The year is 2025. Humanity is on the verge of a technological golden era. We stand on the precipice of reality altering advancements like the rise of artificial intelligence, implanting chips into the human brain to help the disabled, interplanetary travel, heart transplants, and finally solving the mysteries of the cosmos. Yet despite all of these advancements of the human condition, apparently we are still unable to figure out the secret ancient technology of how to let someone remap their controls in a video game.

We apparently are able to adjust the vibrations levels, the volume of the sound effects that a user interface makes, and even the ability to add some sort of retro filter visual effect to the screen to make the game damn near impossible to stare at (no other video options!). Apparently at no point in time is the creative process, coming up with all of these nonsensical things did someone think that someone might want to change their buttons.

I'll even take it a step further. I will also wager that at no point did someone making this game try to play this game on a PC using a keyboard, because if they had they would have had their hand cramp up in a few minutes from the absolute insane keyboard layout that someone dreamed up for this that no human would ever want to use. It's either this, or the person who did play with a keyboard has some sort of deformed claw-like hand mutation that makes using UIOP keys feel natural in some way. Instead of using, I don't know the buttons with the arrows on them to move, I'm convinced someone placed their controller on top of their keyboard and just set the unchangeable default keys to whatever was under it.

Beyond the horrendous and unchangeable control scheme, there's a few other glaring issues with the game so far. A little ways into the game, you are given the ability to switch between multiple characters on the fly, and spend a rare finite resource on leveling up their stats. As bad as an idea as this is on face value, it's more hilarious that 2 of the 3 characters have no mobility at all. The main character is able to dash and double jump to navigate the basic platforming in the game, but neither of the other 2 characters can do any of this. The screens are designed in such a way that navigating them without these abilities would be extremely difficult or not possible at all, so the concept of spending a rare finite resource on characters who can't really move at all seems like terrible design choice.

The entire imbalance of this continues further by the fact that monsters hit like a truck, have a massive amount of life, and the 2 extra characters don't do enough damage to be viable. Shortly after the game introduced you to the second character, you are thrown into a boss fight where the boss has over 2000+ life, and this new character's standard attack does 6 damage per hit. SIX! Meanwhile the main guy is doing 100+ per hit, and one hit from the boss will do 200+ damage, and possibly set you on fire for some sick damage over time.

Thanks to the amazing unchangeable controls, you have to take your hands off all of the action buttons UIOP to move them to the arrow keys to cycle through your potions to find the potion that puts out the fire, then back to press U, then back to the arrows again to cycle to the healing potion, then back to press U again. While you are playing hopscotch on your keyboard wrestling with this baffling control scheme, the bosses is going berserk hitting you again, lighting you on fire again with an attack that hits the entire screen. Normal enemies are not much better, where one hit from them does devastating damage while requiring many hits to kill.

What's also cool is save point do not heal you, and instead the player must relay on brewing and chugging healing potions to sustain themselves, or you swap party members and sit and wait very slowly for the non-active person to very slowly regen their HP while off field. There are some healing stations scattered around the map, but after you drink from it once you can't drink from it again unless some time goes by or you travel far enough away. I'm not really sure why someone thought either of these made for compelling gameplay, but here we are.

All of these things combined just make for a frustrating game experience. I do enjoy challenging games, but I also enjoy polished games that were properly play tested with basic QOL functionality that have existed in video games for decades. The game seems to go out of it's way to make it annoying, not difficult. It's a shame because in a lot of ways you can see a lot of effort went into this game, and I may still try to slog through it because under all of this there is a concept of a decent game here, but there's no way I would recommend this to someone else as it is right now.

it's absolutely fantastic. Charming, delightful, entertaining, fun... and many, many superlatives. Turns out they still do make em like this. Congrats to the devs for nailing everything they were going for.

Just started playing this game. First and foremost, the pixel art is simply gorgeous, The combat and movement is pretty responsive and so far, the game looks to be fairly interesting.