TOKOYO: The Tower of Perpetuity

I really regret not buying this when I added it to my wishlist 3 years ago. It's a fun little platformer where you can pretty much set your own difficulty. If you want a high score then you'll want to move fast and do the whole thing hitless while still collecting every coin, but if you're just looking to clear then you can just ignore coins and stack a bunch of healing options and use continues as needed. Some level of speed is still required though, since your only attack has a cooldown so avoidance is your primary method of dealing with enemies and there's a sort of timer system for each floor. As a result, a single run takes less than 15 minutes but, again, if you're hunting a high score you might want to do several runs. I am also a little biased because I'm a sucker for several of the design choices. The contrast of the mournful atmosphere in the main lobby against the fact that pretty much every moving enemy is either cute and/or an anime girl is honestly just right up my alley. The limited online stuff like seeing other people's tombstone markers and messages and seeing the phantoms of other players in the rest areas is as well. Additionally, several of the main characters are original characters from artists I've followed for a long time. So between the flavor and the mechanics it feels like a game that's laser targeted at me. If you're into that sort of thing and platformers you'll probably like it too. The only disappointing thing is that the playerbase is pretty small now so a lot of the online features aren't as noticeable, I'd have liked to have seen the leaderboards and phantoms when the game was at its peak.

went into the game blind and had a fun time climbing the tower. The rouguelite aspect of this game mainly focuses on learning the daily switching patterns of the tower which didn't really speak to me

Fully realized platform roguelike that doesn't insist upon itself. The 24 hour gimmick gives enough consistency to make 1CC feel rewarding, while also enough variance to keep coming back. For adjusting difficulty, there's multiple forks and each character's projectile range drastically changes the play style. The arcade-y "the game is as hard as you make it" feeling is refreshing for a modern release, especially a modern roguelike. My biggest gripe is that moving platforms feel like they have rounded corners, somewhere between how Crash 1 and 2 feel in N.Sane Trilogy and typical Unity jank. Take the game from an arcade perspective and you won't be disappointed. Negative reviews are too mean.