devonrv

I got to play on my brother’s Switch again, and I can confirm that the vintage Joy-Con D-Pads still suck (they may even be worse than the PS1 D-Pad).

That boy doesn't look like a ghoul to me.

Anyway, this is a platformer, but you can’t short-hop; every press of the jump button sends you to your maximum jump height, which is never a good thing for precision platformers. You also have a double jump that’s way shorter than the initial jump (kinda like Super Lucky’s Tale) which the game tries to hint to the player without a tutorial, but rather than do this by having a vertical wall that’s just out of the initial jump’s reach, it does so by having a spike pit that you just barely can’t make it across in one jump. This has the opposite intended effect, as it makes players think it’s just a hard jump at first instead of having their mind go straight to “maybe there’s a double jump?” To be fair, the game also has a mechanic where you throw spears at walls to create another platform to get over them, but the game could always start the player off with zero of them and give them to the player afterward (plus, this jump is before the spear tutorial anyway). At least there’s no forward momentum, so letting go of forward stops you right where you are.

Honestly, this game makes a ton of beginner-developer mistakes like that. There are several areas where you have to jump across moving platforms, but the platforms desync, changing the timing (or worse, making you wait for them to sync back up). The game has locked doors where you have to find a key or hit a switch to get past them, but then randomly has one level (and ONLY one) where the only way to open the door is to kill all the enemies (and of course it never tells you that), and what’s worse is that there’s one enemy in that segment that can’t be reached without getting hit TWICE, draining your health bar to its lowest point. World four has web sprites used as background that look very similar to the web sprites that can block your way and need to be cut with the sword, then proceeds to end with an autoscrolling segment where a high-HP enemy blocks your path, likely forcing you to the back, then proceeds to have a spinning spike platform that can only be safely crossed if you’re near the front! Oh, and the game doesn’t autosave at boss stages, so if you stop playing at that autoscrolling level, you’ll have to redo the level beforehand. Some enemies have an animation before they shoot, but then there are the bowmen in world 5 that just look at you until suddenly there’s an arrow speeding toward you. Hell, the game even has genuine glitches that show up in a casual playthrough: the green axe-wielding giants sometimes get stuck on the floor, letting you just stand there and kill them; items spawned by enemies can get launched into the ceiling or even just randomly stop falling in midair; blocks that you need in order to progress can get caught in the ceiling and CLIP THROUGH THE ELEVATOR, falling back down to a point where you are literally unable to go back and retrieve it, forcing you to go on without it and take damage to progress:

And then there’s the final boss. At first, it doesn’t seem too bad: its pattern can be learned just fine, and even if it also doesn’t have any warning animation for its projectiles, you can attack it during its third phase where it’s bringing hazards down from above. However, even the boss’s pattern desyncs: rather than swap attacks after a set number of animations, it swaps after a set amount of time, so the first time it stops moving back and forth and starts shooting at you, it will be on the edge of the arena, but the next time, it may suddenly stop in the middle when you’re trying to jump over it and you’ll take damage (or it may stop at the end, but still go in that direction when it gets back to that part in its pattern, throwing off your timing).

So yeah, this game is highly NOT recommended. It has effort put into it (but then again, what game doesn’t?), but it makes way too many beginner mistakes to be very enjoyable.

Cece09

im amazed you kept playing this sounds horrible