Recent reviews by Hayden Sikh

Massive shift in gameplay between the prologue and the main story; the game introduces itself as a being more on the hack-n-slash Link to the Past style, then shifts to relying on the either the parry or dodge to avoid the swarm of enemies that will two-shot you. Both mechanics are fairly slow and clunky -- don't expect a Hyper Light Drifter dodge or a snappy parry like in Blasphemous. This could be forgiven a bit more if the prologue wasn't so long, but it almost feels like an attempt to run down the timer on refunds before pulling a bait and switch.

Rogue-lite but unbalanced where some parts rely on luck or upgrades rather than skill. That could be fine if you always inherently had incremental progression through normal gameplay, but some challenges require you to go out of your way to grind.

As other reviews pointed out, the upgrades often don't descriptions. Again something that could be fine if there was always forward momentum, but grinding to get an upgrade that's a roll of the dice if it would be helpful or a waste of time is the opposite of fun.

Extremely buggy in ways that break the core gameplay loop. It's built around parkour with walls indicated with color and textures, similar to Mirror's Edge, but with some sections where you're more likely to slide down a wall or clip through it than trigger the wall-run mechanic. The game quickly devolved into one run at a section to scope out the area and find out what you need to do and then 20+ attempts to hope that the game will actually function.

Enjoyable game mechanics, but while the is game driven by its mechanics it's ultimately *about* the characters you meet. Those characters live up to that burden put upon them. At a surface level each is given a rough stereotype, perhaps a necessary conceit for characters in a video game and/or perhaps for the aesthetic the developers were going for, but I was surprised at how well the writing, voice acting, and animations conveyed subtleties and nuance that made them feel much more real than your typical fiction.

One thing I liked was that there were still some unanswered mysteries left at the end. This can be a delicate balance; leave too many open questions that are central to the plot and it feels rushed and incomplete, answer everything and it feels almost too tidy, too convenient. For me this struck a good balance, leaving enough mystery to make the world seem larger and a touch more real. YMMV.

Short, and what's there isn't great. I bought it thinking it'd be similar to Katamari Damacy, with weird tight timers and multiple choices for routing incentivising multiple playthroughs of each level. It was not.

First off, the game's mostly just cutscenes. While they can bring some quirky charm their appeal fades quickly when they show up between every level and usually take much longer to sit through than it takes to complete the gameplay sections surrounding them.

And the gameplay itself... there's not much of a hook. Bringing back the comparison to Katamari Damacy, it does feature a mechanic where you have to collect smaller items which then let you colect larger items. That's about where the similarities end. There's no time limit, instead the level ends when you collect everything. No incentive to replay to try to do better or to try to find something you didn't see on the first pass through.

There's no skill or dexterity needed to complete levels, so that's not the hook. It could be they're going for casual, relaxing exploration, but if so then it falls flat because the levels are so small that there's just not enough to seek out or discover.

I want to recommend this game but feel like I have to suggest giving it a pass, at least as it stands in the current version (1.0.0-9).

There *is* a lot to like about the game. The 16-bit, SNES graphics are charming and they have a lot of expressive variants for the models used in dialogs for the main characters. NPCs do only get generic dialog pictures which is mostly fine though sometimes jarring; for example, the NPC with the top-down sprite and text that is meant to be a Shakespearean actor but has a dialog picture that looks more like a farmer. Similarly, I like the characters and their distinctive personalities. The game mechanics are also generally fun, blending hack-n-slash combat, platforming exploration, and puzzles. The feel of the controls match up with those mechanics - slight skidding around as you change running directions, floating hops as you auto-jump off of platforms, ranged attacks with accurracy that tightens up if you aim in advance, puzzles that have you think of projectiles moving in interesting ways.

However, these same mechanics are horrible when put in other contexts and that's the fundamental problem with the game's design. Those platforming nuances that add a viseral feel due not lend themselves to precision, so the sections of the game that ask for precision platforming feel horrible and you're mostly just going to power through attempts until you get luckiy enough to get past. The slow aiming feels great, unless the only way to stop an ememy from fully healing itself is to shoot a fully aimed charged shot at it... with a half second difference between the time to aim and the time before the heal procs. I also doesn't help that even with that 100% accuracy aiming there seems to be some weird geometry in play where your projectile will hit a wall despite the aiming line indicating it won't. Having multiple heights on the map are great for platforming and puzzles, but horrible for combat, at least given how poorly the game indicates what height an ememy is at; you get a faint shadow that is hard to see in the best of circumstances but can be easy to lose track of in heat of combat or behind other sprites.

In the game's news they indicated that it took 7 years to get to version 1.0. I suspect what happened is that those really nice game mechanics and control feel that are at the core of the game were developed early and over the years additional content and challenges were added. But that means that by the end of the lifecycle the people adding the content had 7 years worth of experience getting used to ther own game, effectively making them blind to the nuances that make the game excel in some areas but are beyond janky in others.

For version 1.0.3

Though the developers have released this from Early Access, it really should not have been. First off, the bugs:

• missing image assets
  
• broken dialog trees/subquests
  
• spelling mistakes
  
• crafting window which gets laggier and laggier each time it's opened.
  
• constant shaking of the screen when left unattended for long enough (in my case, once to answer a phone call and another to deal with a someone at the door).

Beyond the bugs, the content of the game itself is surprisingly sparse. You just constantly descend without much incentive to explore other than to discover upgrade stations. You can also find NPCs and get their subquests, but even if those subquests aren't broken there's no real payoff for completing them.

At its current level, the amount of active development and polish needed before this would be worthwhile is probably measured in months, not days or weeks. I'd check back in six months to a year to see if things have gotten better or if the move out of Early Access is an indication that the dev team is abandoning the game and so might as well call it done.

Not fun to play in single player mode. If you're looking for a game to escape from the world for a bit then give this one a pass.

Difficult to start out but as abilities and other character classes are unlocked then it stabilizes. That same variety of character classes and abilities allow for a lot of repeated playability. There is a bit of a story which is as much implied as told, a sublte touch that I do like, but if you're looking for a story-driven game then this is not the one for you.

This is currently my go-to game when I'm listening to something in the background and I need something to keep myself busy while I absorb that.