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[Hide] (606.8KB, 2560x1440) Star Fetchers: Escape from Pork Belly
It's a paid spinoff for a free cuckchan /agdg/ game, and said spinoff is in a completely different genre: a roguelite PunchOut knockoff. The protagonists from the main game have been kidnapped and held hostage by a gang that runs an illegal fighting ring, and there's ten boxing rounds left until you've paid off the debt and are free to leave. How well you're paid depends on your performance in each fight, and between fights you spend a bit of the cash to heal up and buy stackable items. Lose a match, and you're sent back to the beginning with zero of the metaprogression that plagues modern roguelites and acts as a crutch for players who don't git gud.
The fights are pretty decent. There's a good variety of more and less human enemies with decently varied attack patterns, and if you ignore their patterns in favour of flailing around like a spastic retard, you'll just get pummelled no matter how good your item loadout is. You generally want to position yourself well and stand your ground so you don't waste time and stamina on unnecessary dodges, then react quickly and immediately punish enemies for mistakes without going so overboard that you miss and create an opening.
The aforementioned items actually do change things up a lot without trivializing fights. There's pretty standard health, strength, and speed upgrades which shouldn't be ignored (speed especially), but the rest are a lot more interesting because they grant different effects. Items that damage enemies on a successful dodge or when you're hit, temporary speed boosts when you're hit, health drain from landing hits, damage bonuses when you're either high or low on cash, gold teeth that increase your payout when you're hit, blah blah blah. A lot of them play off each other in interesting ways and reward riskier fighting styles, especially when they're stacked, and this works out really well within the story mode's short length. Sadly it can get out of hand in endless mode and so completely outpace enemies' stat scaling that they eventually die in one hit, but that's only really an issue if you're good enough at endless mode to get that far.
Now this is well and good, but the real show-stealer is Pork Belly's fight announcer/nurse/item vendor, Nevada. Nevada may be the only cute nigger in video games even if she's a fucking retard. You can talk with her between fights, flirt, and eventually unlock this painfully cute mexican cowgirl outfit for her to wear. I would marry that charismatic moron so hard if she recovered from her gambling addiction, and it pains me to say that almost all of the fanart of her sucks. Star Fetchers mostly gets tumblr fanart instead of weeb fanart even though the devs are cuckchan weebs (I think it's mainly due to the writing style), and while tumblrfags can sort of manage to make the other characters work in their malformed styles, they inevitably either mess up Nevada's face, make her too detailed in the wrong areas, or pull the usual tumblr art thing and turn her into an ugly, big-nosed freakbeast. Yuck.
Something else that bugs me is the curved CRT filter. The base game didn't have it, but Escape from Pork Belly has that stupid meme shit enabled by default and will not let you turn it off. I don't completely hate it, but that thing probably looks like complete ass if you play the game on an actual CRT, and I wish the devs would have accounted for that instead of forcing this shit on the player.
Overall though, it's a pretty good little game. The visual style and writing won't fit everyone's tastes, but the fights themselves and item variety are solid even if they aren't as original as the main game's mouse-controlled, sidescrolling sword combat-
>writing this post
>check devs' social media through nitter no bluesky accounts, which I'd say is a good sign
>by complete fucking coincidence discover I'm writing this on the game's 1 year anniversary
>the game is getting a new update today with more shit and more outfits for Nevada
Fuck, so much for being done with this thing.