What Did We Play Yesterday?

Spent maybe more healing stuff than I should beating the twin dragons, became very best friends with Zangetsu, and ended up in a place called the Underground Sorcery Lab which was surprisingly small. I expected a full-fledged level but it's only a few screens. There's a really annoying boss there who is super fast, and beating him gets you the teleport ray thing you need to unlock other parts of the castle. For some reason Dominique is down there (hmmm... could it be the church lady who knows a bunch about shards and is always in weird places is a baddie?).

Did all the hoo ha needed to unlock the spiker parts of the library. They are indeed spikey. This area is harder than the previous levels, so upgraded shards come in handy. I tried and failed to get a good screenshot of a guy shredding a guitar a la Mad Max Fury Road. The teleport ray can be used to get into tricky places, so I retraced my steps (again) to see if I could squeeze into various places inaccessible before.

The twin dragons are bitches, so I took the liberty of retraversing the entire map to find anything I'd missed. I did find a few upgrades, as well as the silver knight familiar, who I'd missed when I beat the stained glass boss thing. I've kind of ignored shards up to this point, so I took some time to upgrade a few and the Poltergeist protective shard is may favorite so far, although Flame Canon has been extremely useful as well.

I've been working my way through a couple of areas that are a real PITA, including the Twin Dragon Tower. The 3D-2D effect is cool, but hit detection is a little weird and there are a few jumps where it's really easy to miss and fall to the bottom. There are also some interior areas where there are a crap-ton of flying enemies that are a nuisance to deal with (in this game, instead of the annoying medusa heads there are dullahammer heads).

I was minding my own business when .... well. Twin dragons showed up. I'm not sure what I was expecting tbh. Evidently this pair of bosses dies when it reaches a certain level of the tower, so killing them too quickly can make the game glitch and you'll fight them forever. I'll be going into this one prepared to get stuck for technical reasons.

I scored a sweet, sweet double jump, and had a little scare.

Right before I scored the sweet, sweet double jump, I went to save my game and all my saves appeared to be gone. Scary! Additionally, I didn't seem to be creating new saves. I SSHed into my deck, confirmed the saves still existed, and backed them up, and on restart they appeared again. I think this was a glitch related to temporarily putting the deck to sleep.

The double jump is acquired in a library area that's honestly pretty cool. You can use your nebulous magical powers to move platforms so you can navigate the area. Now I can backtrack and get the goodies that have been taunting me since the beginning.

I've encountered the usual Castlevania weirdness, including giant bunny demons (and puppy demons), and a "not bad" barber demon who says he's cursed until he learns 666 haircuts or something to that effect, which unlocks the ability to customize your character. I could REALLY use a double jump ability, not sure when I'm getting that, but otherwise I'm just scampering around breaking all the lanterns, as one does.

Was in a Castlevanian mood. My copy of this game came with a "bonus" "genie" outfit that was a straight nope, which was easy since it didn't have great stats anyway.

This game is REALLY castlevania, which is exactly what I wanted, but playing on the Steamdeck the game locks up after the first boss battle and gets stuck on a black screen. Evidently the developer stopped supporting the game and several versions are now broken, including Android, but this instance may be an FPS issue. I was able to get around it by playing through the first level on my PC and copying the save states to my Steamdeck.

This game has crafting and cooking mechanics, and food gives a stat bonus the first time you eat it. Enemies reward you with "shards" which are equippable abilities, a lot like the tactical soul ability in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. There are also quests (so far, kill X monsters) and I appreciate that the monster locations are marked on the map when the quest is active.

I officially beat the game a few days ago, but I started a new game now that I have Improved Skillz and continue to poke at it because I don't have the bandwidth for anything else. You reach a point where you can increase and decrease the probability of card draws, and things started to get really messy and unbalanced for me, so I'm trying to keep this run pretty narrow and focus more on exploring strategies than tinkering with that kind of stuff.

Spending a lot of time micromanaging and overdecorating. Behold, glow pond.