Super Ikaruga Brothers

Outland's pitch of combining platform-action and bullet-hell mechanics - with color switching, ala Ikaruga - sounds pretty promising. Until you remember that bullet-hell games necessarily enforce a specific pace to their action, and that waiting around for obstacles to move is one of the most boring parts of a platform game.

The result feels like an avoid-em-up with only occasional bursts of wall-jumping or sword-swinging. "Combat," while it does involve learning and adapting to attack patterns, tends to be less about defeating an enemy and more about dodging it. The pattern-handling can get especially tricky when an enemy is near environmental obstacles, or other enemy types ... or both.

Then there's the strangely counter-intuitive behavior of Outland's platforming mechanics. Platforms are slippery, but you latch onto walls in an instant -- even when you didn't intend to. You can fall off the bottom of a ladder, but can't climb off the top of one. You can move horizontally while mid-air, but the fall speed is way too fast to reasonably re-calculate your landing point.

Like Ori and the Blind Forest, Outland isn't "just" hard because of challenging scenario design, but also because it demands more precision that the game's controls really support.

There is a story in Outland, for some reason; a weak, trope-y justification for the Light and Dark color dynamic. The plot definitely isn't intriguing enough to push the game forward. Nor is the world's aesthetic, which despite the high-visibility Light and Dark elements, is mostly very bland.

I don't like pure bullet-hell games, and Outland is basically ... that, with an awkward platforming implementation bolted onto it.

Progress: Somewhere in the Underworld.