Here’s yet another game I bought with the intention of playing the older ones first, but between my Steam backlog getting ever bigger and Drakengard being garbage, I decided to axe that plan. I might go back and play them later; who knows.

• Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
  

  7 hours playtime

  12 of 25 achievements

This is a platformer, but with the additional mechanic of switching planes (and, by extension, your hair color). On top of your standard “these platforms/hazards only exist in this plane” stuff that comes standard with plane-switching, there are moves you can only do in each plane: twirling (hold Y to do an extra jump and float down) can only be done with yellow hair, and dashing (push X to charge in the direction you’re pointing; bounces off walls and kills enemies) can only be done with red hair. Both of these can be done once after jumping, but you can only do one per jump (and if you twirl, you can let go and push the button to speed and slow your falling speed, respectively). Also, if you push one of those buttons while in the other plane, the plane will automatically switch, though it’s possible to switch planes without doing anything else by pushing one of the shoulder buttons.

First, I should point out that the game does some things right. Notably, the difficulty curve is fairly well implemented, which I’ve noticed is something that has become increasingly rare (even Celeste didn’t really have one, instead opting for longer distances between checkpoints to create the illusion of harder levels, only increasing difficulty at the start of each Side).

However, one of the things it gets wrong is a pretty crucial one: controls. Basically, when you hold left or right, it takes around a quarter of a second for the player character to build up enough speed to reach top speed, and when you let go or push the other direction, it takes an equal amount of time to slow down, so you’ll stop around a unit in front of wherever you let go of the controls. For the most part, it’s not a huge issue, but the game wants to be a precision platformer (something evident by the end of the first world), and when the platforms you’re expected to land on are already only one unit wide, that one-unit-long stopping-distance will cause you to slide right off the platform. Of course, this can manifest in other ways, too: for example, there’s a ghost enemy that chases you through solid tiles, and if one of those shows up in front of you, you may not have enough time to stop and turn around before you collide with it and die. The momentum may not cause you to die that often, but it will cause some of your deaths eventually.

The game also has some trouble getting its hazards to stand out from the rest of the scenery. For example, it isn’t uncommon for a level’s yellow-hair-plane to have red lighting, and even though the enemies are green and blue, the red lighting gives everything a reddish shade and causes everything to blend together somewhat. Of course, this issue could have been avoided if only the background and platform textures changed color instead of the entire lighting of the level. There are also skeleton enemies that charge at you if you’re in the red-hair-plane, but if you’re in the yellow-hair-plane, they throw a thin, tiny white bone at you that will absolutely kill you if it hits you (you die in one hit if you didn’t find a shield in the level or you lost said shield). Taking this a step further, moving hazards like crushing pillars or saw-blades render behind regular solid tiles, so if you can’t see the actual hazard, the only way you’d know it’s there is by looking at the edge of the solid tiles (a.k.a. the wall that’s connects it to the background, a.k.a. the part you wouldn’t be able to see at all if this were a 2D game).

Honestly, even by $15 indie game standards, this game lacks quite a bit of polish. The scripted sequence before the 2nd boss (where you’re dashing through a spike corridor) spits you out just beside the platform, so you die if you don’t react in time. Clouds are safe platforms in the red-hair-plane, but if you stand on them too long in the yellow-hair-plane, they zap you and you die (and of course, the game never tells you this). There are multiple areas where rocks continually fall from above, but one of these areas won’t trigger the rocks until you’re directly under their spawn point. There are also at least a couple areas where the model for deadly spikes is placed slightly in the background behind completely safe platforms, so if you’re approaching it from below, you might not realize you can even go there. The final boss can throw a hazard that follows you, and right afterward, the boss can shoot fireballs that trigger geysers, making the only safe places thin vertical corridors for a couple seconds (again, while you’re being chased by a hazard, so you’d have to lure it to just the right spot to avoid taking a hit). Heck, this even extends to little things, like how the title screen menu starts in the middle instead of the top (where the “play game” option is) and how it never says how many gems you need to unlock the boss level while you’re on the level select screen (it only tells you that you need “an average of half” during the loading screens’ randomized messages).

To add insult to injury, the game is also gimmicky. The worst example is in world 1’s boss level: there’s an object that moves back and forth and shoots out a spike when you change planes, and it’s used exactly twice in the entire game: the introduction is during a thin corridor where there are enemies and a spike ceiling (so you can’t kill them by dashing since you’d bounce into the spikes), and the second time it’s used is in the boss’s arena, and that spike is the only way you can damage the boss. This is easily the worst part of the game since you have to wait on two objects, moving independently of each other, to line up just right so you can cause the spike to hit the boss. Also, the spike is delayed, so even if it lines up properly, you still might miss.

Overall, this is a pretty mediocre game. It’s not terrible, but it lacks the same amount of polish you’d find in a free Adobe Flash game. If you’re interested, wait for a steep price cut.

P.S. The “holiday special” levels are all just clones of existing levels with minor changes here and there. I didn’t really find them worth playing.

• Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams - Rise of the Owlverlord
  

  2 hours playtime

  7 of 17 achievements

And then there’s this $5 standalone expansion. It’s basically more of the same (seven extra levels), but now there’s a lot more cheap hits. At the very beginning, once you break out of your cage, spikes start spawning from behind you and unkillable flying enemies come in from above to chase you, and it all happens so fast, you may not be able to react to it. After that level, though, it goes back to where the main game’s difficulty curve left off and isn’t too bad (relatively speaking; it has the same lighting/control/polish issues, though). I do have an issue with the boss, though: the boss will throw a blade at you that follows you, and the only way to damage the boss is to hit the boss with the blade. That’s fine, but the blade only damages the boss if the boss switches to the costume that it wasn’t wearing when it threw the blade. It’s not as bad as the final boss in the main game (and certainly not as bad as the first boss in the main game), but it’s such an arbitrary requirement that I didn’t realize the blade even damaged the boss at first, especially since the blade is no different depending on the costume.

If you liked the main game, you’d probably like this, too. However, I certainly wouldn’t recommend getting this instead of the main game since this one is way worse at conveyance, having text tutorials slide from the top into the top corner while you’re being chased by fast-moving hazards.