Not long after I joined Steamgifts and saw how some people felt towards winners, I told myself that I’d not only play my SG wins, but beat them as well. This is the closest I’ve come to giving up on that decision.
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Wings of Vi
27 hours playtime
16 of 40 achievements
This is a platformer. You have your standard left/right movement and jump, but there’s no set control scheme; you have to map the controls before you start the game, even though you won’t know what “action” is until after the first boss (just call it “flutter” for goodness’ sake!). The physics are really well done: you stop right when you let go of forward, and you’re also able to move and attack simultaneously (which shouldn’t be as rare an occurrence as it is). The opening area also does a good job of getting you used to the controls; there’s even a part where it teaches you that you keep your jump if you just walk off a platform, and it does this through level design alone.
Unfortunately, that’s practically it for the good parts of the game. You’re even greeted with a huge red flag before you even begin playing: the difficulty selection tells you what the difference is between easy/normal/hard mode, which is itself a good thing, but the difference isn’t in level design, but in quantity of checkpoints! Those of you who’ve played video games before will know that lack of checkpoints don’t make things harder, they make things more tedious since you have to redo that which you’ve already successfully made it past. I remember watching the Celeste dev make a similar claim that lack of checkpoints somehow equaled more difficulty at GDC 2017, and it was just as bafflingly, objectively wrong there, too (at least that explained Celeste’s lack of difficulty curve).
One of the main problems with the game is it’s combat. Sure, you can move and attack at the same time, but your attack isn’t just a single slash in front of you; it’s four very quick slashes that barely even line up with each other (they alternate one up and forward, one down and forward, repeat). Also, the very first enemy type you come across is one that chases you on the ground, jumps randomly, moves much faster than you, AND has 4 HP. Not only does this mean you have to time your attack just right or it’ll just tank your attack and hit you anyway, but it also means that the enemy isn’t conducive to alternate level designs outside a long, (mostly) flat platform.
That’s another big problem with the enemies: they aren’t designed to work off of the level design to provide interesting new challenges, but instead to screw you over. Literally the second enemy type you encounter will just fly through the level design outright, sine-curving its way towards you like the Alpha Metroids from AM2R. Because they ignore solid tiles in favor of gunning for you directly, the only way to make an encounter with them more difficult is to spawn more of them at once, which the game does several times (they’re also the most common enemy in the game).
Other enemies aren’t quite that brazen, but still suck. There are these blue demons that throw rocks at you, even if you’re above the ceiling, and they’re often placed in spots where you’ve just made a tricky jump and only have that one spot to land on, meaning you get a rock thrown at you as soon as you land. There are green plant-like enemies that don’t move, but throw projectiles at you in an arc (and said projectiles also go through ceiling tiles just fine). The third enemy type you encounter will throw fireballs in an arc toward you (also going through tiles above them), but then they’ll disappear right after throwing them, then throw two more right after they reappear, then repeat the process (also, the location they reappear is random, so you just kinda have to wait around until they show up in a place you can hit them). There are these insect enemies that can’t be hurt until their egg hatches (which happens when you get close) and they immediately fire a projectile at you as soon as they hatch (they also fly a couple units in a random direction every second, including into solid tiles where you can’t hit them). Late into the game, worms are introduced, and they’re a worse version of the sine-curvers since they beeline towards you while ignoring level design (they also get used quite frequently after being introduced, including showing up with a mob of sine-curvers a few times). Oh, and since enemies are triggered before they appear on screen, you can get cheap-hit before you even know the enemy is there.
Worse still is that death effects don’t mean an enemy’s hitbox is gone. You know how, in Super Mario Bros., hitting an enemy with a fireball will cause it to turn upside-down and fall off the screen? You know how you don’t get hurt if you run into the upside-down enemy after killing it? In this game, the opposite is the case: not only does the demonic cry of anguish and tiny fires spawning on the enemy NOT mean it’s safe to pass, but the little fires have hitboxes of their own, effectively making it less safe until all the sprites have vanished. You think the worm’s body disappearing and the head coming to a stop means you can go ahead? Nope, that head will still deal damage.
