Islets

Islets is a silly, fun metroidvania with nice music and art, plus a bit of bullet hell action. The combat is intuitive, with a nice variety of both monsters and environmental hazards. I really enjoy the game loop in Islets. Obviously as a metroidvania, there is a lot of back and forth as new abilities unlock new routes. However, Islets makes it feel fresh by providing several completely separate maps. which are slowly connected as you progress in the game. Each new connection both creates a new area to explore and changes how you navigate the map as a whole. Compared to Hollow Knight, where your map slowly expands outwards as you explore, Islets feels more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, working on several sections at once until they meet in the middle.

Fun Game that slowly expands as you unlock new islands to go to. Upgrades are random from a pool, but even if all you do is grab the gold options then you are still better off then not picking anything at all. Difficultywise, i'd say is a little more on the easier side and aside from 1 or 2 bosses, you proly arent going to struggle since i started on hard and 100%'d everything in around 10h. Movement is a little floaty which takes some getting used to, but it does allow for some decent movement speed if you get hopping. Areas are well through out and aside from enemy kill rooms, can be blasted through quite quickly with movement, slashing, and reactive puzzles to break things up. There is some revisiting areas, but those are for future upgrades, secrets or achivements. Bosses are hit or miss, for the most part you'll just be either jumping and slashing or on the ground and slashing inside of them until you need to move out of the way for an attack. There is a limited amount arrows to fire off when they are out of range, or if you dont want to deal with a monster room in front of you, these replenish at either save points or by striking enemies after an upgrade. The ground slam is by far the most broken thing you can do in this game when fight allow it, it has invincibility frames during the animation and shortly after the wave animation is complete (more then the dodge roll, but you can dodge roll immediately if you need to get out of the way). If you are inside of a large boss then every part of the wave is hitting them (albeit for 2 dmg each but you can still see the hp bar get chunked each time). Some of my boss fights devolved to spamming slamming to avoid attacks, which i also used on some fliers that have either hard to dodge attacks or have a ground slam of their own, and you can overlap them to do damage while dodging theirs (which has a fun slowdown on one of the bosses if you time it right). All in all i belive this is an older title, but a very solid one as a metroidvania. Recommend if you just want something to play over a day or 2.