I’d known about this game ever since BalrogTheMaster made a video about it, but I never got around to playing it until now.

DISCLAIMER: I played the free version on itch.io, so I can’t say for sure if any of extra content from the paid version is worth paying the extra $6, but if it matches the quality of the rest of the game, I’m gonna say no (at least wait for a sale).

Anyway, this is a platformer. Standard left/right movement and jump, but while your shots travel straight horizontally away from you at first, they’ll slow and fall down three units away from the edge of the screen (as opposed to after traveling a set distance from where they were fired), then disappear after falling another three units. It’s just a weird little detail at first, but there are a few times the game makes use of this, putting an enemy below where you could otherwise hit (meaning you gotta walk back enough so your shots will fall onto the enemy) or putting an enemy close to the screen’s edge where your shots can’t reach. After the first level, you reach a hub where you can play the next 3-4 stages in any order (I say 3-4 because one of the four is just a joke level), and once you beat them and the following 5th stage, you reach a hub where you can choose which of the next 8 stages you want to play next. Unlike the previous levels, you get a new power after beating each of these 8 stages; it’s kinda like Mega Man, but there’s no weapon energy, so you can use those new powers as much as you want. There’s also a 9th power you can get by going to the city a 2nd time, but this is just a one-time-use power that you can only refresh in the hub or by losing all your lives. Oh yeah, this game also has a lives system; run out and you have to start the level over. I can give the length between checkpoints a bit of a pass since you have a health bar (even on the hardest difficulty) and the dev wouldn’t want the player to tank everything, but I’ll never understand modern games that keep the lives system since all it does is make you redo what you’ve already done if you die too much.

One thing I distinctly remember mentioned in the video is that enemies and gimmicks are introduced safely so that you can see how they work before you’re in any real danger. While that’s true for quite a few of them, it isn’t true for all of them. For example, in the very first level, there are pencils that spawn enemies from their bottom, and the pencil shrinks as you shoot it before it’s destroyed. Well, there’s one part in the first level where there’s a gap, followed by a pencil, followed by a health pickup, and you might think this means you can safely jump on the top of the pencil, but no, that just hurts you. In another level, there are tiny factories (that don’t show up outside this one level) that produce cloud blocks that move up, and when you jump on said platforms, they start moving to the right. These platforms are introduced over a spike pit and lead to a higher, stationary platform with enemies coming toward you, so naturally, you’ll jump up to shoot the enemies…except the cloud platform won’t keep going to the right like the ones in Super Mario Bros. 3; it suddenly starts moving up again. Another gimmick that doesn’t show up outside of the level its introduced are blue arrow outlies: when you touch one, your character freezes in place, so you might think “oh, it’s like those earlier enemies that trap me in a painting and I just gotta tap the buttons enough to get out” except when you hit those buttons, you get shot. Turns out, it’s a rhythm game gimmick: you have to hit the arrow key that corresponds to the outline (or hit the attack button if the outline corresponds to your projectile attack), and you do this AFTER your character is in front of the outline, completely obscuring it. Now, if you know rhythm games, you know that you’ll be penalized just as much for hitting the button too late as you would for hitting the wrong button, but near the end of the stage, you have to go down a one-tile-wide vertical shaft that not only has the outlines, but also hazards moving back and forth, and though I tried several times, I never made it through without getting hit, and the only thing I can think of is that you can just wait forever while the outlines have you stunned (which is unintuitive) because I’m quite convinced that timing your fall past the moving hazards otherwise is impossible without taking damage. Issues like that are strewn throughout the game, and I’d be here for quite some time if I were to list them all.

I will list the one that I really didn’t like: the level “digitaland” introduces skull timers in an empty room so you can easily deduce that you need to get out of the room before time runs out, but then it immediately introduces blackout rooms so every few seconds, you won’t be able to see what’s where. That’s still not too bad, but THEN it has a blackout room with a skull timer that scrolls, so you can’t even see everything at once. Plus, this room also has enemies that dash left and right horizontally while shooting vertically, and while I’m sure the dev thought these enemies were introduced fine, you’ve only seen them at the very top of the screen before this. Combine this with the blackout and the skull timer and having to scroll the screen to parts you haven’t seen yet, and you realize you’re not gonna know that they don’t actually turn around on the edge of the ceiling/floor and instead keep going until they hit a wall until it’s too late. Also, the boss of this level can teleport and suddenly summon a wall to push you off the arena into a pit. Yeah, there’s quite a bit of trial and error in this game.

