performance of running this game was incredible, while playing on my pc I didn’t lose any frames, didn’t have screen tearing issues and lacked any real flaws, if any during my runtime. As far as I’m concerned this may have been one of the cleanest gaming experiences I’ve had in a long time!

Verdict

Anyways if you’re wondering I do recommend this game! It’s super fun, relaxing, at times stressful but at the end of the day super entertaining and rewarding. I give it a 9/10. The only real issue was that the game was so good that the story couldn’t keep me compelled enough to pay attention. But it barely caused any problems to my overall enjoyment! Those were my thoughts on Turbo Kid! Thx For Reading! Keep doing great things! You’re good at them. Bye 🙂

Side Notes

Played this game with a Rx 6750 XT Powercolor GPU, and an intel i5 13400f. Game had amazing controller support, saving animations are so fun and have so much personality.

What makes a great mystery? A small cast of characters, all with secrets and personal agendas? A series of tantalising clues? A brave but vulnerable investigator? A locked room—or perhaps a hermetically sealed starship, hurtling through space, where tensions increase over time and threaten to boil over?

Between Horizons makes great use of its setting—a generation ship, flying through space to form a colony on another planet—to weave a tale about individual choice and collective responsibility. It asks whether leaders, such as the captain of a spaceship, should be given total control—including over as yet unborn children—or whether ordinary people should take matters into their own hands. Tying this all together are some very focused gameplay systems which eschew distractions to hone in exclusively on investigation and deduction. It’s a heady brew that engaged my brain and emotions in equal measure.

You play as Stella, daughter of the security chief aboard the starship Zephyr. Things on Earth are falling apart, so humanity decides to send several starships into the void to settle colonies on habitable planets. The catch is that these are generation ships, meaning that the original crew will eventually die, passing on their responsibilities to their children and grandchildren. 

Like all good sci fi, Between Horizons conjures a world ripe with moral and philosophical dilemmas, and then wastes no time exploring them. Should the first generation crew retain control, even as they grow old? Should the passengers have a say in how the mission is conducted, or only the crew? Is it a good idea that children born on the ship inherit their parents’ profession? 

Stella is part of the second generation, destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to live her whole life on board the Zephyr, taking on her father’s role as security chief when he dies, never having seen Earth, and with no realistic hope of being alive when the ship reaches its ultimate destination. Without giving too much away, the story burrows into the challenges and contradictions of live aboard a generation ship, and Stella finds herself at the centre of events as they unfold, slowly at first, and then with explosive consequences.

The gameplay is tightly focused, with no loose ends. There’s no combat, no platforming, no side activities. You’ll speak to crew members, walk through the ship gathering clues, which will be memorialised in your PDA. You’ll be assigned cases to investigate, which you can theoretically ‘solve’ immediately by simply offering an answer to the central question of the case and calling it a day. That would be like starting out a game of Cluedo by guessing that it was Professor Plum, in the Billiard Room, with the Candlestick. You might luck out and hit upon the correct answer, but probably not. So instead you follow the clues and gradually narrow things down until you’re sure (or fairly sure) you know the answer. 

The main way you do this involves selecting pieces of evidence and showing them to specific characters. Much of the challenge comes from figuring out who might know something about a particular clue. These cases felt like real mysteries rather than video-gamey puzzles, because they require real deduction and logical thinking to solve. The more I played, the more I realised that the real game was taking place inside my head. Sure, the PDA helped me sift through the evidence, but it was always a leap of deduction in my own mind that helped me to crack the case. Between Horizons reminded me how often video games present players with an apparent mystery, only to effectively solve it on their behalf after a bit of gameplay or a few scripted dialogue options. That’s not the case here. You’ll have to rely on your little grey brain cells to get you through—and that feels great. 

At its heart, Between Horizons is about delivering those moments when you use your noggin to smartly piece together information and clues, feeling jolly clever when you get it right. Between bouts of head scratching deduction, the game tells a story that is tense and surprisingly deep given it’s short run time. There are occasional dialogue choices that Stella can make—including some very impactful ones, near the end of the game—but don’t be fooled into thinking this is an RPG. There are different endings, and the narrative will continue even if you offer the wrong answer to a particular case, but this is not a game where you make your own story. The overall contours of the plot remain the same no matter what you do, which was fine by me, since it allows the story to be carefully crafted and well-paced. 

I do have one or two small complaints. Due to the tightly scripted nature of the cases, it’s not possible to ask characters certain straightforward questions—or really any questions at all. You can only show them a piece of evidence and see if they react, and if it’s not the specific evidence the game thinks you should be showing them at that moment, they’ll spit out a generic line about not understanding what you’re asking, which sometimes broke my immersion. You’ll also find yourself traipsing backwards and forwards across the ship, bouncing between clues and conversations, or simply searching for your next lead. This is fine for a while but eventually gets tedious. 

The art style is 2.5D, meaning the characters and many objects are pixelated, while the ship itself has several layers that you can move between, giving an impression of depth. It’s a nice style that suits the game. The Zephyr is depicted with a consistent orange and black colour palette throughout, which looks cool, but does mean that some rooms and corridors start to blend together. The soundtrack is consistently excellent, even though only a few ambient tracks play on loop as you poke around the ship. I felt like I’d wandered into a jazz club in the middle of the movie Blade Runner, which is exactly how I want to feel in a game like this. 

By the end of my seven hour playthrough, the story reached a climax that was both surprising and satisfying. I was thrilled to see story beats that were introduced early on paying off in the final act. Like any good thriller, all the main characters have something to hide and flaws that run deep, but they are not cartoon villains. Even the characters stirring up trouble are doing so for reasons that are entirely understandable, maybe even noble. Without giving too much away, by the end of the story you’ll be questioning who is really right—the established authorities, or the troublesome upstarts—and will be invited to act on your conclusions. 

