Question:

What do you do with games that you almost played through but then gave up on in the very last level or boss fight? Do you consider them "finished" anyway? Or "abandoned", "quit"? Neither feels quite right to me, but since I'm more in for the experience than the challenge and I try to keep a positive mindset, I'll just post about them here ...

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Mr. Shifty & Time Recoil

Two very similar games because they both take up the formula of Hotline Miami and add their own small note to it. Like the titles already betray, in Mr. Shifty that's shifting across space, teleporting through walls and such, in Time Recoil it's slowing down time (but with the added benefit of dashing through walls as well). I don't really remember the story of Mr. Shifty and I'm sure I will soon forget the story of Time Recoil, too. Something about time traveling to prevent a Mr. Time from taking over the world with his time weapon, yadda yadda. It's not bad, but equally simple as it is confusing.

That doesn't really matter though as you don't play these games for story but for the mechanics. Like in Hotline Miami, if you take a single hit, you're dead, so you can hardly afford making mistakes unless you're quick to react and improvise, which is both exciting and stressful, and which results in dying and retrying a lot. But in most cases that's fine because you can jump right back into the game and the fast-paced action combined with the music (especially in Time Recoil) pumps you up, gets you hyped and drives you on until you've beat a level and then on and on and on. Both games are fun that way, and at the same time occasionally frustrating.

I won't talk much about Mr. Shifty since it's been quite a while since I played it, I only remember that sometimes the checkpoints were annoyingly far apart (while mostly fair in general). One problem with Time Recoil is that ammo is rather sparse and contrary to Hotline Miami and (I think) Mr Shifty, in Time Recoil you're mostly done for without ammo, since the wild swinging of your fists is a subpar melee attack and will seldom be enough to defend against armed opponents, and there are no other melee weapons to pick up and you can't use the environment to your advantage either (like hitting opponents with doors as in Hotline Miami). So you really need to make your shots count and count your shots. This is facilitated by time slowing down for a few seconds after a kill, which makes it a bit easier to aim, and after several kills in a row you unlock more and more powerful dash moves until, after 8 kills, you can even stop time completely for a bit. But if you don't line up those kills quickly enough, or if you use up the energy for one of these dash moves, the build up is gone and you have to start from scratch again. Since the number of enemies in a level is limited and most of the times not that high, you won't get many chances for building up the energy required for the more powerful moves. In that way the game is at the same time somewhat hectic and tactical, which is not that bad though.

Worse is that enemies can see and shoot at you before you see them because they're still off-screen - they'll give you a cue by shouting "Hey!", but still, that undermines the tactical aspect a bit. Ultimately it means that you'll often fail the first few times and eventually succeed by memorizing the layout of the level, the position of the enemies and the best way to deal with them, which makes it also a bit of a puzzle, I guess. But what counteracts both the tactical and the puzzle aspect is that ammo drops from enemies are randomized. So sometimes you might e.g. kill an enemy with your last shot and he'll drop a fully loaded submachine gun or shotgun for you to pick up, and sometimes the very same enemy might not drop anything at all on your next try, and you'll have less ammo at your disposal than before. This can also lead to situations where you're doomed because this randomness. The random aspect of the game doesn't ruin it, it's still fun, but it kind of makes you wonder how this is meant to fit in with the other aspects like the sparsity of ammo in general, the more tactical nature of the game. Oh, btw, did I mention there are some levels with fast moving deadly lasers obstacles as well? So that's a thing, too.

Anyway, I've read that a lot of players found the game too hard, and that might be true for the difficulty suggested to experienced players, but on the "normal" difficulty decribed as being for the more "casual" players, the game is quite manageable, providing you're fine with the dying, learning and re-trying routine, coupled with a few instances of (sometimes bad) luck. I switched difficulty back to "normal" once it started to become a bit too repetitive, but I think the main difference is just that on "normal" the bullets of killed enemies can't hurt you anymore. It's still challenging enough regardless, what with all the off-screen enemies and limited ammo. But a tiny bit less frustrating and more fun. (I played with gamepad, btw.)

I gave up on the last (boss) level though, because while I knew how to beat it, putting it in practice and trying not to get one-shot in the process was too tedious after a while. It's not a long or complicated level, you can probably beat it in two minutes or so, but I just didn't feel like trying again and again, only to prove something to myself without actually enjoying my time with the game anymore. Still, the last level of Mr. Shifty was a lot worse. At the end of it, you have to survive multiple waves of enemies without getting hit, playing hide-and-seek with them in labyrinths as well, and if you beat that part, there comes another one, and if you die in that one, you're back to the beginning of the long arena part again. No fun. Despite of that I tried again until I was fed up, quit and postponed it to another day, only to find out that on reloading the game, you not only start at the beginning of the arena part, but way, way before that and have to repeat other challenging and tedious stuff to get there again. At least with Time Recoil, although that last level consists of multiple parts as well, if you've reached the part with the boss, you won't need to repeat all the other stuff before him, even if you quit an reload another time.

TL:DR
The two games have interesting (although not entirely original) mechanics and are fun to play, despite a few minor flaws - unless you challenge yourself to actually complete them, because the finale in both titles is rather tedious and frustrating (Mr. Shifty's even more so than Time Recoil's). Until I got there and eventually gave up, I spent about 6 hours on Mr. Shifty and 5 hours on Time Recoil, but I did so because the gameplay was addictive, not because I set out with the goal to complete them. With that in mind, I got really far and the games managed to keep me interested up to the very last parts, even if I did not actually finish them but watched other players struggle with the last minutes on YouTube instead. ;P

Time Recoil is a game by 10tons, btw, the same devs that did Crimsonland, Neon Chrome, Jydge, Tesla vs. Lovecraft etc. Even though I think it's one of their lesser liked games, I think for me it might be close to second place, after my favourite, Jydge.