Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams

The game promised to be a platformer with a twist. You'd be able to seamlessly change between the cute and dark versions of the world, and use this to solve platforming puzzles. And you can! Not only that, the music changes alongside it, without missing a beat. Of course, not being young anymore, I failed to beat this game. A gazillion attempts at beating the final boss but nope.

I picked up this game without any prior knowledge of the Giana Sisters (growing up Commodore-disabled), just looking for a good platformer. I was not disappointed. Everything is spot on. Your standard platforming goodness is there, but the twist is the method of changing between the sisters, which is brilliant. If you've ever played classics like Super Magnetic Neo (anyone?), you'll be right at home, as you'll be switching between 'worlds' quite frequently, and it makes for some fantastic gameplay. Black Forest did a great job of defining the game mechanics, sticking with them (while adding variation), and getting just about everything they could get out of them. The fantastic level design encourages exploration, while the hard-but-fair gameplay rewards you for getting better -- which is something that not enough games seem to do these days </crotchety_old_gamer_rant>. The three bosses in this game will definitely cause screaming and controller-throwing, but when the smoke clears and you've beaten that final, crazy-hard boss, you will stand at the top of the mountain, gamer's high flowing through your veins, knowing that you did something worth doing. In short, this is a great game!

Giana Sistsers does for platformers. Lovely graphics, brilliant controls, some nice puzzles. And it's a pacy little game too (the bouncing sometimes reminded me a little of sonic - in a good way). Cracking price too (especially if you pre-ordered). More of these please GoG.

As the video trailer shows the game looks just very good and the switching between the worlds is nice. I liked the controls and it makes the game just flow. It was challanging and I had fun with improving with every retry. I didn't like to collect those damn gems to proceed any further, so I just played it on easy mode, where it is not neccessary to have those gems to proceed. It would have been great to have it challanging but without collecting gems. Otherwise it was about 10 hours of platforming fun for me :-)

If you like the good old side-scrollers from the 80-90's you gonna love this game. The way they graphics and music changes is just awesome. If you have a X-box controller or similar it is preferred to play this game with one, but it works with just the keyboard as well. This game is worth every penny in my opinion.