Normally, I try to wait until a game is 66+% off before buying it, but this particular game never seemed to go below 50%. A few months ago, I finally broke down and decided to buy it at 50% off, but then I started to get worried that another, better deal would come along before I got to playing it, so even though I usually try to play my games in the order I buy them, I made an exception for this one.

This is a Metroidvania. You start off with just movement and jump abilities, but if you go left a couple screens, you get a gun that lets you shoot in the 8 cardinal directions, as well as letting you go to the right, which is where most of the game takes place. As you explore, you’ll come across new powers, like a drill that can break certain tiles, a distortion beam that can toggle collision between certain other tiles, a drone that you can use to scout ahead and brute-force enemies without actually taking damage yourself, and of course, new guns. However, unlike traditional Metroid games, the guns you find don’t combine all of their powers into a single shot; only one can be equipped at a time (you use the right stick to select which one to equip), and only a couple of them are needed for general progression (though I’m not sure how you’re supposed to avoid getting hit by certain bosses without the Plasma Beam equivalent (shoot through enemies)).

The game’s controls are decently implemented and fairly responsive. There’s no momentum, so the moment you stop pressing forward, your character stops moving forward, which helps with the platforming. You can also hold down L to lock your aim in a specific direction, so you can shoot up and at an angle while jumping without moving forward as well. When you get the distortion beam, it’s mapped to a very specific rectangle on the upper-right side of the front touch screen, so you won’t really be able to use it while jumping, but the game is designed in a way that you don’t really need to; all distortable blocks can be reached while standing on the ground. My biggest issue with the controls is that dashing is mapped to double-tapping forward rather than a specific button; it’s not so bad at first when all you can do with it is phase past single-tile-wide walls, but when you level it up to a proper dash move and you make it to the late game (where you need to dash through enemies and their projectiles to avoid getting hit), having to double-tap forward each time can be rather cumbersome and perhaps even a bit unresponsive. There’s even a simple way the developers could have given it it’s own button: make the drill power (which the game maps to R) into another equip-able gun. There’s already a gun you can get that fires short-range bursts of electricity, so having a gun that keeps a drill out while you hold the attack button isn’t that much of a stretch.

Plus, since dashing is mapped to double-tapping forward, there were a few times I’d try inching forward and accidentally dash instead, which got on my nerves, needless to say.

The game also does a pretty good job of letting you know what each power does. When you get the “phase past single-tile-wide walls” power, you have to drop down into a pit that you can’t jump out of, so you have to phase through the walls. When you get the drill, you’re right next to tiles that are clearly distinct from the surrounding ones, and sure enough, they can be drilled through. There are only two parts that could use some more conveyance: the level 2 distortion beam can solidify acid pools, but only ones in a very specific room (I was turned around for, like, half an hour before figuring that out), and the drill is the only way to kill the gas-spewing enemies in the upper area of the fourth zone (the only enemy that can only be killed with the drill IIRC). Maybe, when you first get the drill, the game could lock the room and spawn one of those enemies; that way, when the gun doesn’t work, the player will naturally think to try out the new item.

As far as level design goes…well, maybe I’m not as big a fan of Metroidvanias as I thought I was, but movement speed seems a bit slow considering how spacious many of the game’s rooms are (and there are no speed power-ups or run button; the closest you get is the ability to teleport to where your drone is, so you throw it forward, teleport, then throw it again, but you don’t get that power until late game), not to mention that there are a few vertical segments that just consist of “platform above and to the left with geemer equivalent, platform above and to the right with another geemer equivalent, repeat.” The game also likes hiding enemies under the ground with no indication that they’re there, then have them jump out at you right when you’re in range to get hit by them (it’s like the game expects you to use that drone constantly to scout ahead). However, the part of the game I liked the least was in the left part of Edin: there’s a segment where you have to look for a spot in the ceiling thin enough where you can phase upward through it, but there are homing flying enemies right above there that will swarm you the moment you teleport past. Not only are they high enough that they’re off-screen before you phase upward (so you won’t see them until it’s too late), and not only is the ceiling wide enough that you can’t snipe them beforehand, but they also take 2-3 hits each to kill (at least, they do on Hard mode), so there isn’t a way to avoid getting hit.

With that said, the interconnection between the different areas is well done. You can go from the first to the fourth area almost without having to backtrack at all, and at that point, you only go back and forth between the third and fourth areas for a bit until you get the grappling hook. At that point, you can access a center hallway that lets you ride a fast-moving statue-head to the different tunnels that lead to the different areas, and once you find where to go next, you can go through two new areas in a row before being placed only a few rooms away from an area you couldn’t reach before but can reach now, which leads to another new area. After that new area, the next destination is the final one, whose entrance is a couple areas away, but as mentioned previously, you can use the center tunnel to get closer to that area faster.

