Mable & The Wood

The game opens with a message saying "Controller Recommended". Unfortunately the game doesn't work with my xbox 360 controller, so I was stuck with mouse and keyboard. I couldn't get past just how bad the game works with a mouse & keyboard and gave up after the second boss. Maybe if the game actually worked with controllers I would've had a better experience?

There are many, many good aspects to Mable and the Wood to make you want to keep playing; the art styles are charming, the story is entriguing, and the gimmicks are interesting and unique. However, the imbalances, awkwardness, and bugginess involved in movement, combat, and level design created too much of a slog to keep me going. If it received a major update to clean up the patience-trying flaws, I would definitely recommend it – if you have the time and extra cash to check out its asthetic and mechanics for a couple hours, it's worth a look.

The game isn't irredeemable, but it is deeply unpolished. I would recommend this game mostly in the case where you have already gone through other far more polished metroidvanias out there and feel yourself itching for something different even if flawed. Positives: * Good pixel art. * Dialogue is OK. * Somewhat innovative gameplay Negatives: * The gameplay is innovative, but so unpolished it's often a source of frustration. * Bad level design: there's a lot of uninteresting parts you have to go through, and it is sometimes unclear whether you can go through certain edges of a room. * Broken geometry: you may get stuck in walls, particularly with the spider shape. * Broken UI: HUD may display over speech balloons, some esoteric combinations of menu interactions may leave the game in such a state that pressing the action button also brings up the menu.

Apparently this requires the user to be on older versions or using rather outdated libraries to get it running properly. I'm using manjaro, it's based on arch, which means I'm sol with running the linux version problem free. Problems include it outright crashing if a dualshock 4 is connect before the game starts or at any point while the game is open. Game does not recognize input from generic controllers plugged in. Ingame bindings are completely messed up, as in, I pressed esc to access the options menu, pressed esc again and now both spacebar and left click open the options menu. Ingame button prompts are all for an xbox controller even though there is no controllers plugged into the system. Avoid this if you're looking for something that runs native. I'll be poking around getting the windows version to see if it works properly under proton.

I enjoyed the music and the art style the game uses. The combat style is different and I enjoyed it. The story or what is going on is something you will not get until towards the end. So then comes the parts that ruins what could been a good/great game. The currency you get is kinda pointless for what you can buy with it. How you loose the currency getting damaged by anything. Sometimes you can recover it but sometimes you have no idea where the "body" is to recover is located. They despawn really quick if you got hit so recovering them is sometimes really hard. Well then don't get hit you say. well good luck when sometimes you have no idea what is coming up. Switching "powers" is slow at times and doesn't switch even thou you marked it. Sometimes you do want to switch quickly. Some powers you barely ever use and feel kinda pointless. I succeded in softlocking myself from progressing as I used a key on a door I shouldn't so couldn't progress after the 2nd boss. The game has potential but has many things to fix.