This game desperately needs a delay.

[Hex: Maidenless]

I'm not going to jump on the full-on hate train here, because what Balan Wonderworld does right, it nails down to a damn T. The aesthetic, the music, the charm of the character and boss designs. It's like they managed to get an A+ in everything except the one thing that matters the most in a game. You know, the game part.

And what sucks is that it's far from unsalvageable. It's less a problem with the game philosophy and more a bunch of small problems with the core of the gameplay that really ware on you over time. Prime examples that come to mind are:

- Movement is just too slow. Speeding it up by around 20% alone would make the game feel much better.
- The costume change delay. I think this speaks for itself. Making it instant or even just a very minor delay like half a second would make the whole experience feel so, so, so much better.
- Costumes needing to be switched between at all. The fact all 4 buttons on the keypad are bound to the same function is baffling, especially since...
- Some Costumes remove your basic jump. THIS is one of the things that hurts the game the most, because it forces you to interact with the slow process of regularly switching between costumes. There's no reason you couldn't do something like say (from an Xbox controller perspective), A is always jump, X is always costume function; or, if you want to get really "ambitious", remove costume switching entirely and have X Y and B always bound to your 3 Costume abilities.
- Costumes being your health bar. There's no practical reason for this design choice, it just facilitates you periodically wanting to grab additional costumes to get shoved into your wardrobe to be backups, since on the rare occasion you get hit, you'll lose one. That will however, rarely happen, because...
- Everything is so. damn. easy. I got a "perfect" on the first boss after killing him in under 20 seconds. The only times I lost any costumes was when I stepped onto the black "pools" to confirm they would actually deal damage, and at one point I jumped off, to confirm that jumping off actually did anything.

On their own, everything but the ultra, ultra easy difficulty would just be a nuisance, but combined they really ware you down no matter how much you try to ignore them. The sad thing is the level design really is not bad. Contrary to what a lot people seem to be claiming, there's a lot of verticality to some of the levels and a lot of very obvious additional collectibles and trophies that are simply out of reach without (I presume) costumes from other chapters. It genuinely seems like this is a game that going full collect-a-thon beyond the initial "Clear the stage move on" phase would be a joy...as long as those issues with the core gameplay would be resolved, and they really don't seem like things that COULDN'T be resolved.

I will say I still intend to play this game, but, after this demo, it will most certainly be on the Game Pass and not through a direct purchase. $60 is a huge ask for a platformer these days, and as long as these issues persist, sadly, all the wonderful aesthetics and music, no matter how well done, do not in any way justify that asking price.

I genuinely hope Square takes a look at the reaction from the demo and opts to delay the game to resolve these issues. There's so much potential here, it would really, really suck to see it squandered. Faster, platforming, ease of access to normal jumping and either streamlining of costume switching or removal of the need to all together, a basic health bar and some way to refill it, and a bit more difficulty (faster enemies so you might actually, you know, get hit now and then, and bosses that take more than 3 hits to kill) alone would remove the sensation of "slogginess" the demo currently has and turn this into an enjoyable experience. Sure, it wouldn't break the sound barrier or be anything extraordinarily revolutionary, but in a world where we're barely getting any high quality platformers anymore, they don't really NEED to be revolutionary right now, just...ya know, actually fun.

EDIT: I'll also add on the obvious addendum that keys are functionally useless and may as well not be in the game, especially if it were to be changed to remove the need to continuously grab more arbitrary stacks of the same costumes to put in reserves.

[Samson Fairfox]

This comment is awaiting analysis by our automated content check system. It will be temporarily hidden until we verify that it does not contain harmful content (e.g. links to websites that attempt to steal information).

[Lue]

Agree with everything you said. I had the thought "A Hat in Time was more polished than this, and was ~1/3 the price". There's so many things going for this game as a classic Yuji Naka platformer (e.g. the art, the chao garden-esque sub game), but it desperately needs more polish.

I think it's unlikely Square will budget a delay (esp. since a late March release makes it screamingly blatant they want it out before the end of this fiscal year), but smaller fixes like removing movement acceleration, giving all costumes a jump and completely removing the animation lag between switching costumes would already improve this game tenfold.

[Raven Wolfe]

Agreed, there is potential here and the talent as far as production value is certainly there but the game feels like it's half baked. It's very one dimensional with far too simple mechanics at this point, so it needs more depth added and better speed/movement mechanics.

[Garuu the ToonCat]

I don't think there's a hate train at all

Just train riders desperately trying to pull the breaks and wanting a delay because it desperately need ones

I don't want this to fail, I really really don't...