I’ve rarely been so impressed with the story and writing in a game, or felt so satisfied with the way I’d been challenged to think my way through it. The end screen informed me that I’d solved 8/10 cases correctly and apprehended some, though not all, of the conspirators. That felt about right. I’d made some logical deductions, played some hunches, and come up with a messy solution that felt close to the truth. Somehow, it wouldn’t have felt right if I’d achieved a completely ‘correct’ outcome, which shows just how much I got sucked into this game’s complex, noirish world. 

At a time when so many games are full of bloated content and tacked-on mechanics, Between Horizons is an all-killer-no-filler tale that I heartily recommend to anyone who likes science fiction, mysteries, or simply a great story well told.

Rogue-like or Rogue-Lite

Empty Shell is a stylish rogue-lite horror game. Randomly generated maps that change each time you start a run are used in Empty Shell. Empty Shell is developed by CC Arts and it seems to be one of their first projects. Published by a Polish company, Hyperstrange, the game released on Nintendo Switch on 12th March 2024. The version reviewed here is the Switch version.

A rogue-lite is similar to a rogue-like, a rogue-like being a game where you explore, fight, and die. The player then repeats the run and no weapons, or key items that the player may have collected are saved for future runs. In other words, in rogue-like games, the player is often fighting enemies in dungeons, exploring, finding new paths to make progress, but then, when the player dies, they have to return to the start of the game with nothing that they’ve collected being saved. In a rogue-lite, you keep any key items that you found on previous runs.

In Empty Shell I noticed that some of the electronic devices that you find (that help to describe the game world) are kept on your next run. So, over time, you build up a library of lore documents. Each time you play the game, a character is given to the player and there is detailed biography information of the character that you are playing as. For example, I could be a 22-year-old named John Smith. The background to the game is that there is a group of people being held against their will and one at a time, they are sent into a facility in order to complete certain objectives. For the group, they hold fear of the facility as no one who goes there ever returns.

Horror

There is a clear Squid Game influence in the way that the characters are being held against their will, and sent to complete dangerous tasks. This is similar to the Netflix show, Squid Game. The game is definitely a horror title. There is little or no music as you explore the facility, but there are sound effects and generally an eerie sound design. I feel that the sound design isn’t perfect as the absence of a thematic soundtrack means that Empty Shell isn’t exactly a game that you can sit and chill to. However, it is appealing in other ways. The survivalist elements of being left in a facility swarming with monsters with only a shotgun, some shells, and a shovel does give you an adrenalin rush, and the gameplay is addictive and suitable for a playthrough every so often.

The combat with your melee weapon (which could be a shovel, or iron bar) is satisfying. You can almost feel the edge of the shovel crushing an enemy giant spider’s thorax. However, because the graphics are in black and white, and you see the action from a top down perspective, you can often hardly see what kind of creature you are fighting. There are spiders, zombies and other creepy monstrosities crawling towards the player at most times. It is wise to save ammunition for when you really need it and use the melee weapons on most enemies.

Gameplay

The game controls like a twin stick shooter. You hold the R button to engage you’re rifle or shotgun and then use the second analog stick to aim. It actually controls similarly to Diablo and other Diablo-like action RPGs. A game that I would say Empty Shell is very similar to, is Undead Storm and Undead Storm: Nightmare on DS and 3DS respectively. However, Empty Shell is many times more polished, has serious lore woven around it, and generally doesn’t feel like a budget game (unlike Undead Storm). Ironically, Empty Shell probably will fill the same gameplay niche as Undead Storm for most people who play it.

However, the genre of rogue-likes is prone to eliciting frustration in its players and Empty Shell is no exception. There is little feeling of progression when the player dies repeatedly and is sent back to the start of the game multiple times. Rogue-Likes aren’t my favourite genre of videogame so I’m sure that if you do like rogue-likes, you’ll enjoy Empty Shell because even though it’s not within my favourite genre, I enjoy playing it in bursts.

Conclusion

Overall, Empty Shell is an enjoyable Rogue-lite with a unique look and great horror elements. Reminiscent of past horror games, and with satisfying combat, Empty Shell is great to play in short bursts. While the gameplay loop may put some people off, if you are a horror fan, you could do a lot worse than Empty Shell. Furthermore, there is a wealth of lore hidden around the facility, and if you let the story ensnare you, you could get addicted to the experience of running through the facility narrowly escaping death at every turn.

A soothing story driven fetch quest.

Skaramazuzu is a rather interesting project. The premise is rather basic , you wake up with no recollection of who or where you are. The art style even though quite simple is very clear, from the character you can interact with to all the objects in the over all world that can be used or picked up. Following in the footsteps of its art direction , the gameplay is also very simple. The games mechanics only require you to walk and talk to various character who are in possession of some item that you will need, and since they never have the need for said item themselves you are free to grab it off them. For a price. The entire game is you finding out more about the situation you found yourself in by chatting away to certain creatures in this ‘limbo’, and then fetching something for them so that they may give you an item that you were tasked to fetch for someone else.

Other than these characters and creatures you will also find yourself interacting with items, keyholes and rotating mechanisms in order to find 4 orbs spread around the games world in order to finally learn exactly what and who you are.

I will not mention anything about the story as the game is rather short, I have completed it within 3 hours or so. it is definitely a nice experience if this is the sort of game you are into. To me the walking back and forth and talking with the same no voice acted characters to see if there’s something I missed was tedious, but definitely rewarding when my brain finally clicked and I solved the puzzle / riddle. The game is sitting at $10.59 which in my opinion isn’t worth it for a 3 hour experience with no replay-ability factor but that may be due to me not being a fan of such games. With that in mind I still commend the game for what it is. A story focused puzzle experience, and this it does pretty well.