What a ride that was. Considering the absurd amount of hours I have in Mount and Blade, this game is an easy win for me. And I suspect the creator favored horse archery in that game as much as I did. I consider myself pretty good at it, but wow it's even harder to aim in this game. One thing you will want to know is that aiming is a toggle, not a hold. That messed me up for most of my playthrough. 

However, zooming around on a motorcycle with a Koakuma flinging RPGs everywhere is incredibly satisfying. The final encounter ramps up the difficulty far beyond what the rest of the game requires, and demands you know what you are doing (or know how to cheese). The writing is simple, but the environmental world building really carries the narrative. Zooming through so much emptiness makes you feel for what was lost. The visuals doing double duty for the story telling is excellent. The sound effects provide good feedback, mostly. The lack of music may be intentional giving the deserted vibe the whole game gives off.

I am left with wanting more to explore and more enemies to explode. It is the mark of a great jam game if I walk away hungry for more.

Edit: Oh, of note the game hard crashed when I was standing in the glowing residue at Magus Ritual Site. But it has a working autosave feature! Very nice.

Rather great experience, but a bit clunky here and there.

- One of the main mechanics is that Patchouli can shoot at enemies while driving... If that's how it was meant to be (just like what the 1st weapon suggests), then the aiming DESPERATELY needs aim assist.
- Aiming feels tedious. Its surprisingly hard to hit anything while driving, even at close range. Maybe the inaccuracy gimmick and the combined movement of the motorcycle and of the enemies stack too much to be played that way.
The alternative being to stop to aim, which feels sloow. And considering the mechanics, I'm not sure if the game's made to be taken slow.
- Thus, I ended up leaving it all up to the Koakumas. (With my vain efforts to try assisting with the Water spell and not hitting anything yet again, somehow.)

The worldbuilding though sure is awesome and- ARE THESE MECHS?? Funny how this is the second game I see where Patchouli roams a post-apocalyptic world.

AWESOME game. My brain's a little scrambled today, so I might not be able to phrase my thoughts well, but yeah. It's 3D!! And it controls well!! And it's got an ending!! I haven't played Mount and Blade, but even if this is heavily ripping it off in some way, Biker Patche + Rocketing Koakuma third-person-shootything is so cool that I'm giving it high concept points anyways.

The entire game controls in a weird way that's both smooth and very unwieldy, from the motorcycle's handling to the inaccuracy of your attacks if you aren't good at taking purposeful, well-aimed shots. I'm not good at that at all, so much of the combat was pretty hard for me. Started out relying mostly on Koakuma One to kill enemies, until the final boss where the training wheels came off in more ways than one, and I had to learn how to actually play the game. The difficulty curve in general was great-- I died a ton, but it always felt like my fault. I probly should've been using Elder Koakuma's baiting to my advantage more, done tactical dismounting to use Koakuma One as a turret, or just been more accurate with my shots.

Story was in the background and didn't take itself super seriously, which is fine. While music would've been nice, the lack of it almost enhanced the atmosphere at times. And gosh, I just really like the vibes of this game in general. Lack of LGBTQ+ themes? yeah whatever I don't care this game is COOL

Flaws, uh... sometimes dismounting would clip me into a wall, but it easy to get out of that by just mounting again. The Magic Experiment Location thingy with the book in the shack was pretty confusing for me to navigate, to the point of spending what must've been 20 minutes just driving all around the area looking for that last dang book. Koakuma One really could've used a few more dialogue exchanges, as they start repeating after like 5 minutes. And also I kinda wish enemies had more of a visual indication they were being damaged-- until the final boss I genuinely had no idea how much damage my attacks did, and it seemed less like I was damaging the enemies with my shots and more like they all had 1 HP but my aim was so bad that every hit but the one that killed them would keep missing. Also levelstuff leading up to the final boss seems far too easy to skip entirely-- this isn't necessarily bad, since it'd be awful to go through a really big level every time you died to the final boss, but I dunno, maybe the final boss's room could've had a checkpoint or been registered as its own area like the Hidden Cave.

But anyways YEAH!! This game is RAD!!!! It almost feels a bit unfair to give such a high appraisal/rating to a game that seemingly had nearly a month to get made instead of two weeks like the others. But I mean, this thing's probably not gonna get many ratings on account of being so late, so it's probably fine.

In short, it's in my top 3 favorites of the jam so far.