Looks 10% better (mainly some faces and in outdoor levels) but runs 10 times worse. Not only is the frame rate much (!) lower even with reduced quality settings, also the stuttering when entering a new area is much (!) worse compared to the original. To add insult to injury, the "optimized" edition also tends to stutter in the middle of a fight now. Save games from the original game can't be imported and both versions are installed separately. Skipping dialogues causes some kind of flicker in the dialog menu now. Also hiding in grass looks weird now. Even as a free update, this would have need a major nuisance but charging money for it even for owners of the "Non-Mandatory Corporate-Sponsored" edition is pretty bold in its current state.
The DLC provides a much better ending (letting aside that it's "no return" ending) than the main game and ties up quite a few loose ends. It actually feels like all of the DLC content was originally planned for the main game but didn't make it. E.g. without the DLC you couldn't nearly finish the skill trees. Also, the final temple is much better designed than the previous ones with open areas and and usually only 2-3 puzzle/arena rooms in a row. Of course, all the other flaws are still there, i.e. clunky keyboard controls, annoying fight system, time pressure in puzzles, game being grindy as hell. The penultimate boss fight (against the gods/ancients) is pretty much insane though and the fight against the "Son of the Beach" is maybe even worse. Then again, if you somehow made it through the main game, the DLC is a must, I guess.
Where the game shines is when exploring the environment. Everything else is either a drag or extremely grindy. I spent 133h (!) with the DLC. Maybe a fourth of this was fun. Pros: Large game world (split in maps consisting of smallish rooms with a teleporter every few rooms), beautiful graphics, interesting characters, lovely dialog animations and a good story. Complex skill system, tons of items, custom saves. Cons: The music is terrible and and keyboard controls are clunky. These becomes an issue later when you need to do precision jumping while skating on ice. The delay when blocking makes it totally pointless, the dash is too short to be useful but happens all the time accidentally on platforms. While the elemental powers are great, switching them in battle with numeric keys is a PITA. Besides, the elemental overload is bad design and a PITA in boss fights. Indeed, the whole fighting system is just no fun. The aiming delay is a bad idea, besides later every 2nd normal enemy and all the mini-bosses are immune to normal attacks. You need to trickshot them in the back, switch elemental powers and use the level (converters etc.) while enemies fire homing missiles causing continuous elemental damage etc. Normal enemies are bullet sponges and typically give 1 exp which makes progression very grindy. You need to smash thousands of plants to collect stuff needed to buy potions. Also the elemental skill tree is somewhat messed up and the stealth section are simply buggy. The map shows the current room, but not your actual position. So setting markers is problematic. Then there's the puzzles and while some of them are fun, lots just aren't. The mix of timed switches, precision jumping, switching elemental powers at the right time etc. is already a PITA, but some of the wall reflections are based on luck since you can't really judge the angle. Since the temples are a mix of dozens of puzzle rooms with arena fights and you're without your party, they are really annoying.