What makes that issue even more frustrating is that hitboxes are larger than they should be. I’m sure if you really analyzed it, you’d figure out that it stretches to the end of your sprite or something, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a hit-BOX, meaning it isn’t uncommon for the transparent (invisible) pixels in your hitbox to collide with the invisible pixels in a moderately-fancy-looking hazard’s hitbox, causing you to get hurt or die well before the visuals imply you should. The only exception to this is that the hitbox doesn’t go to the top of your sprite. I wondered why this one bit of leniency was programmed into the game when everything else about hitboxes was so unforgiving, then I realized: it’s so that you get Game Over from falling into a bottomless pit before your sprite is completely below the screen (half your character’s head is still visible, for crying out loud!). You can even hit the flutter button right before it happens and watch your character flutter while the “Defeat” text spawns on screen.
As awful as the enemies are, a sizable chunk of the game is just precision-platforming around insta-death hazards, but even these parts can be hit-or-miss. The first area has bad graphics since bright yellow tiles are solid while not-as-bright yellow tiles are background, but super-dark brown tiles (which blend into the dark background) are ALSO solid! There’s a part early in the game where you have to hit a level to open a gate, but when you do, enemies will bolt out of the gate in your direction (you have to fall off to avoid dying, but because you had to use the crumbly platforms to reach the switch, you won’t be able to get back up if you didn’t carefully land on just one of each pair, which you wouldn’t think to do at first because nothing like that happened before and nothing like it happens afterward). There are swirly portals that will do a swirly-effect to the screen teleport you to another room, but enemies can still move and attack you while the new room is swirling into view. When you make it to the lake, the water’s reflection obscures which tiles are actually below the surface and which are just a duplicate of what’s above. This area also has dark stormclouds that blend into the dark background and do nothing until you get right below them, at which point they repeatedly zap the ground with lightning.
When you make it to the cave, the game introduces a gimmick where you have to hit switches to disable the electric barriers, and you have to make it past in a certain amount of time. Not bad by itself, but there are times the game tricks you into thinking you’re safe by having a wide area between barriers, only for you to realize there’s no switch in that area and you have to kill yourself and go quicker. There are also parts where you have to ride a minecart, but when it reaches the end of its path, it explodes instead of stopping. Also, contrary to every other platform in the game, sliding on a minecart keeps you on the minecart. The half-way point of the cave introduces rotating spiked walls, and the second room combines them with the electric barrier switch gimmick. Thing is, this is also underwater (which slows your movement), so you have to hit the switch, then jump to the barrier and wait as you sink past it, but you sink too slowly to get past it in time. Eventually, I accidentally just tanked past it (the seamines are supposed to keep you from skipping it, but the invincibility from getting hit by the spike wall let me pass the first one and tank the second one. The next room is similarly unreasonable, but easier to tank past, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s what I was supposed to do the whole time.
When you make it to the underground, one of the first enemies you encounter is disguised as a background tree and can’t even be hit until you get close enough for it to reveal itself (it’s like that enemy from Zook Man ZX4, except worse because this one will stab halfway across the screen shortly after revealing itself). This area is also when ceiling slope tiles become more prominent, but if you flutter at them, they’ll just stop your movement rather than slide you down the slope. Near the end of the underground, there’s a part where you get chased by an instakill hazard, but even if you move perfectly, it’ll still catch up with you and kill you. Turns out, you can’t just walk forward; you have to slide forward before it even shows up since sliding moves you a bit faster than walking…and when you make it past, there’s a spike that blends into the background between you and the next checkpoint.
When you make it to the castle, the game introduces black holes that spawn spikey balls that beeline to your last known location (think Rinkas from Metroid, but you can’t kill them and they follow you after screen transitions). The path then splits, and if you go up, you’ll encounter large blue goats that shoot lasers at you if you’re in front of them (so you have to wait for them to turn around). Not too bad so far (at least by this game’s standards), but then you make it to the elevator, and no matter how long you wait, the blue goats are always facing you when you reach them. There’s a wall, but it’s over the edge of the platform, on the other side of the shaft as the blue goat, so you can’t get past it and still have enough height to jump over it. After a few deaths where I couldn’t figure out what to do, I looked up a walkthrough, and it turns out that if you slide off a platform, you fall slower than if you walk off it…and you’re just supposed to know that, apparently. This isn’t like the air-jump where the game teaches it to you through level design; it just comes right out of nowhere and IIRC is never used again. You’d think that’d mean the bottom path HAS to be better, but after a hall filled with spikey-ball-spawning black holes, you’re portaled to a room that introduces an enemy that repeatedly spawns wall-crawling enemies that also move much faster than you, and the corridors are so tight and long that I guarantee you’ll never be able to avoid damage, at least for that first one. Also, half a second after you kill the spawner, a black hole shows up where they died, so not only do you have to wait for their death effects to disappear (because those hurt you too, remember), but you then gotta be quick to get past them or you’ll be trapped and forced to kill yourself to try again. Afterward is a downward shaft where you’re chased by a spike ceiling and have to hit switches to delay it (along with some more trial and error), then there’s a gimmick where you hit a switch to toggle spikes, and the worst part of this is that the game doesn’t do a good job (or really try) letting you know that the switch is also a solid tile.
