Games You Should Play #1: Archvale

Archvale is a game I played on Xbox game pass and beaten it before it got taken off a little over a month ago. Archvale takes inspiration from games like Terraria and Enter The Gungeon and other Indie games. It also has an huge influence from bullet hell games, bullet hell games are basically where a ton of projectiles are being fired at you and you have to avoid them while also firing back at the enemies. This game easily became one of my favorite games I've ever played and I am going to talk some about it.

In Archvale you go through each area clearing all the enemies in each screen before being able to move on to the next area, I know some people will be turned away by that mechanic but it's not that bad. You collect resources in each level or different biome basically to upgrade your weapons and your armor and there's also chests you can find that will usually have better weapons for you to use than the ones you are using before you find the chests. The boss fights are easily the best parts of this game, each one is different and unique from another that it never feels like the boos fights are just rinse and repeat, this game had some of the coolest boss fights I have ever seen and I really enjoyed each one. And the music in this game is also really good, (minor spoiler) even the desert area had decent music and I usually find desert area music in games to be very bland or not that interesting in most cases. I rarely come across desert music that I actually like in games or that doesn't make the level or biome some really uninteresting.

Archvale's story takes about 10 hours to beat on average, I believe I actually ended up beating it in 8 hours which is pretty cool since I took less time than what the average time is to beat it. The bosses are easily the hardest part of the game, and sometimes you can immediately tell when you are under leveled for an area. And sometimes things might feel easier for you than they should because you either forgot about going to an area or you just went somewhere else first. There's not much I can say about this game without spoiling it for people, but I highly recommend this game to people because it's a very enjoyable experience.

I especially recommend you to play this game if you like games like Terraria, Enter The Gungeon, Dead Cells (Although it's probably a lot easier than Dead Cells because that game is very hard), Neon Abyss, or even games like The Binding Of Isaac games. Or if you just like games with really fun and challenging boss fights or cool boss designs, or if you just want a game with a pretty good soundtrack in it. If you like games where you collect loot or where you need to collect different kinds of resources to upgrade your armor and weapons then this is a kind of game for you.

Also, one really cool and interesting mechanic about this game is that it has a badge system. You get more badge points from playing through the games and there's like over 20 different badges with different effects that they have. Due to the good amout of different badges that this game has, it allows you to try out different loadouts and play styles to the point that you can mess around with the badges and see what loadouts that you like the best or you can even just play the game multiple times with plans to use different badge loadouts each time if you really want to. And to get some of the badges there's this bonus mini game that gets harder each time you do it.

Archvale is the first game on my Games You Should Play series, and I'll be making more stories for this series whenever I think or find another game to add to the it.