I didn't quite know what to expect but in a nutshell, it's an exploration focused shooter with a lot of jumping and grappling. It's open worldish with most areas directly connected even though there are teleporters for fast travel. The world is colorful with a lot of secrets that involve quite a bit of vertigo-inducing jumping and grappling. The ability to perform multiple jumps and to grapple have to be earned though by collecting items. But as soon as you can double/triple jump and grapple, moving around is a lot of fun. There's only one weapon which is a bit on the annoying side with its tendency to stop shooting when you need it most and the over-sophisticated charging which needs multiple correctly timed key/button presses. Still, it's good fun to shoot the alien lifeforms into slimy chunks. The boss fights are not extremely difficult (and you can usually flee), it's possible to find all secrets because you can get scanners for them later in the game, all in all the design is pretty fair. Not everything is totally great though. Apart from the weapon, also the two different jump keys/styles don't make much sense. And most of the video footage that is supposed to be hilarious is cheaply done and not very funny. Some enemies like the frogs are badly designed and hitting them is a bit random just as some of the special tasks. Also the last part of the main game (tower) is a bit unfair and frustrating. There are also some death traps which are impossible to exit alive without the proper ability or even with it (Gauntlet). Then again, dying is part of the game design and getting your inventory back is never a big problem. The DLC introduces a way to fly by hitting rings which made me crazy at first but which worked out quite well after a while. In sum, it's a very worthy addition. I needed around 27h for the main game plus DLC with 100% completion and most of this was pure fun, especially the exploring. I still cursed the developers now and then ;)
I was drawn to this game by the somewhat unique graphics style and at first was a bit disappointed as I expected more of an open world combat focused game which it clearly isn't. You can't actually kill opponents and initially you can only outrun or at best stun them. Later you can cure them by shooting fitting food at them that was treated with an antidote. This is a somewhat uncommon idea, but works our pretty well later. Actually the game is more of an action adventure with some puzzle elements. The world consists of scrolling smallish areas with transitions between them. There is a bit of persistence regarding bigger objects and so on, but thrown objects disappear when leaving an area and also cured animals/people might turn "Z" again when returning. The game has a classical progression system where you move from area to area without being able to return when passing certain transitions. So if you miss some collectible, you'll need to load an older savegame or restart from the very beginning. At least there is some savegame handling even though the manual slots are very limited and the autosave slots only go back a few rooms. You have an inventory which is mainly needed to store food that you can shoot at animals/people. There's also an RPG element where you can improve your shoes, backpack, slingshot, and shield by collecting clones of yours. The game is actually quite polished with a lot of attention to detail, i.e. stuff you can move around. It's not very hard and most puzzles are pretty logical and straight forward. Towards the end, it gets a little exhausting and the final boss fight is somewhat stupid. Also the story is forgettable and there is no really satisfying ending. The only bad thing I can say is that ran into one major bug (hotdog car went havoc) which nearly left me stuck with corrupted autosaves and I had to quit and restart to be able to continue. But I good had fun most of the 12h I put in it and didn't regret to have bought it for a second.
I played it on Steam a while ago, but assume the GoG version is identical. A lot of love went into Cave Story. There are dozens of secrets, three endings and so on. The fundamental gameplay of running, jumping and shooting works very well. Weapon power-ups are implemented in a fun way, you can perform power jumps with the machine gun etc. My main gripe is that the distribution of save points is just badly done. Sometimes there are three in a row but there's usually none before a boss fight. Which means that if you fail, you need to traverse several rooms full of enemies and tricky jumps, and then endure lots of dialog (which you can speed up, but not skip) to try again. I also didn't like the "skating" of the main character. I personally like games where the character stops moving when I release the key. Also, some save game management would have been nice. I also consider it bad design that the best ending requires you to omit certain unsuspicious actions without giving you any hint. There are also technical issues. The scaling on widescreen monitors cuts of a good part of the upper and lower screen rendering the game unplayable. Forcing the game to run at 640x480 (through Win10 options) works, but stretches the display horizontally if your monitor can't compensate. For a reworked "+" version, this is just a No-Go. The game also crashed on me when I finished the machine gun challenge. Meh. Then, there's the final boss fight (normal ending) which actually consists of three boss fights in three rooms without any possibility to save or restock. Only about 20% of players seem to have reached the normal or best ending of the game. So 80% of players failed to reach a proper ending. Side note for the desperate: there's a file called profile.dat where the maximum and current life energy are stored at offsets 0x1C and 0x20 and the max/current rockets at offsets 0x58 and 0x5C.
