Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls is a bit of a hidden gem on Steam, or at least that's the way I look at it. The game is completely free toKhimera: Destroy All Monster Girls is a bit of a hidden gem on Steam, or at least that's the way I look at it. The game is completely free to play, the only part of it costing any money whatsoever being one piece of $1 DLC for an alternate costume. It's a retro-style 2D action/platformer, the gameplay often times reminding me of titles like Shovel Knight or the original Shantae.
The game follows Chelshia, a chimera tasked with tracking down and beating the tar out of a group of pirates known as the Sea Spiders who've stolen all of the treasure from the people of Morgana Island. The main game is fairly short, able to be beaten 100% in around two hours if you know what you're doing, sporting twelve stages to platform and pummel your way through. Of these twelve stages, only eight of them are needed to beat the game, the other four being extra stages that the player can unlock by finding hidden switches within the four main levels.
After beating the first stage of the game, the world map opens up a bit, allowing you to play through the next four stages in any order you want to, each stage ending in a boss fight. Defeating the four main bosses in these levels earns you a new ability to use for platforming or combat, Mega Man style. Playing through the extra stages will also earn you new abilities a well, a few of these optional abilities being more useful than the necessary ones in certain situations.
As far as how the game looks, plays, and sounds, I really have no major complaints in any of those three categories. I personally find the game's sprite art charming and nice to look at, though I can see how some may have issues with it. The game controls just fine with a nice variety of moves to take advantage of from the get-go, and the soundtrack I personally found to be pretty nice. Songs like The Pirate Captain and Ragazza Plains are tracks I could easily listen to on repeat for quite some time without getting tired of them.
Every last stage in the game is memorable in some way, and nearly every NPC has some charm to them. One nice touch is that as you play more and more stages in the game, NPCs from the extra levels will show up in the game's main hub area, and you can also find the pirate bosses you've beaten locked up in jail, able to be talked to if you so desire.
The game has two main collectibles hidden throughout every stage. Collecting notebooks will give you access to character and enemy bios in the hub area, while freeing every trapped fairy in the game will net you a well worth it reward that I won't be spoiling here. You can also earn yourself a few Steam achievements and extra completion percentage by beating each stage with an A rank, doing a no death run, and beating it with the reward for freeing all of the fairies. I've personally 100% completed the game more than fifteen times, and I plan to make that number even higher in the future.
Overall, I think Khimera is a very enjoyable title, especially considering its price tag of exactly $0. Honestly, I'd love to see the game eventually come to consoles, and maybe even get a sequel sometime in the future to expand on it and the characters it brought to the table. This is a game I'd easily recommend to anyone who's fond of the platformer genre, without a shadow of a doubt, and one that's made its way into my personal top five favorite games list.… Expand
