• Wuppdeefriggindoo
  

  8 hours playtime

  3 of 23 achievements

This is an adventure game. Sure, you have a gun that is fired with the right stick (which is why jumping is mapped to the left trigger (L2) of all buttons), and sure, there are enemies and boss fights, but most of your time will be spent doing fetch quests, solving riddle-based puzzles, or in dialogue trees (most of which amount either to “more text vs leave” or to a list of optional world-building text walls). Very rarely outside of a boss fight will there be any threat to your character’s health, and when there is, it isn’t really noteworthy.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the game is that speed is tied to the framerate: if the framerate drops, everything lags, yet the game still has vsync for some reason. In my experience, enabling vsync will have a 100% chance of making the game run at 30 fps, which is half speed, but if you have a high-refresh-rate monitor (e.g. 144hz), the game will sometimes run too fast when vsync is disabled.

As for the core gameplay, it really does revolve around wandering the completely-safe map talking to NPCs; explore enough and you’ll probably stumble upon what you need to progress. Sometimes, if that isn’t enough, you can check your map and there may be a flag icon on the screen you need to go (even if the only thing you need to do there is continue to another screen that you haven’t been to yet). Other times, the game can be unnecessarily obtuse, like what you need to do to get the diving suit (without grinding to buy the one from the store). Sure, the game does bring up fishing and how to do it, but it never even so much as hints toward any connection between it and getting a diving suit, and it also doesn’t explain that you need to use a medium-quality fishing hook to get an NPC’s hat, and then use the high-quality fishing hook you get as a reward from said NPC to get the diving suit.

Honestly, the boss fights kinda seem out of place in this game, even though there are quite a few of them. Not only are they basically the only action-y part of the game, but they also aren’t really designed well, with many attacks being fast and sudden (giving you little, if any, time to react). Combine this with the fact that the player character doesn’t often stand out from the backgrounds and the fact that everything obscures everything anyway, as well as how common healing items are and how large your health is, and it seems like the devs intended for these fights to be tanked (or played at 30 fps), even on normal difficulty. Even the effect that’s just supposed to show how much damage is dealt when an attack connects can be needlessly obtrusive:

This isn’t Paper Mario; I need to see what I’m doing! And that doesn’t even count how a couple of the early bosses can stomp the floor and send out a dust cloud that also deals damage.

Overall, I wasn’t a fan of this game. The action bits just felt kinda tacked-on, and the rest of the game focused on things I don’t really care about. If you can look past mediocre gameplay for a world so fully realized that you need to wait in real time for the train to arrive (and you can miss it, at which point you have to wait for it to come back), then you might like this game. However, if you see the “metroidvania” tag and you think “I’ll probably like this because I liked Super Metroid and Castlevania,” then this isn’t for you.