Guacamelee!

If there are a handful of games you must play on Vita, this one belongs on that list.

Guacamelee is a special kind of game — a retro save-the-princess story wrapped in a Mexican setting with luchador wrestling at its core. On paper it sounds like a gimmick. In practice it completely works.

The way it plays

The combo system is easy to pick up. Most of the time I stuck to punching and throwing, only reaching for special moves when a group of enemies needed to be knocked back all at once. What keeps it interesting is that your combat moves double as traversal tools — the same techniques you use to fight open up areas you’d never reach through normal jumping. The fighting and the exploration feed into each other in a way that never gets old.

The art style is hand-drawn and it fits the game perfectly. The world is full of references to other games and a good amount of miscellaneous stuff that’s genuinely amusing to stumble across — including at least one Journey reference I was not expecting.

Where it gets hard

The game is fun and only occasionally punishing. Bosses and certain dungeon sections that demand precise timing kept me busy, but the Orb Dungeons were where I spent the most time by far. Each one is a gauntlet of precision platforming and the satisfaction when they finally click is real.

All orb dungeons done. Just the final boss left — and then platinum number 19 was in the bag.

Cross-play

I played the whole game on Vita, but it runs just as well on PS3. The cross-controller feature — play on one platform, continue on the other — is one of those things that sounds optional but once you’ve used it you wish more games had it. Setup takes a couple of minutes but the official site walks you through it clearly.

DLC

Three months after the platinum, went back for the DLC and finished that out too.

100% done. One of the best things on Vita.