This was quite exactly what I was hoped for: an action adventure inspired by Zelda on the SNES. I liked it a lot but some quirks and the lack of some final polishing result in 4 stars. I needed ~20h where a lot of that was running around searching for locations I visited before but couldn't find again easily. The good: The graphics are quite beautiful and you get all the bush whacking, pot smashing and dungeon exploring that you would hope for. The world is quite large and open, i.e. the world maps consists of separate scrolling areas some screens wide, but there's a transition between the areas. The controls work like a charm. There's a somewhat interesting (but not totally gripping) story and quite pleasant music. There are quite a few side quests and some secrets to discover. You can upgrade your weapons and armor, find spells and new weapons needed to access certain areas. The game's not really hard as you can earn money by selling items you get by killing monsters or cutting flowers to buy healing potions etc. The not so good: Dungeons are small. There's a coarse world map which _sometimes_ tells you where you are but typically doesn't. I'm unsure if this is a bug or a feature. You can only fast travel with a ship and not even to all major locations. Which means running around a lot and there are regions where it's hard to not get hit by rocks etc. especially when in a hurry. All of this adds up to a bit of a nuisance. A better automap and easier fast travel would've saved me a few hours I guess. The bad: There is no savegame handling whatsoever. You can backup the save file manually in your AppData\Roaming\OceansHeart folder and you should do that before entering the final battle. The game messed up my last save game after I won the final fight and I couldn't continue to finish a side quest since loading that last save resulted in ending the game when trying to leave the island. Meh. Btw. the savegame is a plain text file, so you could edit your way out.
It's somewhat a charming little adventure but it's very short and lacks polish and more careful design all over the place. The (bad) rhymes are unique, but I don't get why someone who doesn't care for metrics or, well, proper rhymes, would make this the unique feature of a Sci-Fi adventure game. It was not totally distracting but added to the "so, so" flair. The ultra-lores pixel art style is OK most of the time, sometimes even pretty but sometimes not so much (the legs in the end sequence *yuck*). There are only very (!) few usable objects and you can't combine inventory objects or use different actions. So, most puzzles are basic, but I got stuck for some time on the frog-puzzle near then end since it's totally and utterly nonsensical rubbish. I also totally hated the final puzzle (queen) because I had an idea what to do but the time pressure, unclear trigger positions and pointless comments made it a pain in the rear. So of my ~3h playtime, at least 30 minutes were somewhat painful. Furthermore, the technical implementation leaves to be desired. When I first started the game (and I started it only twice), the fullscreen mode didn't fill the whole screen and there was no way to change it. Like there are no gfx options at all. Also on most screens, exiting on the bottom of the screen is a process of trial and error. Also, while the cursor changes when it's over a usable object, no object name is displayed. So it's nearly impossible to tell if e.g. there are separate objects or not. Last but not least, the writing is only so-so. There is one other human character, but the game doesn't care for him. The aliens are just blue humans using needles to stitch on a spaceship that has cog based mechanisms. Also, the end is a bit careless and not completely thought-through.
It's somewhat unique in its approach to play game stereotypes in the most unexpected ways. The narrator and good writing make it pretty funny most of the time. At least the starting chapters (until you reach the mobile phone) show a lot of love for the quoted genres. The pixel art is lovely and the implementation is flawless. The last chapter(s), with the pseudo-live-video stuff weren't really my thing, but OK. Anyway, the (not a) game is relatively short (needed 5.5h) and in the end and while it pretends to let the user run berserk, in the end there's always only one solution to each stage and at times, it can get a little bit frustrating to go through several loops (without a way to skip or fast forward) of the same thing again and again until you figure out the somewhat arbitrary solution. But I got it on sale, was pretty much entertained the whole time I played it, so four stars seem well deserved.
It's a cute little game with pretty good mechanics, but it's very short. I needed a little less than 4h to finish it with all relics etc. Also some of the riddles in the later two stages are a little arbitrary and actually most other things you click and rotate aren't actually riddles. Anyway, it looks nice, plays nice, was pretty entertaining and I got it on sale. Still, a few more levels wold have been nice. Also some there could be a few things improved regarding usability. Like allow further zooming out, auto scroll when the mouse reaches the border. Things like this.
