Medievil

Watch on YouTube: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Medievil is a reasonable entry in the 3D platformer space. I enjoyed playing through it, and found it to be a pretty straightforward entry in the genre. The aesthetic of this one is a cross between Spyro the Dragon and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

I didn't pay much attention to story, which probably hurt some of my enjoyment; in some cases, I used the advice of folks in chat rather than the built-in story to tell me what to do next.

Overall, a couple things about the game made it not a stand out success for me:

- First, I'm not at all a completionist. The requirement to participate in completionist approaches -- ie, picking up the chalices in order to pick up more advanced weapons -- reduced some of my enjoyment. Knowing this ahead of time could have saved me some time, but even so, it was frustrating to have to go back and play levels again because of a lack of a chalice I didn't realize I had to pick up, or hadn't killed *quite* enough of the enemies for.
- The game in general is very dark. Its color scheme is very much "The Nightmare Before Christmas", and this just isn't my style in particular. The camera constantly aiming at the ground doesn't help with this perception of darkness. Compare with the very bright world of Spyro, it's a big problem for me.

I did approve of the general approach to life management -- with the slowly growing life bars through item pickups, and the in-level recharges. I did find the mechanic of going back to earlier levels to recharge my life meter to be annoying, and I would have rather that you simply started all levels with a full life meter.

The gameplay was mostly solid, and even the camera work was pretty decent, which is better than most 3d platformers of the era.

Shoutout to Brad Prichard for recommending this game for the channel.