I've played it with my 11 y.o. kid and it was fun. Some highlights: * The game is neatly designed story-wise. The atmosphere changes considerably during the game, but there's always a goal to follow that looks natural. * I've liked the characters. They feel believable and nice. The Magpie specifically even went into our local vocabulary that I use with my son :) We reference it or quote certain phrases at times * On the downside, the "failure" moments are a bit too brutal to my taste. Gameplay-wise yes they show a danger icon and you know you should save, but I'm speaking about the emotional and visual impact here, not whether you'll lose game progress. This could be done better. Maybe have a checkmare to see/hide the more violent moments? ("Violent" is a pretty strong word, but these failure moments aren't too nice either.) Overall very well done. This game is not just about puzzles to solve, but also about characters to follow / be part of. Comparing to other 3 or so point-and-click games that I still remember, this one scores a bit higher than the others for me.
Pros: * Simplicity. You grow into your controls gradually, just at the right pace. It's very intuitive, even after you already have multiple weapon and movement alternatives (and use them all). * The final boss fight is pretty fun! The map incentivizes you to use many of your weapons and skills: jump, run, static jump, drill, steam punch etc. Some downsides are: * you don't know if you can spend gold on "unnecessary" but quality-of-life-improvement things until the end. (The answer is likely yes, you'll have quite enough gold towards the end of the game. But it's finite and you don't know the exact amounts in advance.) * the final boss is too easy. Way too easy. I've defeated it without problems on the first try. Even though the map is fun, the difficulty of the map is not. I had a bit of a sad moment when I've realized the boss got defeated without a challenge. A definition of challenge would be dying once or twice, or actually incentivizing higher-level gear, etc. The boss can actually be defeated with just a few upgrades from mid-game. Overall 4.5/5