The next area is when it occurred to me just how gimmicky this game is. Rather than increase challenge by mixing up its gimmicks like a good game would, it just throws you in head-first, then abandons it and makes you deal with something completely new by the time you’ve trial-and-errored your head around the previous gimmick. For example, this new area introduces a pulsing mass: touch it three times and the wall blocking the next area goes away. Literally the very next pulsing mass dies in just one touch (and is placed very close to the screen transition, meaning you’ll probably hit it by accident), and it destroys the platform you need to reach the other side of the room. It pretends like it’s gonna teach you what’ll happen, then stabs you in the back with another cheap shot. The next two pulsing masses are suspended over a pit and surrounded by crumbly platforms, and the level is designed to trick you into thinking you have to approach it from a certain way when that’s actually impossible to do. I’ll admit I looked up walkthroughs for those rooms as well, and when I realized this was the game suddenly deciding to be a bit of a puzzle game, I was ready…but it turned out there was only one more pulsing mass before this area was over. This area also has two rooms with SMW-styled snake blocks, also designed to make you think one thing will happen at first before never doing that thing…and of course, those two rooms are the only places those snake blocks show up. The other half of this area is enemy spam, including sending multiple worms and sine-curve enemies at you in a vertical shaft full of nothing but crumble-platforms. The final area has Mega-Man-styled disappearing blocks, but the rest of the room is open and empty, so it’s actually one of the easiest parts of the game. It caps off with a fall-through platform right before the checkpoint, which leads to a chasing hazard segment that also spams those worms and sine-curve enemies, but rather than the chasing hazard killing you outright, it cripples and poisons you. You might think this is the game being lenient like before, but no: even if you get hit right at the end of the room, there’s still an empty screen and cutscene before the next checkpoint, so it’s just the game being cruel again.
The one thing the difficulty selection says is different besides quantity of checkpoints is how many attacks the bosses have, so I chose to play on normal mode, but that was even more of a mistake than I expected because the bosses are the worst part of the game. The first one has foreshadow animations that don’t properly convey what the attack will be (e.g. it jumps straight up, and fire spawns on ALL platforms when it lands), but it isn’t a special kind of bad; I’ve seen bosses like it before. The second boss, on the other hand, is where I would’ve given up if this hadn’t been an SG win: you’re stuck on a platform on the left, the boss flies to the right, and it STARTS the battle by instatly spraying a bunch of tiny, hazardous projectiles towards you with no warning, and since you only have a melee attack, you just have to wait it out on the other edge of your platform. It also has an attack where it swoops down above your platform, and since you recently got the slide power, you might think you need to slide under the boss, but NO! The boss is just low enough that you still get hurt even if you slide, so the only way to avoid the attack is to walk off the side of the platform and air-jump back on. It also has a few attacks where it’s out of range completely, defeating the purpose of it being a health-bar boss instead of a wait-for-weak-spot boss.
The third boss, an electric sheep/ram/whatever, gives you a wider platform, but it also walks along the platform, and because you only have a melee attack, you’ll be too close to react when it does. Its attacks also barely have any foreshadow animation, like maybe it stands still instead of jumping, or it glows a bit in front of the already-bright background. When you get it halfway down, it turns invincible and starts firing bolts from above, but these are foreshadowed by red lines, so it’s ironically easier…but then it goes back to its earlier attacks, just faster this time. When you beat it, you FINALLY get a ranged attack, but you can only fire three shots at once (which recharge 1 per second, a.k.a. pretty slowly), and with each dealing only 1 damage each, the melee weapon still has some use. Oh, but rather than have separate attack buttons, the game tries to sense when you’re close enough and automatically switch accordingly, so there will be times you want to shoot but slash or want to slash but shoot.
