#IndieSelect: Savage Halloween (NS)

 Disclaimer:  I received a copy of Savage Halloween by 2ndBoss from the publisher QUByte Interactive for 420MacMan's #IndieSelect.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played by the requesting party and that the experience is shared through social media channels.  All words and pictures unless otherwise noted are my own from my own playthrough of the game.

Savage Garden is a retro-styled shoot'em up game developed by 2ndBoss and published by QUByte Games Studios where you run and shoot things.  Run and Gun if you will.  Like all good games in this genre, there is a healthy mix of running, gunning, jumping, surfing, gunning, flying, gunning, driving. . . you get the idea.

Like any good NES/SNES era game, you need to have a basic story for why you are running through various environments and biomes shooting everything in sight.  The story here is that Dracula has decided that all of the evil things that would normally have the night off on Halloween but decided that they deserve more days off, so he closes the portal that would take them back into their realm so that they can (checks notes) wreak havoc the rest of the year.  I think that is correct.  The point is, Dracula is allowing evil creatures to remain and it is your job to kill them all and force Dracula back through the portal.  

Our heroes here are a sentient bipedal pumpkin-man named James, Lulu the puppy who turns into a werewolf, and Dracula's daughter Dominika.  Each of the characters has slightly different stats in terms of health, moving speed, and jumping.  When I first started, I selected James since his stats were all right down the middle, and not knowing if I would favor a slower character (Lulu) or a speedier and slightly weaker one (Dominika), James seemed like the best choice for me.  I also tend not to be the greatest player when it comes to run and gun games (Contra comes to mind), so again, I decided to go with safe.

Before I go on, I should briefly explain the lives and continue system here since this can differ from one game to another and I definitely took this into account before I started a new stage.  In Savage Halloween, you start out with three lives but you can find James' head, often in hidden areas that grant you an extra life.  When you lose your last life, you are given the option to continue or quit back to the main menu.  If you continue, of which you only have three, you will start back at the beginning of the most recent area of the game you died in, or if there was a checkpoint partway through the area.  At the end of your continues, it is Game Over and you are taken back to the main menu.  Now, if you pass a stage with one character, that will carry over to any of the characters, so you could beat Stage 1 with James, then attempt Stage 2 with Dominika if you find that James just no longer cuts it.  This is a little game mechanic that I very much appreciate as it tells the player, at least to me, that this game is meant to be fun, not punishing and that if you decide you want to try other characters, go for it.

With James, I made it to almost the end of Stage 1: Awakening and decided that I needed more life to get me through this section.  The flying (Gradius, Life Force) section did a number of eight of my lives and two of my continues.  The mechanic here was a little different though from your regular flying shmups in that here, when you pressed Left on the left joystick, you would aim backward while flying backward.  Maybe because I did not take full advantage of this mechanic, but I found it somewhat disorienting so I just held the ZL button to lock my aiming forward.  So after many failed attempts, I felt that my only recourse was to choose Lulu whose Life rating was an A instead of James' B or Dominika's C.  A somewhat slow tanky character in a run and gun for the sake of staying alive just a little bit longer seemed like a fair tradeoff.  So I returned to the main menu, restarted the game with Lulu, and began my journey to send Dracula and his minions back.

For me, Lulu was it!  The slower movement speed never felt like I was playing a slug, and the shorter than average jumping ability never seemed to hinder me from accessing any part of the game that I was trying to get to; having a double jump ability from the start was a nice touch too, so it just meant that I was double jumping most of the time; sidebar, you cannot fall and then use your double jump mid-fall if you did not jump, to begin with.  So thanks to Lulu either having more life than James or just taking less damage, I made it up to the flying section [although for Lulu instead of flying on a witches broom, Lulu is flying on a ghost (and for good measure, I made it to this section with Dominika and she flies with her own wings)], past it and got through to the first boss.  It would be Lulu for me for the rest of the game.

As you can see in the last two screenshots above, you have the character's health meter, the number of lives under their avatar picture, followed by a series of icons showing different types of ammunition and how many rounds of that type of ammunition you have.  The first bullet type (the grey box with orange/yellow bullet) is the default bullet type and is the same for each character (despite each character having their own type of gun, they all fire the same bullet at the same rate, ie a machine gun).  By default, you have the machine gun which I ended up favoring over most of the others, partly because it is just a good gun and you have infinite ammunition so you do not have to worry about running out.  Then there is the classic shotgun spread, which I really only used for trying to reach hard to hit enemies or enemies that would shoot back at you if you got in their line of sight.  Next is the ghost bullets, which I only found out by accident that they can pass through walls and will move back-and-forth in an area until they hit an enemy; I rarely used this ammunition.  There were frog bullets which were just you shooting a giant frog out of your gun that would ricochet off of walls until it hit something, which was great for hitting enemies on platforms lower than you, often around corners.  Then there was the chicken bullet that would stick into walls and other enemies then explode.  Lastly was a character-specific special attack which I honestly would often forget about.  What I quickly discovered about these different types of ammunition was that I would hoard them like they were Elixers in a JRPG often thinking that they might prove useful against the end-stage boss.  Then I would end up unloading my machine gun on them and just carry over the unused ammunition into the next stage.

