I was going to wait until this was on sale but went ahead and snagged it late last week. Glad I did. Finished my first play-through last night and was thoroughly entertained. It starts a bit slow, gets more fun a couple hours in, after an item acquisition removes one particular game mechanic. (I guess you could play without that item or turn it off, but it would slow your progress considerably.) There's backtracking aplenty, but it's not onerous, especially for a game of this type. There's fun secrets to sniff out, precision platforming, and a handful of creepy/grody enemies (mixed in with all the typical ones you see in a game like this), all in a well-designed setting (the gorgon statues and background/side art is freaking great). This one's a winner, and I will be firing it up again soon to try for one of the different endings. I have a few minor quibbles, none of which affected my enjoyment of the game enough to deduct a star: -Occasional controller weirdness (i.e., character keeps moving although D-pad isn't pressed any longer); -I know it runs counter to my review title, but bosses -- except the second one, perhaps -- could use a bump up in difficulty; -It would be nice to have descriptions of what the upgrades do and whether they're permanent.
First GOG review, here goes. The game looks great. It's a modern pixel-art game, you know what to expect & it delivers. The animations & environments are quite well done. You can turn on a CRT effect, which is just kind of dumb but whatever. The platforming is stodgy. This has been said in other reviews, but boy oh boy is it particular. Gameplay is slower than a lot of contemporary Metroidvania affairs. Your little dude stops cold when he swings his weapon. Also, you probably will have to grind a while to beat the game... but I don't mind grinding. Figure out the enemy's attack pattern -- especially if it's tough and/or high xp -- and defeat it, return and repeat and level up and see what neat weapon or armor or gadget eventually comes out of it. The monsters are very well designed and have interesting attacks and patterns, especially in the last two levels. Some are pretty creepy. Oh, and the drops can be neat. Really fun beasties! But the familiars (Bird Hat and Sword Hat, is there another one I missed?) are tough to recommend as an asset. The leveling for them feels wrong and they feel laggardly in play. The biggest drawback is how much you will backtrack. Metroidvanias have this flaw baked in but it felt worse in this one, I think because the little guy moves a bit too slowly and his jumping is weirdly less free-feeling than it should be. If there was a map annotation feature it might be a bit different, but you can only mark things with a star and it's hardly useful. The rogue-like aspect of this was totally oversold, but maybe I should have played through this twice to get a different seed. I can see it being trying to find all the artifacts and plot-forwarding stuff in different maps, vs like replaying SOTN where everything is where you left it last time you played. This is just a bit more than the sum of its parts; like the computed grade is a C+, but it's from a student you weren't expecting anything out of, so you round up to a B-.