Similar to the level design, the bosses are also hit-and-miss. The first few bosses are okay, but the fourth boss (the scorpion one) can only be damaged if a bullet connects with the bottom of it, but there’s only one unit between it and the ground, so you can’t walk there. Maybe you can use the drone, which is one unit high and also recently acquired? Nope; the game won’t let you send out the drone during boss fights, so what you have to do is duck and shoot and wait for it to sit on your row of bullets, resulting in a pretty boring fight (unless you found an optional gun that has bullets that shoot other bullets perpendicular to them at regular intervals, at which point the boss is still boring, but the fight goes by quicker since the bullets will shoot up at the boss even when it doesn’t sit on them).

There’s also a bee boss near the end that can only be damaged if you shoot its mouth when its open, but the rest of its body can block your shots. That’s one thing, but it also has an attack where it suddenly dashes forward, and you can’t really dodge it since you don’t have the dash move at this time (you can’t jump up to shoot the boss from the side since it’s too high up and there are no real platforms; you can only hit the boss attacking up at an angle). If that wasn’t enough, the boss will also, at regular intervals, spawn three flying homing enemies that re-home and speed up when they get near you, making them harder to dodge (especially when there are three of them). Now, I admit that the boss isn’t that difficult if you use the enemy-piercing weapon since you can easily shoot through the boss’s stinger (which would otherwise block many of your shots), but again: that gun is an optional find, and I’m still not sure if it’s possible to avoid all of the boss’s attacks with it.

(Side note: apparently, one of the differences between Normal and Hard is that bosses move faster, so maybe the bee’s dash move isn’t as sudden on Normal.)

The final boss is even more nuts. The weak point is stationary, and the boss itself doesn’t have any attacks, but it spawns three giant flying drone enemies that take positions based on where you are. During the first phase, they fire solid beams (as opposed to individual projectiles), and sometimes, when they reposition themselves, they do it while firing the laser, essentially sweeping the arena with unavoidable damage. Sure, you can kill the drones (and sometimes get some health back in doing so), but it takes far longer to kill them than it takes for the boss to spawn another one (10-15 seconds to kill with constant bombardment from you vs. ~5 seconds for another to spawn). Sure, you have the dash by this point, but you can’t dash while ducking (and you’ll probably end up ducking to avoid when they shoot lasers near the floor since jumping over them/dashing past them just makes them turn around). Sure, you can use a distortion bomb (which you don’t get until near the end of the game, and which have limited ammo that only restocks at save points) to slow down all the drones on-screen and slow their rate of fire, but their lasers can still sweep across the arena when they reposition themselves (and their movements are a bit erratic, too), and if you kill a distorted drone, a fresh one will spawn after a few seconds to take its place. Sure, it’s possible to bait them to move near the top of the arena by being in mid-air at the moment they start to reposition themselves, but it’s kinda hard to do that when there are lasers blocking your path (you could dash above the lasers, but then you’d fall on them and take damage anyway).

Long story short: I don’t know how the game expects the player to avoid taking damage at this part, and I’m almost convinced the game forces the player to take damage here. It reminds me of the wrench-throwers in Kero Blaster: since the hazards move faster than you, there isn’t much (if anything) you can do to avoid them. Although, with this game, it’s less that the enemies move fast and more that there are constantly three of them (and when they move, it’s in different directions, and their lasers move with them).

The final boss has phases, so if you damage the weak point enough, a little cut-scene will play out (while you’re still avoiding the drones’ attacks, of course), and although the boss itself still does nothing, any new drones that are spawned (in case the previous ones are killed) have a different attack. However, the craziest part of the entire fight is that the subsequent drones are actually easier to deal with than the initial ones; instead of a constant beam that turns on/off, the second phase’s drones shoot three projectiles (forward, forward-and-slightly-up, and forward-and-slightly-down), so you can dash through one wave of shots to avoid damage. By the time you get to the third and final phase, any newly-spawning drones only shoot a single projectile forward that explodes on contact with a wall, so even with three of them shooting constantly, you can actually avoid their attacks with reasonable consistency if you hit them all with a distortion bomb (it’s still pretty difficult, though).

Lastly, I’d like to mention the game’s performance. There’s at least one secret area in the game where a scan-line effect is added, and in-game level scrolling is tweaked to resemble that trick to make old computer games (like MSX-1 old) appear to have smooth scrolling (where the tiles at the edge of the screen are completely blacked-out until they’re completely on screen). It’s a neat little detail to differentiate the “artificial” zone(s) from the rest of the game. Also, the framerate drops during these parts. There are also a few times where the framerate will drop if you get near a large cluster of tiles that can be affected by the distortion beam (the texture will flash on tiles that can be distorted), but there are also a few areas where the framerate drops for seemingly no reason, so I’m not sure what’s intentional and what’s just a result of code that isn’t optimized properly. Plus, the game would frequently just freeze for a couple seconds before resuming like normal (though the background music would keep playing), and there was even one point where the game crashed on me. First, Squid’s Odyssey, now this; what’s with portable ports of indie games not wanting to work properly?

Overall, this game is okay. Movement speed is just a bit too slow in my opinion, and there are quite a few moments that could use some tweaking, but if you think you can look past that, I’d say 50% off is a decent price.