The Witch & The 66 Mushrooms

The Witch & The 66 Mushrooms

This is a cute short metroidvania with a lot of fairy tale influence in the story and bosses. The world is pretty small, but it’s dense with upgrades and collectibles, so it feels a bit larger than it otherwise would.

You start with a double jump, and a healing ability (check your pause menu for more information). The metroidvania locks are various weapons which can destroy certain crystals and unlock passages, a few items that open up more of the map, a cat form that lets you go into narrow passages, and gems/orbs late game that open the way into the final area.

Real player with 10.8 hrs in game


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As the first game i ever played developed on this Pixel Game Maker MV software, i got to say, it’s pretty ambitious to develop a small sized metroidvania title, but even then it has its shortcomings, particularly small things than end up mattering on the whole gameplay experience, for starters, while the controllers seem decent enough, there’s some minor decisions like running while holding the attack button as if this was a game developed for a game system with very few buttons, when in reality you could easily fix this by making just tapping the same direction twice like Castlevania Circle of The Moon, furthermore, the difference in movement and speed between walking and dashing could be a bit more notorious.

Real player with 8.6 hrs in game

The Witch & The 66 Mushrooms on Steam

Samurai Wish

Samurai Wish

Hotline Miami: But in Japan

Real player with 14.8 hrs in game


Read More: Best Beat 'em up Action Games.


If you liked Hotline Miami, this is totally like it. All the blood, all the fun and even more techniques such as a dash to escape enemies or their bullets….great game!

Real player with 2.4 hrs in game

Samurai Wish on Steam

Redeemer: Enhanced Edition

Redeemer: Enhanced Edition

A really good punch-through-them-all type of game. Brutal, bloody and very straight in what it does. The story motivation is quite basic: some high-tech mercs burned your village and you have to bring that fire back to their base, right on your fists. It’s not a really thorough story, and the English version of texts ain’t exactly Shakespeare (neither does original Russian text or any other language in that game). But surely it’s not about “story” that people actually buy those games for, it’s about gameplay. And with that Redeemer is pretty. Especially for the given price. Well, maybe “pretty” ain’t a proper word, as this is all about throwing punches and kicks, bashing and squashing your enemies heads and blasting some stuff on the way…

Real player with 15.1 hrs in game


Read More: Best Beat 'em up Action Games.


Enter the Дракон

Redeemer is an old-school action title from a Russian developer Sobaka Studio. The player embodies persona of Vasyli - an ex-mercenary, turned a Tibetan monk on a quest for inner peace. Vasyli’s attempts at achieving equilibrium will be cut short, as the game opens with monastery getting invaded by a military force. After roughly 20 second-long hesitation Vasyli returns to his old ways. Now there will be blood, guns and very outward bouts of violence up for the player to deliver. What could possibly be a better way to apprehend a man capable of ripping somebody’s head off with his bare hands? Send in waves of poorly armed grunts, expecting them to beat their quarry into submission, because of course it is.

Real player with 11.8 hrs in game

Redeemer: Enhanced Edition on Steam

Steel Sword Story

Steel Sword Story

Steal Sword Story is a fun little action platformer with pixelated retrographics. The gameplay, enemies and level design are all reasonably well done but you won’t come across anything new or innovative. It is a very casual game, and you do not need a lot of practice to beat it. As soon as you figured out the attack patterns of the various enemy types and bosses, your second playthrough of SSS is a proverbial walk in the park. After you get the ‘dash’ ability which allows you to dash through enemies without getting injured, you can actually quickly race through every level (except the boss fights obviously) without killing even a single opponent and taking zero damage – but you won’t collect any gems though, so this is not recommended and not how the game is meant to be played.

Real player with 5.0 hrs in game

This is a very nice little game.

It won’t blow your socks off, but it was exactly what I needed. I had been playing Legends of Eisenwald, which was a long, dense, and often frustrating game, so I wanted something lighter - which Steel Sword Story provided!

I played 1001 Spikes a few months ago and I think that is one of the best platformers out there. It was very difficult, but always fair. It was very demanding, though - you could easily spend 20 minutes on a 20 seconds level later on.

Still, that game left me perfectly satisfied after beating the main campaign with all the collectables.

Real player with 3.8 hrs in game

Steel Sword Story on Steam