2D Metroidvania. Besides standard left/right move and jump, you have a short melee attack (X button). You’ll also unlock three different abilities that you switch between by pushing L (not R) and activate by holding up and pushing the attack button. However, not only does each ability have a cooldown when 2/3 have no reason for it (EDIT: and the last one is still debatable), but they also use the same resource, so if you use one ability, you have to wait for the meter to refill before you can use a different ability. Their cooldowns last different amounts of time as well, with the third power (the projectile attack) making you wait the longest.

Level design is pretty good. There are a bunch of bland rooms, but that’s to be expected in the backtrack-centric genre that is Metroidvanias, and there are plenty of challenge-focused rooms to help give the game a somewhat-stable difficulty curve. There are a few puzzles in here as well, but they’re all pretty easy (even if you count all the fake walls and fake spikes as “puzzles”). There are a couple hiccups, though, like certain obstacles being introduced in less-than-ideal circumstances (will the bubbles let you stand on them or will they pop and bounce you? also why do they take a few seconds to spawn despite no visible spawn point?). The worst is that your block-summon ability can work on upward-facing spikes just fine, but urchin-shaped spikes will kill your block outright! That got me killed when it first happened and still took me a while to get used to.

Map design is okay. I never got lost or confused on where I had to go (the in-game map helps), and even though previous areas don’t always lead into their next area, the game does have warp points that help avoid the worst. The room layouts also do a decent job of implying where secrets/fake tiles are so you don’t miss too many items on your first run through an area. Still, it does have my biggest pet peeve with Metroidvanias: areas having optional items behind late-game roadblocks solely so you have a reason to go back to that area. I don’t know if Metroidvanias were always like this or if I’ve just been spoiled by the best of the best, but I always thought the idea was you’d naturally end up in an earlier area through basic story progression and think “hey, I can get this item now that I have this power!” instead of “oh, I finally got the power I need to go back and get this item that’s now super out of my way.” At least it’s only done with the optional items, though; I was able to get all the mandatory items on my first pass.

Sadly, the bosses are a huge nosedive in quality. For one, they all make you wait before you can deal one point of damage, then they make you wait some more. Even the ones that are technically always vulnerable have a tendency to idle in near-impossible-to-reach places for just long enough that trying to go after them there results in you taking damage from their next move and/or not making it there in time. Even still, the first boss is okay and the third boss is tolerable.

The second boss, however, is the worst one. On paper, it seems reasonable since its movement and attacks are slow, but it falls apart when you compare it to what your own character is able to do. First thing the boss does is summon a shield of orbiting projectiles just wide enough that your melee attack can’t get through without you touching the projectiles and taking damage. Then, it walks back and forth across the arena, so you need to use your bubble power to jump over the boss and avoid its shield-projectiles when it stops walking and shoots you. You’re probably thinking you can finally safely get a hit in now, right? Nope; the boss starts walking again, and its walk speed is just slightly faster than your own. Plus, the bubble power (which you need to use to jump over the boss) won’t let you walk through it; it’s sides act as solid walls, thus giving the boss even more time to catch up to you and subsequently making a hit-and-run nonviable. After some more walking, the boss stops in the center of the room and summons spouts from the left side to the right side, and since you’d naturally be on the right side at this point, it’d seem like you’d have enough time to summon a bubble and jump over the spouts…except your bubble rises even slower than the spouts do, and the spouts go quite high up, so you can only really avoid damage by knowing what’s coming and summoning the bubble early. After several deaths, I finally won when I stopped trying to avoid everything and just took damage on purpose so I could get more hits in.

The fourth and fifth bosses aren’t much better. Both of these bosses disappear for a while–making it completely unambiguous that you HAVE to wait–and the fourth boss only appears across a pit, forcing you to use your projectile spell to hit it. However, one of the fourth boss’s attacks is a close-knit spread shot that sweeps across the room, so the only way to avoid it is to summon a green block…which you can’t do if you’re waiting on your lengthy projectile-spell’s cooldown. But hey, you can always summon the green block in advance and leave it in a spot you can return to…but then you need to make sure that the boss’s other attack (two lightning bolt projectiles that are shot at your last known position) doesn’t collide with it because that’ll destroy your block and force you to summon another one (after waiting on your projectile’s cooldown from when you attacked the boss, of course). Also, the boss can summon bat enemies that fly towards you, and while you can easily take them out with your melee attack, it turns out said melee attack can also destroy your summoned block(!), and the available platforms are small enough that you don’t have much room to attack without hitting it. Combine all these details, and the fight is less a boss fight and more trial-and-error/figuring out the right sequence of inputs that’ll let you and your block avoid damage.

The final boss also has a close-knit spread shot that sweeps the arena, but each projectile can kill your block, so that attack is about trial-and-error figuring out where to place the block so it creates an opening you can slip through. Once you get that down, the rest of the fight is quite easy; it’s really just more waiting for the boss to teleport to the bottom where you can actually attack it. On my last try, I even beat the final boss without taking any damage and was disappointed there was no second phase.

Overall, this game could’ve been really good if the bosses had been tweaked and the spell cooldown was removed, but as is, I think it’s still worth picking up on sale.

P.S. Apparently, the NES port has extra content, so maybe play that version instead? That said, the map I found for it on GameFAQs seems identical to what I played here, so I dunno. Can someone who’s played both confirm/deny?