Rustler and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Two games inspired by other games.

Rustler

This game tries its hardest to be GTA but set in medieval times (though this includes medieval graffiti,  beat boxing bards you can hire to ride along with you so that you can have some tunes, and guardsman knights whose horses are equipped with red and blue sirens). You can get the gist from its live action intro. :P

You play as the titular Rustler who is out to make some gold by doing illegal things, the least of which is stealing horses actually! I like that horses also have various "makes" (like the cars) and that you can re-color your ride through the paint station. Alas its somewhat repetitive, and the fixed top down view doesn't really do it for me, so it doesn't get a recommendation from me. 

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

This side scrolling platform game is basically Castlevania, except your protagonist is now a sexy shard caster named Miriam who has trouble jumping to places unless she wears kung fu shoes and does the correct sequence of moves to "air walk". Her proficiency in the many weapons available does somewhat depend on player skill and knowing the combos that you learn from library shelves, while her stats improve not only from the gear you wear (and craft) but also from the first time you eat any cooked dish so expect to be ingredient hunting a fair bit! 

There's a bit of a grind and more than a little back and forth through respawning enemies but what irritated me most is that you lose any unsaved progress between save points and there are no real hints of where said save points are meaning you might be doing pretty good until you get locked into a non-telegraphed boss room and if you die - hope you have fun replaying that whole segment again. I didn't.