The Madness of Little Emma

I love games like The Madness of Little Emma where you play a run at a time and try to get farther and farther, defeat difficult bosses, unlock powerful and fun items, and discover secret areas and challenges. This game fits that mold fairly well, but I can't recommend picking up this game for a number of reasons. 1. Unbalanced Items: The majority of items you will come across are pretty useless and sometimes (I'm not sure what determines this) picking up items increases your Madness stat by 1, a stat which makes the game harder. I'm not sure how exactly the difficulty increase works; I'm not sure if it scales with your Madness level or just increases the difficulty once you hit a certain threshold, but this mechanic encourages the player to pass up on most items due not only to their unhelpful effects, but due to the negative consequences of picking up a large number of items over time. That being said, there are a select few items that are really, really good. If you manage to find ...

Imagine Binding of Isaac except as a platformer and you pretty much have this game. Unfortunately some aspects of a game don't work nearly as well in platformer form as it does Legend of Zelda style and it clearly shows in this game. There's some original ideas. It's more horrorcentric and if you want a roguelike that is a bit more dependent on skill rather than memorization, this will fit the bill, but expect a much greater difficulty than in Isaac. Unfortunately that difficulty increase doesn't feel intentional. Spikes that seem to be meant to push up if you stand on them too long, damaging you, seem to switch to the 'stab' state too quickly to really utilize this as a mechanic and you can easily get treasure screwed early on because of their placement. Similarly, many of the items you can get are useless or actively detrimental to your gameplay. Once I got flight and was like 'woo flight'--in Binding of Isaac this was one of the best items you could get but in this one it's actual...

The Madness of Little Emma is one of the few rogue-likes that caught my attention and didn't let go. It certainly has lots of things in common with other rogue-like games, but it feels completely different. Mainly due to the fact that this is a platformer with rather satisfying movement physics. The game has a good learning curve: it doesnt tell you anything about its mechanics, you have to play, observe and note the changes. First couple of hours i had difficulty getting past 1st stage, 60 hours later the main reason for not reaching the 5th or 6th ending is that i made some mistake early on. Surely TMoLE has some rough edges, for example the cursor is somewhat bleak and sometimes i lose it in the background. But the developer is constantly working on the game, fixing bugs and adding new free content. In conclusion: a great game for its price, challenging but rewarding.

UPDATE: Since the recent patches, I now no longer continue to have the problem when trying to open the game. It will now open from Steam and the desktop, so that was fixed pretty quickly. Sure, the game is influenced by other Rogue-like titles such as Isaac, but the one thing that this game doesn't do is hold your hand. A 2D rogue-like platformer that easily can stand as one of the tougher rogue-likes on the market. From the couple of hours I've spent in the game, hardly do I even come CLOSE to seeing any 1 of the 4 endings mentioned. Little Emma requires skill, simply put. You'll get damage ups, but the enemy placement and mini boss rooms range from "easy to dodge" to "this room is the WORST". Some of the late game mobs, including these crying women who start bombarding you with explosions that are hard to track, are just a pain to deal with, if you even make it that far with no damage. Is it a bad game though? Absolutely not because it's still a very interesting rogue-like....

This is how it should be done. Instead of shoving your money up the arse of some early access scum buy this game. I bought in on release day, played through it, had a good time. But that was not it, the Dev Dude keeps updating it as frequently as I get disappointed by early access games. And that's about once a week. I could see how the game improved with every patch, and now its better than ever before. So that guy published a finished, perfectly fine game and now he even keeps updating it with new totally free content. Its sad that there only so few people who are playing it. If you love rogue like as much as I do, then this is a must buy. Give the Dev Dude you god damn money!

I seem to be addicted to this game, despite my frustration for how it just drops me into bullet-hell. I find myself wanting more control over which power-ups I receive, and more opportunity for clever escape. Some rooms are dead-simple, while others are pretty much impossible.. unless you have the right power-ups, of course. Frustrated but addicted is bad, so I cannot recommend the game.

Binding of Isaac if Binding of Isaac was a platformer and not good

I was quite happy to see this gem made it to steam and bought it immediately. It's a rather obvious hommage of The Binding of Isaac and it's influences. You'll recognize a lot of things quickly, if you are familiar with BoI. There is, however, a crucial difference: The Madness of little Emma is a platformer, which adds a refreshing spin to it. There are already plenty of items in this game and it is possible to see what they do by pressing Esc and going into the items menu, which removes a bit of the guessing game and makes it easier to learn the ropes. As far as the enemies are concerened, most patterns are easy to learn, though, not surprisingly, there are some that need some getting used to, as well as those that very likely need some tweaking. There's also an insanity meter in this game. The higher it goes, the faster enemies become and the earlier more difficult ones/variants spawn. Personally, I only experienced a glitch and one crash/freeze, but I'm fairly confident that t...

This is a perfect example of everything an imitator game should be. It's obviously "The Binding of Isaac as a platformer", but it successfully captures the mood, feel, fun and design philosophy of Isaac. The madness mechanics and the item pool do a good job capturing the feel of Isaac without feeling like a rehash. There's great music, great enemy and boss design, varied items, and tons of secret levels. And oh yeah, it's fun and really does feel like you're playing a new version of Isaac. Cons: Game balance isn't perfect for some items, characters, champion enemies and bosses. Neither is Isaac's, but this game definitely occasionally has me going "that room wasn't fair" while Isaac didn't. Also, it's hard to tell what some items do.

I was on the fence for positive/negative on this one... I'm going thumbs down. <aside>Why don't we get a scale 1-5 or something, Steam? C'mon!</aside> It's like the creator wanted to make Binding of Isaac, but that was already done: * Play in a series of increasingly deep basement rooms and floors? Check. * Lots of random power-ups that can have synergistic effects? Check. * Big Boss to fight at the end of the floor? Check. * Body fluids as weapons? Check. * Treasure chests, coins, and bombs? Check. * Shops with undead shopkeepers? Check. * Sad and creepy back story and enviroment? Check. To be fair, the creator has said s/he was inspired by TBOI, but I just don't find this game as fun. Some things I don't like: * Your main weapon is <i>spit</i>. Yes, you happily spit at your enemies, not the sad tears of TBOI. To me this is just weird. * Your shot range is about 1/4 the screen width, but enemy shots fly across the entire room. This cannot be improved (at least that I've seen s...