Spooky-season 2024: game 10

This year's spooky-season ends and I'm pretty satisfied with the 10 games I managed to play/replay this month. I’ve actually grown quite fond of horror games despite never really playing it much before I tried out this project/challenge.
Although I will probably take a small break from horror and halloween themed games for a little while, I won't wait until next October to dive into them again.
Now for the last game of this month I went with something a little more lighthearted, a 1990 Sega Genesis halloween themed platformer by the name of Decap Attack.

Decap Attack is a 2-D platformer featuring Chuck D. Head as the protagonist, a zombie who unsurprisingly “chucks” his severed head at anything that moves too close to him.

Pretty solid platformer overall, but nothing too amazing or terrible. Jumping feels a little too floaty at times and enemies infinitely respawning as soon as they get off-screen gets a little boring and can feel like a chore if you need to backtrack or miss a jump at any point during the levels

The game consists of 7 areas with 3 levels each and a boss fight at the end of the third level. The game can be beaten within 2-3 hours at most.The enemies scattered throughout are pretty generic and basic gameplay wise, the bosses however can be quite fun to fight.

The game is carried HARD by its great soundtrack and halloween aesthetic. The sprites and animations are very charming and really hold up despite being 34 years old and really elevates the otherwise quite mediocre platforming experience to something kind of memorable.

This was all for this year's Spooky-season from me at least, happy Halloween everyone!

I really love the characters and their interactions here. The performances are all great and make them feel very much alive, particularly in this early era of video game voice acting where a lot of other games were stiff and awkward in that field. Although the party you play as is pretty small, they do a tremendous job keeping things engaging throughout the game's runtime, alongside its creepy tone and atmosphere. Major brownie points for the presentation as a whole, but I thought the performances were worth a special mention.

It's good that there's already so much to like here, too, because I wasn't particularly satisfied with the gameplay itself. Not that I'm unwilling to get behind tactical RPGs despite my limited experience with them, but there's just a lot of downtime here and a redundant number of stats to manage and it kind of just feels slow despite its relatively short runtime for the genre. It's not nearly bad enough to dock serious points, especially when everything else here is so nice, but I thought it was of enough significance to mention.

Whatever the case, I think it balances out to be a pretty solid game. Though battles were a bit of a pain, I enjoyed my time regardless. Would say it's worth a look for the story and cast, and maybe if you're more patient than I am the combat won't even be much of a drawback.