Pudding: Lyre Knight

but what really makes Pudding: Lyre Knight stand out is its approach to storytelling. it uses a couple different techniques, but the most prominent and notable is out it has characters, mainly Cygnus, displayed with their avatars on the left-hand side of the screen, talking to the player while they try to complete the run. this forces a player who is interested in the story (and the gameplay is so interconnected with its story that i can't imagine a player not caring about it) to divide their attention between reading the dialogue to parse the story and paying attention to the level for more accurate play. i can't think of any top-down shooters that do this, at least to this degree, perhaps because it could be very annoying in theory, but Pudding is easy enough that i never felt frustrated by this, and even if i did, delivering the dialogue with RNG against level design with little-to-no RNG reduces any possible annoyances. as a result, i found this way of delivering the story pretty entertaining.

Gameplay was honestly pretty fun overall.

Similar to Katatema's other games the world has a distinct visual style along with a strong soundtrack.