• From the Shadows
  

  41 minutes playtime

  no achievements

Platformer. Left/right move, A double-jumps, LB swaps between light and shadow forms. The game does that all-too-common thing where it almost has responsive movement, but if you let go of forward in midair, you still keep moving about a unit or so before you actually stop. That said, the platforming never gets that difficult, even taking into account the optional firefly collectibles that do nothing except increase your % completion score at the end.

As you’d expect, the different forms let you change which platform type you have collision with, but there’s an issue here, too: instead of opposite-type platforms becoming an outline or transparent or something, they disappear completely. This isn’t too big an issue for shadow platforms since you can usually see them sticking out from the edge of a light radius, but for light platforms, they often have no indication of their existence until you stumble upon them in your light form, which generates its own light radius. Sometimes you can intuit where they might be based on the level design, but not always.

The game’s only boss abruptly introduces a few new things you gotta work around. The levers here are the only ones in the game that rotate the spike platforms, and the boss will (slowly) try to slap you after a bit, so it doesn’t take much to intuit that you have to lead its hand into the spikes. What can take a bit more time to figure out is that the direction it slaps you is based on which side of the screen you’re on, and the spikes rotate in a way that means you need to wait on the opposite half of the screen for the boss to start slapping, then run over and hit the switch. It’s not hard; you’ll just be doing quite a bit of waiting.

Overall, I can see these issues bringing down a full release, but for a free title that will probably never be finalized, it’s okay.