Astaroth: The Angel of Death (1989)

Astaroth: The Angel of Death (1989) by Eldritch the Cat and published by Hewson Consultants for Amiga. I don’t like this game. I want to like this game, it has a cool art style with nice pixel graphics, it has some surprisingly good music, it’s just that playing it is kind of miserable. You are Ozymandias, and must journey through the catacombs of Astaroth, the titular (and tit-ular, as indicated by the title screen) angel of death. The main objective is to collect all nine “mind powers” scattered throughout the game, which will aid you in fighting monsters and solving exploration-based puzzles. It’s almost like a Metroid game, but if Metroid hated you. The very first screen has unavoidable damage, as you begin paused in the mind power selection options, even though you don’t have any yet, only to unpause and be faced with a skull enemy careening toward you. Ozymandias has a Castlevania-like fixed jump arc and a deceptively big hitbox, also, when you hit down to duck, he does this weird little fiddling motion that almost looks like kung-fu before he actually kneels down. Basically, the odd sluggishness of your character means you will be getting hit a lot. This isn’t *too* great of an issue, because a lot enemies just… explode on contact, but there’s these snakes… these snakes… Oh man, the snakes. They move back and forth and won’t explode after damaging you; this is when I realized that this game has no invincibility frames, so every second you’re touching the snake, it’s annihilating your health. Everything in this game is like this, weird, cryptic, clumsy. There’s these screens where you have to weave past two different environmental hazards in a rhythm, but I’m convinced that the starting positions of the hazards aren’t fixed and actually depend on frame speed or something like that, because I would go through once and it would be actually impossible to avoid getting hurt, and then the next time it seemed to work as intended. Quite a shame, what with the legitimately cool, H.R. Geiger inspired visuals, but I wouldn’t recommend this unless you have a lot of patience. Maybe if I start streaming, I could do this as an endurance run.