Back again for my regular Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both. Outside of gaming, I saw the new Scream 7 at the cinema, and it’s the usual twisting and turning slasher fun if you’re a fan of all that, but doesn’t exactly reinvent the Ghostface mask. Not much else to report that I haven’t already – big clear out before the house goes on sale, and we’ve turned our attention to where we’ll live next if it ever then sells, which I don’t think is going to be a quick task either. Not that we’re in any hurry whatsoever so it’s all good. Just a couple of games for you this week, and I think they both fall into the aforementioned “bit of both” category… Definitely quality over quantity too, and if both don’t make my Game of the Year countdown in December, then we’ll have had a very good one!

Not unlike the fantastic Donut Dodo from a few years back, Bomcat, which came out on Steam a couple of weeks ago, is a vibrant homage to the glory days of single-screen arcade platforming, probably just like you remember but not really! There’s the best of all sorts you will remember here though – Donkey Kong, Rod Land, Burger Time, Crazy Climber, Pipi and Bibi’s and so on, but with a modern flourish, if not so much a more forgiving modern sensibility… Don’t let the choice of Easy Mode and Hard Mode fool you because there’s only one choice here, and that’s fast and rough either way! You play a bipedal cat who’s got to infiltrate a bomb factory and rescue a damsel in distress by clearing stages filled with fiendishly placed ladders, platforms, meanies and their own unique gimmicks. You do this by picking up the bombs carelessly left lying around and throwing them at the four computer terminals positioned around the screen, then once they’re all destroyed (together with anything else in the vicinity including you), the barrier protecting the boss will disappear for you to deliver the finishing blow. Then do it all again! This thing plays like a dream (or precision-jumping, reflex-stretching nightmare), as addictive as it is challenging, and it looks and sounds like an eighties wonderland, with impossibly colourful, character-filled, effects-laden pixel art, and the most sublime chiptune tribute, all as bang up to date as can be, however much your memory is telling you otherwise! 

Last week here I closed with a quick mention of the then just-released Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterly Remake, and how I’d enjoyed my time with the first few chapters (on Xbox Series X) but hadn’t had the opportunity to write about it yet. Well, as subsequently promised, this week I have, so we’ll close with a proper look! From what I remember, the original PlayStation 2 game from 2003 was always a bit niche, overshadowed by Silent Hill and Resident Evil, and on one hand maybe a bit too Japanese for its own good, while on the other, it got a generic local renaming, Project Zero 2: Crimson Butterfly, which probably hurt its cause even more here! Bit of a quiet masterpiece of survival-horror all the same though, that would become the very definition of a cult hit, and together with the series going dormant for many years (although it actually got the remake treatment already on Wii back in 2012), it’s a pricey addition to your library nowadays too, so this new version was very welcome to me having never had a copy, although not for the want of trying! The plot is classic Japanese folk-horror meets ghost story, as sisters Mio and Mayu stumble upon the abandoned All Gods Village, where a failed ritual has left it frozen in time and haunted by the understandably irked spirits of its former inhabitants…

They soon also stumble upon the Camera Obscura, which Mio must use to fend off vengeful ghosts, as simply trying to escape the village turns into a tragic tale of sacrifice and sorrow, where Mayu suddenly has the leading role. It’s all built on dread rather than spectacle, which the original seemingly pulled off spectacularly regardless, and this does the same again, not only with the expected lick of very atmospheric paint and mournful new sound design, but it more or less plays like a modern game now too, although I’ll always argue fixed cameras still make for better scares! Not that it’s lacking there in the slightest, but a bit more polish wouldn’t have gone amiss – lighting can be off, animations can be stiff, “combat” even more so, and some environments look more upscaled than remade. It’s still a beautifully haunting and consistently unsettling experience though, with no denying it knows its J-horror, and there’s loads to uncover and get easily sidetracked by too. And while it could potentially have been a bit more transformative, I absolutely loved my time with it – it properly got it hooks into me from the very outset, and there were so many times I was just left with a big grin on my face, at least until I remembered how much I’m inevitably now going to spend on finally getting hold of the original as well!

I have had the Taito Egret II Mini on the go again too, where I’ve mainly been playing a load of Elevator Action, which isn’t unusual and also isn’t going anywhere, so if that’s still the case next week we’ll cover it then! Otherwise, as said at the start, that’s about all I’ve got for you this time. In case you missed it last Wednesday though, I eventually made it to the final “proper” instalment in a very long-running, genre-spanning series, when this time we counted-down my Top Ten 3D Shoot ‘Em Ups! Had a lot of fun putting that together too, so do check it out! And do have a good week ahead, and I’ll hopefully see you here again for more of the same next Sunday!

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