Some frustrations with a game I want to love:

[[S] Modus Pwnens]

First off, the game is beautiful. A lot of things work really well. I keep hearing this is a single developer project? That's just insane. You've done some incredible stuff. I'm going to get at some things that keep me from just absolutely falling in love with this game. Things which push me away in spite of SO MANY GREAT THINGS about this game you've made. And please remember that. You've done great stuff here.

1) Try to move away from Hollow Knight. It's hard not to feel Hollow Knight's weight constantly bearing down on this game. I hope in your next project you can break free of it. And I can't tell you, I hope so, so hard, that you are going to make another metroidvania after RT. If this is where you're at... I can't imagine where you can go from here.

2) The Augment system. I get it, it's charms and slots 2.0. Don't make my HUD take up Augment space. And frankly, I still hate HK for introducing the idea that it's ok to make my navigational tool take mission critical charm space. The Nomadic Compressor, being a pretty critical movement tool take up space in the Aug's is also very unwelcome. Also, you need to consider, in a HK style Charm-like system, the space taken by a charm is a HUGE cost all by itself. When an Aug, like Vaporized Injector takes up two full slots, AND comes with the downside of "stay in this small area while you heal" it's not worth it. It's taking up a massive amount of charm/aug space AND it is requiring massive mental real-estate to use. I went from going, oof that's costly but worth it, to immediately unequipping it and wishing I'd never wasted my time to obtain it. The cost of an aug/charm is the opportunity cost of not being able to equip something else. Stacking additional caveats on that destroys the Aug's value.

3) I'm lost. So very often I am lost. I've spent hours upon hours lost. Lost in so many ways. I spent quite a while even in the first little loop where you start, before I found my way out into the wider world. I don't like the world of, "highlight anything of vague importance in lime green." But some of your visual language is lacking. Sometimes I think things in the background are obstacles. Even with abilities, I'm lost. Super Jumps using the spin/stickies is incredibly fun. I LOVE how it opened up the world. I only know about it from reading a comment that someone made about it though. Breaking the purple walls? Again, I'd have no idea if not for the discussions here.

4) Speaking of Swim Dash and breaking the purple walls. Boy, that's a really unpleasant mechanic. It's super hard to control. It's incredibly hard to get started. When I got the swim-dash I was excited for the world to open up and being able to get to new places. I honestly dread every time I have to use it now. It's a deeply unpleasant experience. I am 15 unhappy minutes into trying to get the Living Alloy brick behind the Sevans arena to complete another health. Just let me spin-dash into the barriers to get through them. I busted my butt fighting the boss to get the ability. The momentum mechanic here, is theoretically really neat. I like the idea of what you were trying to do. But in practice, I wish it wasn't a thing.

5) Difficulty curve. Holy moly batman, the sparkblood mines are a true nightmare. The difficulty there just ramps WAY up. And then once I clear it and am able to move deeper into the game, the difficulty ramps down.

6) Respawn locations. Just put 'em nearby the bosses. The traversals to a lot of the bosses are not fun. I'm trying to learn a pattern, but I gotta try and do a special dance around a bunch of enemies and obstacles to get there. It feels really bad and is very frustrating. And its not the good kind of frustrating. I find all the bosses frustrating. Man, I cannot tell you how unhappy I was fighting Sevans. What a jank, cheese-jerk boss. And then that stupid spike-ball... BUUUUT eventually I figure it out, I get the patterns down I learn to be a little less greedy about damage after spike-boy joins the fight. And I am incredibly satisfied with my victory. But the trip from the respawn to get to Sevans. It was frustrating, and I'm still mad at it. Dumb, purple tentacle floaties and navigating that stinkin reverse gravity thing in the middle of the room. That was and is just frustrating and with none of that sense of victory and accomplishment I get from taking down the boss itself.

7) I really don't understand how the diagonal spark jumps work. They feel like an interference in my movement, not an addition. I really hope they aren't necessary. Just one of those, "feels bad man" movement things.

8) Super jumping off bombs on most moving platforms is a recipe for getting stuck. Spin-jumping mid slide in a tight space is a 100% soft lock. I'm sure you'll get these fixed in patches.


Again, I want to close with reiterating that these are things that are pushing me away from a game I otherwise am loving, and wanting to absolutely fall in love with. I feel like these are flaws in a gem. And here, let me emphasize that, this game is a gem. At the heart of it is some great stuff. I can't tell you how many times recently I've bought a metroidvania that looked great (and yours looks great BTW) only to find that the core gameplay experience was at best, "meh" and often times just flatly bad. The core of Rebel Transmute is a gem. I'm torn about whether or not its an experience I can really recommend at this precise moment because of these things. But man, a little more polish.. a little more work... I honestly believe that RT could stand as one of the best metroidvania's of all time. And please... don't stop here. Make another. I can't imagine what your next game will be, if you're putting out material like this now.