But not always.

As previously mentioned, you only have three continues each playthrough, so if you used up one or two (or three?) during one stage, that would mean that you have fewer attempts at taking out the stage boss.  What I ended up doing most of the time was after defeating the stage boss, I would quit back to the main menu, then select the next stage and begin again.  This meant that I would start a new stage fresh with three lives and three continues.  The two downsides to this approach to playing is that your score is reset each time you start up from the main menu, but what the High Score does beyond bragging rights, at least on the Switch version I am unsure.  The second thing that happens is that any special bullets and special attacks you had accumulated in the previous stage are gone.  So all 678 rounds of that shotgun ammunition go back to zero.  I took this as an acceptable trade-off.

Not to give the impression that I loved everything about Savage Halloween, there were a couple of things that I had critiques on, which really just seem minor at this point.  The first is that some of the stages felt a little long.  While each stage would often have a section that was an homage to a classic game, I found myself excited to make my way through the running and gunning areas to find out what this stages special section would be (like the flying area in Stage 1, or the surfing section in Stage 2 being a reference to the Turbo Tunnel stage in Battletoads).  There were also a number of stretches especially in the earlier stages near the end of an area where there was just running, no gunning.  These areas really felt empty and pretty uninteresting.  I am a little conflicted here because while it was nice to have a bit of a reprieve, it did kind of feel like the game (or the area) ran out of enemies and just wanted me to get on with it.  I guess you could also say that this meant that enemies were not frequently respawning making times when you had to backtrack all the more hazardous.

Because it is the Switch (and I do not have the Child Monitoring function enabled to see my playtimes) I cannot say for certain how long it took me to beat Savage Halloween, but at seven stages, all but one I was able to beat on my first attempt, felt like the perfect length of time.  There were a number of times, looking at you Peanut, where I felt anxious that I was going to go through all of my lives and continues and I would have to start a stage over from the beginning, but that thankfully never happened.  For me, this tells me that the game was nearly perfectly balanced in terms of difficulty.  Putting the player on their toes, thinking that there is a very real chance that you will end up dying and being overpowered by the enemies and/or the stage boss.  I applaud the developers for being able to achieve this fine line of maintaining the challenge without feeling that game is too easy; although I would be surprised to not find people who have complained that the game is too easy, even on the Hardcore setting.  I did briefly try the Hardcore difficulty setting if only to say that I did, and while I had thought that I would be faced with more enemies on screen, the effect was actually a lot simpler.  In Hardcore, one hit from anything kills you.  Any enemy and environmental hazard are lethal.  I did not make it through the first area in the first stage.  This might actually be a case of playing as the most handicapped character (Lulu) when playing as Dominika would offer the greatest advantages if Life is not taken into account.

There is a lot more that I feel I could go on about with Savage Halloween, from the gorgeous sprites for the characters, enemies, and bosses by Abdel de Oliveira to the perfectly suited music by Zé Roberto Chapolin.  The environments are interesting and varied for each stage ranging from inside trees to circus trains, to large interstate freeways.  The modes of play too are a massive love letter to shmups throughout the golden age of NES/SNES gaming using past games as elements in stages and not based entirely off of those elements so as to not feel completely derivative.  You can tell there was a love for these games that wasn't intended as a nostalgia cash-grab.  QUByte Game Studio did well to help publish Savage Halloween and hopefully developer 2nd Boss will see even more support from them going forward, as they will see support from me (just bought Biolab Wars on the Switch before writing this article).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Ancient Malignance Awakes

P.S.  The only aspect of the game that I did not try out was the local two-player co-op, which I am sure would be a blast.  Conklederp is not really a fan of shmups/run and gun, but I can almost guarantee you that if Dr. Potts or Vorlynx were in town, I could see us starting and finishing the game in a single evening.  Ahhh, the Before Times.

P.P.S.  Because I could not find a great place to put gameplay videos in the body of the article and have the formatting still look good, here are a couple below:

A brief scene from that infamous first flying section in Stage 1.

An underwater stage reminiscent of The Dam stage in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (but you know, with guns this time).  This was a tough stage.

Lastly, a section in (I think) the second-to-last area in Stage 5: Circus Show where you took control of a calliope car with a rocket launcher and from what I can tell, you are completely invincible.  This section seems to have been created just for the player to have fun in and rack up points before you have to fight Peanut (see above), being one of the more difficult boss fights in the game.