The developer states on the kickstarter page for the full game that part of the intent of The Tackle Box is to get as many people playing this sample version of the game as possible, both to entice future buyers but also to acquire user feedback. As such this is basically a publicly available alpha build of the game and i will treat this review as user feedback for the developers.

Aesthetically, this game has won over basically everyone who has played it. Many like the visual style (including myself) and it even goes the extra length to try to tie the various obstacle elements into a larger cogent setting, which is a finishing touch that most platformers don't necessarily reach.

When you start out, things seem alright at the outset. The game provides a training grounds for all of the basic moves and signs which tell you about all the moves that you are capable of. Tackle feels responsive and tactile to control and his animations read as distinct from each other and are readable in when you are doing one move or another. All seems fine here. Once you complete the tutorial you are given a Breath of the Wild opening into a larger sandbox and are told to run free to look for the game's equivalents to coins and stars.

This is where the disconnect happens for many people. Because the aim of the systems of Big Catch is a physics driven platforming where acceleration and momentum are meant to be converted into a variety of moves which are chained together, whose interactions with each other and how they sequence together are not readily understood in how one will affect another, and so the game has functionally given no real priming on the core hook of the games mechanics.

Furthermore, the levels in the open sandbox do not function as primers for the physics based platforming logics, because the levels are, for the most part, full mastery sequences built for a complete understanding of the various interlocking physics properties in which you must transition from several different moves likely intuitively already known by the level designer but never introduced to any meaningful extent to the player by the developer. They have functionally built a Super Mario Maker custom map pack before they have even built their Super Mario World.

Now, you can reverse engineer the solutions to several of these levels by experimenting with the moves and systems in these large parks scattered throughout the world, which with enough time and intuition is doable for most players. This process of discovery and experimentation can be an innately fun process, especially if in the process of that self-discovery they begin to see solutions for the obstacles everywhere around them.

But then, there are additional ambiguities which obstruct the player from implementing any obviously perceivable solutions. They are:

1. Occasionally vague, ambiguously arranged architecture which makes the course to proceed unclear. This means before the player can even think about their strategy of implementing their tools they have to contend with discerning where the actual course is in a sea of white noise visuals. This means finding the path forward can sometimes amount to a pixel hunt of not-immediately discernible interactive factors. The path forward, once found, can sometimes be mistaken for an exploitative gap solution. I'm not even sure if I navigated some levels as originally even "intended" by the level designers

2. Once a path forward has been determined, the player will likely realize they need to build momentum in a sequence of level objects to clear the obstacle. But because of the range of momentum and the ambiguity in the range of speed, the distinction between the successful attempt and the failed attempt can seem visually identical. Some things such as the grab range of hookable objects seem arbitrarily short, and it seems as though the developers has made all of the levels to be completed around a precise range of momentum build-up that is visually difficult to distinguish until you have attempted the jump. This means you are expected to complete pixel perfect jumps with elastic, visually imperceptible speed differences, with several users reporting that successful attempts seemingly nearly indistinguishable from the appearance of their failed attempts. You combine this with the tall architecture of the levels which have few shortcuts and you are being tasked with completing several obstacles with visually difficult to read momentum with courses which are not even readily understood all the time.

Despite these flaws, for most of the game you can acquire a good enough understanding of the game logics you can begin to understand fairly consistently what it is the game is asking you to do to succeed, even though it can be hard to succeed with a system that demands a precise outcome with an elastic system. For most of the jumps you can acquire a good enough understanding of the game's systems to beat them with surety. This is where a lot of the fun is found as you realize your own and the game's capabilities and execute on them, which can be a freeing and exhilarating feeling.

But it is quite an ask to demand that the player both spend energy interpreting your levels in search of a way forward and then to expend energy trying to execute consistently a narrow path of execution in a broad ranged system. Most games make a conscious choice of whether they want the player to expend more mental capital on solving their way forward or on planning their strategy of execution when presented with a problem.

The reason why the famous Resident Evil 4 village demo resonated so strongly with first time players is because despite hitting first timers with a sudden drop into the deep end the game had sufficiently established its basic play structure in the few levels leading up to the village sequence proper. Players were hit with a sharp spike in difficulty, but they were also likely thinking by that point on how to get out of the house without dying, and not whether they understood their character controls by that point.

A game with a high ceiling of mastery is something that these developers clearly want to make, but I think they need to be focusing on giving a new player a reason why they should care to play with their systems from the outset, and focus on either making the game's difficulty around discovering a solution, or focusing on mastery of execution. With ambiguities in both it just feels as though the game is unfocused in its design. The main character seems to fall short at times in ways that feel unnecessary. Making more visually pronounced the difference in speed and height in the moves the character performs when performing the various moves such as the ground pound jump and the slide kick jump seems like minor, adjustable ways to distinguish the state the player is in while keeping most of the work that has been done. Focusing on making the levels more readable so that the player is spending more mental bandwidth thinking about the implementation of their advance toolkit seems like another minor way of making what these developers have go so much further without having to start from scratch. They already have something very good here that, with a few minor adjustments, could go from a minor hobby thing for people who enjoy tinkering with obtuse systems in a vacuum to something that could resemble the next smash hit.

Addendum: Something I noticed in my time playing is that the blue flower slingshots seem to have a much further rod catching range than the swing hooks, even though the rod should seem to have the same length of string to reaching both of them equally. I've seen other people report coming short at what can feel like an arbitrary range. How much less frustration would there be in the total experience from just extending the grab range a small amount for the swing hooks? Something to consider

So good, that i have genuinely come to enjoy other 3D platformers less after playing this. AND IT'S ONLY THE DEMO!?

goated