[shoumoa]

I hear you on lots of that. My biggest peeve is the whole dropping stuff where you die and having to go all the way back to get it. I don't like that. I wanted to really like this game but that was a deal breaker for me. Refunded.

Every game ain't gotta be Dark Souls.

[LordCastellian]

This sums up my feeling pretty well. I haven't beaten the game yet, due to the fact that I am so incredibly lost I have no idea where the game actually expected me to go.

I went down the the bottom area first because I found the subway before the mines. I got the swim power, and got to the part where I had to hit the switches to do the story bit, but then the game expected me to have walljump. I explored for a good bit of time, and eventually left because obviously I went to the wrong area first. Started doing cleanup while I tried to figure out where to go, and ended up in the arboretum area on accident. Once again, seemed to be walled by progression I didn't have. Went down to the mines finally and unlocked the power the game expected me to have, only to run face first into a locked door I had no key for. At this current moment I assume I have to use walljump to find a spot where this key/maybe a terminal that opens the door? is, but I am running out of places to check, and losing the motivation to find it fairly quickly.

I don't think I've ever played a metroidvania game where I got the solution to a puzzle, only for the game to "Psych, you thought" me as soon as I get past the part that was obviously solved by the thing I just picked up. Like, within a few rooms, and give me absolutely zero indication as to what I'm expected to do. Unless it's actually intended for you to travel to each of the three subsystem areas, and get all of the powers available at all of them at once before trying to clear any of them, I don't really know what the game wants from me.

This isn't really helped by a lot of the jank that the game has, like the spinjump letting you bypass one-way breakable walls, or the wave blaster doing the same thing if you shove your gun far enough into the wall. Or the spinjump bomb launch being an intended mechanic that lets you sequence break so hard you softlock yourself because the game expects you to have all of the powers in specific areas, and not having them just gets you shoved into a corner with no way of leaving. Or the enemies that you're obviously intended to spinjump off of to traverse rooms having healthbars, and can die mid-platforming section and suddenly you have to run back to a save to reset the room.

All this combines to make me extremely disoriented because I don't actually know which areas I'm expected to be able to reach anymore. It's entirely possible that I just didn't notice what the game wanted me to do, and now I just have to run aimlessly until I stumble upon the room that had the thing I needed in it again.

[Death of Rats]

Originally posted by shoumoa:

I hear you on lots of that. My biggest peeve is the whole dropping stuff where you die and having to go all the way back to get it. I don't like that. I wanted to really like this game but that was a deal breaker for me. Refunded.

Every game ain't gotta be Dark Souls.

you can pay 50 to get that health back at the revive station, i just treat death as a 50 dollar penalty and move on.

[[S] Modus Pwnens]

Originally posted by shoumoa:

I hear you on lots of that. My biggest peeve is the whole dropping stuff where you die and having to go all the way back to get it. I don't like that. I wanted to really like this game but that was a deal breaker for me. Refunded.

Every game ain't gotta be Dark Souls.

You can actually unequip that augment. I hate the flux cost. But I was glad to be free of the struggle retrieving cores.

[SnapKick]

I largely agree with or at least sympathize with most of your points, but I really hate when people get upset about HUD/healing/nearly mandatory things being tied to some sort of charm/augment/equip load system. You have to remember, it's not really the case that if you just made those things base kit, and let's say the sum total of all "basekit" augments counts for 1 battery space, that you'd just have 1 more battery space to work with in the game. The dev KNOWS these are near vital and most players will want to just keep them, ergo it's likely there's more space allotted for other things to accommodate. If I were a dev debating on putting in such a mechanic, I'd first stop and adjust the price of everything else or the total equip load the player has.

A mechanic like that, or the specific usage of it, doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's silly to say you're being deprived of space when you're actually just being given an option. An option only challenge runners really want, but still, an option.

Otherwise very good writeup.

[LaLaN00b]

Originally posted by S Modus Pwnens:

some of your visual language is lacking.

This. I feel I'm not too far in and have been lost for hours twice now. In one case a background piece looked like a solid wall (entry to Overgrowth). In the other case after spin jumping for hours on *purple* flowers, *purple* tops of swimming "balls" I would never have guessed, that you can spin jump on those *grey* boxes with a *blue* core that look like deactivated platforms in the lava room.