In our latest Niche Spotlight, we’ve played demos for some hot new indie games that have been making waves lately: the gorgeous hand-animated beat ’em up game PIZZA KIDD, the chonky polygon survivors-esque game Vital Shell, and last but not least the classically inspired survival horror game Parasite Mutant. Without further ado, get our bite-sized previews for all three games below:
PIZZA KIDD
by Kidd Games, LLC
In the distant year of 22XX, the town of Fhiladelfhia, much like the rest of the world, is overrun by mutant abominations. The Santos Corps attempted to resurrect and extinct species to end world hunger. Instead, they only hastened the downfall of humanity. Amid these ruins of the old world, the famous “Angela’s Pizzeria” endures thanks to its owners’ martial arts talents.
You play as the titular Pizza Kidd and probably his even more titular sister, Black Roze, if the Kickstarter stretch goals are met. Walking along the singular lane, beating the soon-to-be-re-extinct snot out of mutants. Sort of like Ninja Warriors on SNES. The mutants you encounter come in all shapes and sizes. From flying bats, which require pixel-perfect accuracy to overgrown turtle behemoths towering over you. There’s robots in there too.
Not deep into the first level you start seeing recolors of the first enemy and that may instill a false sense of “Oh boy, here we go…” in you, but the variety is actually pretty decent here.
The sprites and background environments look nice enough, but there are two issues I have with them: First, characters only occupy a quarter of the screen space and they’re quite close to the bottom. Second, the law of thirds has been broken and the punishment is negative space in the middle of the screen. pixels vary in size between different sprites and backgrounds. And it also seem as though some of the pixels are stretched.
Now this may be a consequence of some creature designs. Or it may be uneven pixels. Either way, a frame of animation here and there may look scuffed depending on how much you care about that stuff.
Combat is punchy, but stiff. Every hit pauses the action to emphasize its weight. Nothing groundbreaking, this has been done before. The problem is that it pauses for every single hit registered on the screen. And the screen tend to get crowded. Meaning a single screen-wide attack can take a couple of seconds to play out. In beat ’em up terms, you may as well file your taxes before you’re able to regain control of the game.
The intricacies of combat aren’t explained to you straight out of the game. The only tip you get is that there’s parrying on top of blocking. If you want to learn about the stamina bars and special attacks, you’ll have to open up the “How to play” option in the pause menu.
Really seems like something you’d want to front load to your players, considering the regular moves aren’t very agile. Clearly an early little demo, hopefully the devs fill out those stretch goals the same way yo momma stretches out every pair of pants she comes across.
Vital Shell
by MarvinWizard
Who doesn’t like the PS1 aesthetic these days? Nintendo 64 and Saturn fans, probably. Vital Shell is a PS1-styled Vampire Survivors clone with mechs, gaudy fonts and weapon combos like in Kirby 64. So there’s a little something for everyone!
It’s going to be difficult to describe this games unique aspects because there are none. PS1 graphics have been done to death. “Vampire Survivors” has been cloned so many times the gene seed has become stagnant. And the way it differs from the original has been done before. So let’s start there, since the other two are self explanatory at this point.
Enemies come in timed waves (20 of ’em), letting you upgrade your “shell” in between waves. You start out with 1 shell-tied weapon, pick a second weapon after clearing the first wave and a third weapon after clearing the 9th. All 3 can fire and reload automatically. After clearing the 5th wave, you get to pick a special. Special attack is fired manually and has limited ammo. You can replenish it by picking up the “S” power-up dropped by enemies or by fulfilling certain conditions after you’ve upgraded your shell enough.
Picking and choosing different upgrades is how you make or break your build, obviously. That’s no different from every other Vampire Survivor clone, but here’s the thing: Since you don’t upgrade your shell right after you level up and instead stack level-up bonuses until the wave is over, you get to really pour over your build decisions.
As an added bonus for people with poor memory, you don’t forget what it was you wanted to lean into in regards to your build. A stat screen is always right there on your side to remind you which bonuses are currently active while upgrading.
The PS1-esque graphics and FMVs are reminiscent of low budget Japanese titles, the UI is charmingly garish and music is generic liquid DnB. It gets the job done. There seem to be 5 levels and 5 shells to choose from, with two being available in the demo. The game expects you to play it over and over to unlock passive upgrades and new weapons/shells. Which is fine for mindless dopamine stimulators like this, I just hope you’re nostalgic for 90’s video game aesthetics.
Controls are simple and allow you to aim manually. Auto-aim is set on by default and I recommend you keep it that way until you need to fire off a rail-gun special into a crowd of enemies. Otherwise the game will target the closest enemy by default, potentially wasting a charge.
This is a no-frills, no-nonsense type of game that will test your reflexes and forward planning. You’ll know it’s a game for you after a single playthrough (15-20 minutes).
Parasite Mutant
by IceStruuna
In a nice segue, we move from a PS1-styled clone of a modern game, to a modern PS1-era game clone. Parasite Mutant, as the name and title font would suggest, is a spiritual successor to Parasite Eve, a 1998 fan-favorite Square RPG. And while it does offer a number of “retro” filters, all they do is make your game blurry. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to have my games look as sharp as possible, image clarity is a must.
Fortunately, these can be turned on and off in the main menu. Unfortunately, navigating menus is a bit of a nightmare: Moving your selection too fast will confuse the system. You have to let the menu animations play out. The game won’t recognize your controller layout until you restart it. Buttons for selecting and exiting out of a sub-menus change constantly and I really hope the dev standardizes it by release.
Graphically, it looks neat enough, but you cannot turn off chromatic aberration, so you’ll just have to live with that. Monsters are appropriately disgusting and the stiff animations can be excused when you consider this game was made by 3 malnourished china-men with no regard for copyright laws. That much is obvious from a straight up Xenomorph boss fight. To add to the bad taste, the game utilizes AI-generated 2D art.
If you’ve played Parasite Eve, you’ll know how to play and what to expect from Parasite Mutant. Semi-turn based battles play out in the open world, your weapons have limited ammo and range, everyone can move freely during the fight and all your actions are tied to a timer.
There’s a weapon upgrade system, which thankfully lets you transfer the invested upgrades from one gun to another. So if you’ve dumped a bunch of materials into one pistol and then suddenly find one with better stats from the get-go, you can use an item to transfer that value into the new gun.
If you’re a big fan of Parasite Eve games, I guess you’ll enjoy this as well, but it failed to pull in a franchise tourist like me.
