Stealth Bastard Deluxe Impressions

Sorry for the delay, I didn't have any time to play in the past week so I'm writing this fresh off my experience earlier today.

This game is tough.

Like, real tough.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, but man does it get frustrating some times. It's not the kind of frustrating due to things that have plagued older stealth platformers, or older platformers in general, like shitty hitboxes not letting you grab onto ledges, or requiring pixel-perfect maneuvering through the air to land on something. No, the frustrating thing is the exact timing you have to hit sometimes when you've got roving enemies who can fry you to a crisp instantly when they see you. Also frustrating is how dark the game is, but for a game based on stealth in the shadows I don't know that I can complain too much about that. It's just that I had to turn the brightness up on my monitor to the maximum so that I could see some of the passages that were in shadow because they were too dark to actually see while I was playing. If the game had a Gamma setting that would help immensely.

Jesus, this game is brutal. I've had to take many breaks to cool off once it gets too frustrating. So far across 28 levels I've died 155 times in less than 2.5 hours. I'm certain this game, along with They Bleed Pixels, was heavily inspired by Super Meat Boy which came out two years earlier.

Each set of levels have a central theme of something: the first group focuses on your movement; the second introduces autonomous turrets and roving robots who will fry you on sight; the third introduces laser trip sensors which can do all manner of things like keep death rays turned off, move blocks, and open doors. The fourth group focuses on teleporters.

I'm really going to be hard-pressed to recommend this game, unless you really like I Wanna Be The Guy and wanted something like that but mixed with Splinter Cell stealth gameplay. The base game price is $10 but it's been discounted to $2 during the steam sales for the past couple of years. If you like to collect indie retro platformers this is a solid addition, but otherwise I don't know that you'd like it.