(Despite that title, I'm keeping the images SFW, don't worry.)
I'd had the excellent search action game Rabi-Ribi in my backlog for ages, but only just got around to playing it lately because I knew the dev had a new title coming out, TEVI. For the entire time I'd known of it, it was with a warning: "It's a best-in-genre contender, it's freeform, it's got all sorts of challenge toggles and scaling, lots of content, but it's also hoooooorny." And it is! One of the primary protagonists is literally wearing ribbons1, and while it's not every boss, multiple of the most striking fights in the game are openly leering at or perving over you2 in their pre-/post-battle dialogues. I would not judge a single person if they reacted to this game by taking the option offered on the menu: hold cancel/ESC for a few seconds and it'll just open up all difficulties and the Speedrun mode, which turns off all cutscenes and lets you customize some UI elements.
And yet.
The first time I knew I was gonna be all over this game was when, after talking to so many random food vendors and town residents in my quest to make it to the game's main hub in the intro, an achievement popped telling me in no uncertain terms "You will never need to do this. The dialogue is entirely optional. We have no sacred cows, play how you want." Within an hour or two of this, I would accidentally trigger some of the game's hidden tech, and began experimenting with it. A second achievement popped only after I'd done it two or three times, informing me what it was I'd actually been doing, and making a lot clear. You know, just to make sure I was trying to learn, and not flailing around near a wall. With this in hand, I started trying a lot more in suspicious areas, and sure, some of them were clearly designed around way more precision than I was aiming for, or maybe a future upgrade, but I broke quite a lot of sequences from what the game's signposts lead you down, up to and including trapping myself at two endgame bosses where I couldn't reasonably leave due to a lack of health, or not enough jumps/wall jumps to get back out the way I entered. Warp point or nothing, and that meant "kill the third to last required fight in the game with a minimum of damage".
Near the end of the base game3, once I was doing cleanup passes, I twigged onto a jump being just doable with my skills and some very precise movement tech to land and instantly release the controller so I didn't fly over the edge. I proceeded to earn the most terrifying achievement a game this open could hand me:
It wasn't lying. I had somehow triggered post-game cutscenes and locked myself into an optional, bastard-hard platforming dungeon that was a one-way entrance. When I finished the sequence, the game ran a cutscene and jumped me to "FINAL CHAPTER", and an item near the end of the sequence had leapfrogged me to post-game difficulty for every fight afterwards4. I even had to wallhack out of one room because the new movement I had allowed me to enter an area I was clearly not supposed to be in, which I could not find a way out of, and when I entered the obvious boss room, it would start a cutscene, skip automatically, and teleport me three rooms away in a loop. Whoops!
In short, I cannot help but recommend Rabi-Ribi to anyone into the genre. The boss fights are wonderful and multiple bring cool surprises or character-specific gimmicks, the movement tech is a delight with the exception of some jank around the wall jump move(s), and this is one of the most freeform games I've played in the entire space. Apparently it's possible to do challenge runs which involve fighting minimal bosses, or acquiring no powerups, or... I might do that sometime! But you see, this whole thing started because I'd heard TEVI was a much improved, no-longer-thirsty followup from the devs, and I have a copy, and... I think I'm gonna play something else in the genre instead to close out 2023, actually.
See, earlier this year I was turned onto an incredibly budget series of action games/metroidvania titles which were, uh... very MSX-esque horny pixel-art titles, but they also had incredible Castlevania II/Zelda II aspects and combat and modern design sensibilities, and while one of them just refused to run for me, the others were, once I turned off the H-mode, quite good. (If you want to look for yourself, this link is THE MOST NOT SAFE FOR WORK, SERIOUSLY, but will take you to the latest one from that dev, and should link the others from a bundle on the page.) Apparently an entire horned-up subgenre of this genre of game has popped out (ha) over the past few years, and while I'm sure there's some true bullshit out there, I've actually found a remarkably high hit-rate with them so far. TEVI can wait for me, I'm sure it'll have a patch or two while I put it off. Right now, I have completely unexplored depths to take a look at, because I find it impossible to believe a title based on exploration, combat, and gender-bending is going to be boring in any way. My worst fear is it'll play like shit. Guess I'll know in an hour or two!
(Also because I know if this goes wide enough it'll get this comment: you wanna know what boring and horny in the metroidvania space looks like? It's Shantae. It's the Shantae series. Fuck those games.)
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Let me tell you, I changed her outfit (both characters' outfits, really) as soon as I had access to the closet, not because of a modesty issue but because both of them are wearing some pants-on-head stupid attire. A fairy wearing less than two scarves as a top and a rabbit girl in a unitard and one sock. No thank you, this adventuring party is going to locate some pants if they wish to continue solving mysteries today.
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Probably the worst offender here is the succubus who, I'm told, rewards you with a fully nude CG on her defeat on higher difficulties. Because succubus. Please do not let this being the worst oversell you, though, because second place is definitely "the mage who is a comedy peeping tom" and third place is... man, I don't even know, it's basically just those two in a league of their own.
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The game both has a "main story" which it continues done around chapter 5/8, and a few DLCs which are new areas added in for challenge purposes with new fights afterwards. Good stuff! Cannot overstate how much content is in this game if you take to it. Only grab the DLCs if you want endgame or beyond difficulty.
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The game has two modes you can alter boss challenge off of (with more you can unlock after clearing it or using the Speedrun unlock skip). Standard scales bosses based on which/how many progression items you've collected. Alternative does something to change all bosses to be at a most potent form imaginable based on order you encounter them in, and highly suggests you go around hoovering up every upgrade you can find between fights. I did not meddle in Alternative on NG+0.
