Cobalt Core key art

Cobalt Core

Cobalt Core key art
Cobalt Core Official Site

I meant to do this sooner ‘cus I beat it on the 4th of December! Oh no I forgot! I actually don’t have too much to say really as it’s a quick snappy game!

The music was excellent, because of how short a loop was (success or fail) it didn’t feel like it was dragging on and combat was generally so snappy that it felt like you really had a lot of momentum going forward.

The way the OST was composed makes it really hard for me to go “yes this track”, and that’s a good thing! The music is clearly composed (and is evident from the OST with every battle track having an (Intro) track) so that you can on the fly swap between the tracks without a jarring interruption to the music, to the map, to a battle, to the map, to an event, to the map, and so on. But to make sure I pick a track and not go “All :)”, Self-Defense.

The story is simple, but honestly only once you’ve got it all, otherwise it is a ~mystery~. Which is great I love that. All the characters really stuck with me and even made me a little teary eyed at the end, what the heck how’d they do that to me!? Oh right it was mostly Riggs and Books.

That’s it! I put 35 hours in to it and if I say much more about it it’ll be spoilers! Books is already a spoiler but they’re too lovely not to have here, look at them breaking the fourth wall slightly and leaning on their character frame! Go play it if you like deck-builders, or rad soundtracks, or a possum who is just Hashtag Mood (that’s Riggs)

ZeroRanger logo

ZeroRanger

ZeroRanger logo
ZeroRanger Official Site

Oops it’s a game I beat (and it’s absolutely just a beat, not a complete…) and forgot to make any posts for (I beat it on the 12th of October)! Oh boy!

This is a really fun shmup, but man can it be tough! On the upside though it has a really lenient system to play it with a stage select and a fairly unique continues system. I absolutely cannot 1cc this though (though I feel like I got really close to 1cc-ing the first loop) haha… The power ups you can take do well to make the game play more how you want it to and boy did I land on a specific load-out (Type-C, Side, Charge, Drill) that honestly I struggled to play with the other options, oops!

The music in this game though is fantastic. Like ignoring that if you throw a growly synth at me I’ll go 👀, and the entire OST has that semi-FM synth feel semi-more modern instrumentalisation. It May Be Greenish is a fantastic opening stage theme, and not to compare it to another game, hits similar opening stage vibes that ZUN often does with his work (it’s probably the way the piano dances along the track) and given how shamefully long it took me to realise there’s a stage select, I heard it a lot :’D

The other tracks that really stand out to me are in sequence: Menacing, Descent At Last (two tracks separate tracks, but this vid has ’em paired and frankly that’s the best way to listen to them), and Despair. Like they’re spoilers as to what they play for but GOD DAMN they are all tied perfectly with where they play. And yes Despair absolutely has a vibe of a composition by ZUN again, which is probably deliberate 😛

If you aren’t late to the party like me and enjoy shmups, you absolutely need to at least give the demo a play!

EDIT 2024-04-21 – And now I’ve actually completed it