Mable & The Wood

In the 1st 20 minutes or so this looks like a very neat little game with somewhat unique controls, a charming story and visual style. Later in the game, this positive first impression is somewhat destroyed by loveless and crude level design, control issues and tons of glitches and bugs. Also there isn't much of a story in the end. You can only define 1 of the several keys needed, also I felt like hundreds of time my button presses were just ignored in the most inconvenient moments. Getting up some slopes was a total disaster due to control issues. Also the spider rope only hits enemies now and then when you need it most. Some of the forms acquired later are either pointless (bird), only usable at very specific locations or so buggy (mole) that you better not use them unless you need them to proceed. Honestly I think that I glitched through parts of the game, e.g. you can shoot through levels as ghost or dig your own path as mole. But this also caused the wildest glitches. Also the game crashed several times on me and I had to kill some bosses multiple times as the game glitched back to the savepoint. There are savepoints but no real save game handling and no fast travel. Save point placement is usually OK, but there are some very nasty screens where you will die a dozen times without a savepoint close. Most of the boss fights are not very difficult but rather chaotic and typically you can win them by hitting as fast as possible with either the fairy or spider form. The last boss fight was a bit of a PITA since there's no progress/life bar. Dunno if this is a bug or a feature. Made me wonder if I need a special strategy, but in the end I didn't. You get maps now and then but they aren't very helpful and sometimes the game won't let you leave a room without any obvious hint why. Anyway, I put around 8h in it where I spent at least 1h cursing the developers for this loveless buggy mess. Only around 2% of players made it to the end which should concern you.

Really, you couldn't spare a few minutes to actually setup some decent keybinding or gamepad support?

If you take this game and do the pacifist route without unlocking the other forms the gameplay works wonderfully. But as soon as you get the other forms it falls apart, the spider form is buggy, the stone form is buggy, everything feels buggy, it feels like the standard way to play is the pacifist mode, which has solid gameplay and the kill everything and take their forms wasn't polished enough. Not gonna bother to try the other endings.

The pixel art isn't at all bad, the setting is charming, and the music is decent. Sadly the controls are diabolical, especially shifting between your main and alternate form. More importantly it's possible to reach some fairly unforgiving sections very early in the game, dying forces you to play the same area repeatedly. Exiting and immediately re-entering a screen respawns enemies. The 1980s are now forty years ago, there's enough memory to keep track of all characters. It was a design decision that wasn't fun at the time, and still isn't fun now. Pixel art platformers, even with interesting mechanics, are no longer rare. They need to do better to stand out.

The game seems fun, but I couldn't play for more than 30 minutes without it having a graphical freakout I had to force-quit out of. The controls also seemed buggy and "sticky" with buttons sometimes not responding or temporarily freezing the screen when pressed. In the end the issues were too frustrating for me to enjoy the game.