Oh wait, there’s one more part I should bring up: Gasman (one of the named bosses) will move left/right horizontally at the top of the screen, then come down and shoot a bouncing green skull before moving left/right horizontally on the floor before finally stopping and going back up to the ceiling to repeat the pattern. The skulls stay bouncing in the arena until you shoot them, at which point they’ll stop bouncing and slowly pick up speed moving towards where you shot them from. That already has a bit of trial and error to it, but after a couple deaths, you’ll also notice that the boss doesn’t stay on the ground for a set time before going back up; the boss could bounce off the walls three times or only go halfway across the arena, and many of those times, I was mid-jump directly above the boss and took damage before I, or anyone in that situation, could react to the boss suddenly stopping and moving upward. I tried to use the default projectile at first, but once I realized the randomness inherent to the boss’s pattern, I switched to the guided shots so I could hit the boss when it was in the air to get the fight over with quicker.

Like I said, there’s a loooot of issues with this game.

On the subject of bosses, there are also two bosses that get reused three times. The first boss in the game has a 3-layered health bar, so the fight already lasts quite a while, but this same boss also gets reused in one of the 2nd hub’s 8 levels, just now with the gimmick of left/right movement reversed (you still face and shoot right when you push right to move left and vice versa, so it’s not a complete rehash) and the boss only has one health bar this time. That’s understandable, but the level between the second and third stage select hubs has you fight the boss AGAIN, now with 2 health bars and some red rings to foreshadow explosions during the second phase (which is otherwise identical to the first phase, which is identical to all the other times you fought the boss).

The second boss that gets recycled is completely optional all three times, and the arena is different each time. This does mean how you avoid its zig-zag stomp attack is a bit different, but I don’t think the differences justify how many hits it takes to defeat the boss each time.

As for the optional stages themselves, their entrances are hidden inside other stages. I was able to find the last two just fine, and there was one spot in one of the 1st hub’s levels that looked like it could contain a secret, but your main projectile doesn’t go down far enough to clear the glass blocks out of the way, and the game won’t let you bring later powers back to the earlier levels, so I looked up a walkthrough. Turns out, the tank that kills all enemies on contact and doesn’t have a cannon graphic on it at all…can shoot a projectile, and that’s how you clear the blocks away to reach the first secret level. Thing is, you still don’t unlock anything just by beating all three secret levels, so I looked up a walkthrough again and found out that there’s a PERMANENTLY MISSABLE item in the level between the 1st and 2nd hub where the game has that slide-until-you-hit-a-wall gimmick (followed by a crappy fighting game gimmick, but I digress). I did see the item, but when I tried to get it, I was just barely blocked by a couple pixels (the top of my sprite hit the bottom of the solid tiles and stopped me, around three moves away from the item), so I had assumed the item was deliberately unreachable on purpose (because that’s the kind of joke this game would have).

By the way, the 3rd hub has two NPCs who tell you part of a code to enter on the title screen. Both NPCs are in the free version, but when you type in the code they give you, you’re told the code won’t work on the free version! Okay, now I’m even more convinced that the permanently missable item really was impossible to get, but only on the free version. Either way, I’m not replaying this whole game just to check.

Overall, this game’s pretty mediocre. Parts are well designed, but nearly every level has some trial and error to it (ranging from tolerable to frustrating), and that’s to say nothing of the quickly-abandoned gimmicks and occasional forced damage (reducer orbs). If you haven’t played a halfway-decent platformer in a while, you’ll better appreciate what it gets right, but even then, I still say to pass up the paid version and check out the free version on itch.io instead (but if you already have the paid version, then yeah, go ahead and play the paid version).