You know how Nidhogg is just one thing, and it’s super simple and slightly just…nothing, but you can spend ages with it and it’s got an incredibly high skill ceiling, and there’s no flaws at all and they’ve just sort of achieved everything they set out to do without making a big deal out of it? It’s that kind of game.
Kill The Crows is such a pure, condensed game. So rare to find a gameplay loop so utterly on the mark. Every moment is a small crisis where you’re either lost in a flow state, or you’re dead - and then right back into the action a couple seconds later.
Can’t believe how few people talk about this cult classic-in-waiting. It’s really charming.
If you enjoyed Kill The Crows, I highly recommend Akane. It’s the same basic gameplay loop (one map area, single hit enemies, every 50 enemies is a boss fight) but Akane has a cyberpunk aesthetic. I don’t understand how these two games were made by different developers given the similarities.
The one hit kill is an incredibly meaningful choice, and I feel like it drives a lot of other decisions as well. It forces the player to be completely unburdened by the weight of their actions, killing without a thought. The second you fret about your next move, the flow is interrupted, and your survival chances drop.
And since you spend so little time on any single enemy, that drives decisions about how success is measured, etc etc. The similarities fall into place when you hew very closely to the single hit kill mechanic.
I don’t fault Ludic at all for the similarities here, it’s an innocent case of carcinization. If you’re going to make a game whose loop is so tight that you can boot up the game and enter an extremely satisfying flow state in a minute flat, you make something like this. I’m definitely going to check out Akane next.