The robot boss halfway through the cave is the best boss by far. It’s always on the left, slowly chasing you, and while it has no foreshadow animations for its attacks, you won’t have to worry about it since you can shoot the boss from the other side of the arena and actually have time to react to its attacks! Unfortunately, there’s still one problem with the boss: it can throw metal spheres onto the arena, covering most of it with fire, effectively giving you no room to dodge any of its other attacks. You can kill the metal spheres before they land, but they have the same color palette as all the boss’s other unkillable projectiles, so you wouldn’t know that at first.
The plant boss at the end of the cave makes up for the robot boss being too fair and reasonable of a challenge. One of its attacks is it’ll shoot lasers in five possible elevations, and the only way to know where the lasers will spawn is to see a dim red glow placed in front of the boss’s red mouth. It can also throw dark seeds in front of the dark background that spawn more arc-projectile plants as soon as they land (and also they have thrice as much HP as regular arc-projectile plants). It can also vomit a ton of tiny hazardous projectiles around where you are (tracking you as you move), so the only way to avoid them is if you’re already near one edge of the arena and slide to the other edge at the right time. Also, at unmarked locations in its health bar, it’ll charge an instakill laser, and the only way to stop it is to jump on a minecart and have the minecart collide with the boss (meaning you can’t just get rid of them early so you have more room to dodge). It can also stab vines from the ground, and the only conveyance are some rocks being thrown up among the rocks being thrown up by all the other vines the attack spawned (and the screen is shaking, making it harder to pinpoint them); the only way to get out unscashed is, again, if you’re on the edge and slowly move to the other side as the vines spawn. The attack where it drops stalactites isn’t so bad except for the fact it’ll force you to the center, giving you less opportunity to avoid its other attacks.
Amethyst is somewhere between the previous two bosses. While not as brutal as the plant boss, it still has some cheap shots. For example, while there are always a few embers around the arena, the entire floor gets covered with fire as soon as an ice platform spawns (the only other time Mega-Man-style disappearing blocks are used besides the very end); the platforms and the boss randomly teleport until the segment ends and it goes back to other attacks. Also, at unmarked points in its health bar, the boss will teleport to the left and shoot an almost-instakill laser at the ground below you from the top-left of the screen, so the only way to dodge it is to be on the left, jump over the laser, then move to the right and repeat until the laser goes away. The boss can summon rocks from above which fall straight down, and for a moment it seems like an attack that might be forgiving, but the rocks break off into random arcs when they hit the ground and are still harmful when they do.
Halfway through the underground, you’re swirly-portaled to a platform slowly moving down, but then suddenly the boss shows up on your left and the platform you’re on bolts towards the boss (suddenly becoming an autoscroller). The platforms you’re expected to fight the boss on don’t even show up onscreen until one second after all this happens. The boss can lunge at different elevations, and just like with the plant boss, it’s foreshadowed by a red sparkle in front of the red boss (a boss you can’t even be looking at cuz you need your eyes on the right side of the screen so you don’t fall off the platforms as they slowly move toward the boss). At unindicated points in the bosses HP, the camera suddenly snaps back around your character (no longer being an autoscroller), but the boss is still charging at you from offscreen, so you need to dash* quickly to the sudden 90-degree turn in the tunnel that’s off the other side of the screen, land on the platforms over there, and continue the fight. Here, you don’t have to worry about jumping from platform to platform, but the boss’s lunges suddenly cause the platforms to catch fire for a bit, so if the center catches fire and the boss is about to lunge at your side, good luck getting to the other side without getting hit. There’s even some inconsistency here: normally, if multiple sparkles shows up on the boss, it means the boss is gonna shoot some last-known-location projectiles at you, but in the vertical area, there’s a chance it means it’ll charge at all the platforms, meaning the only way to avoid the boss is to drop into a small pit beside the center platform and jump back up; thing is, there’s no way to know which attack it’ll do ahead of time, and if you anticipate the wrong one, you’ll take damage due to being in a position unable to avoid the attack.
*Oh yeah, the underground introduces wing emblems that let you air-dash a few times by pushing the flutter button, and they never show up again after the castle, where they show up rarely.
The boss at the end of the underground is three gargoyles, each with their own attack: the left one spawns a sine-curve-moving claw that goes back and forth along the arena (and can’t be killed), the center one spawns a laser pointing from it to around where you are before turning the laser harmful, and the right one throws one of two eye-projectiles to a random spot around the arena: red becomes invulnerable and chases you if attacked, and yellow becomes invulnerable and chases you if NOT attacked. Not only are the eye projectiles thrown into a random spot, but the sine-curve claws also spawn at a random point in the sine curve, making this one of the more luck-based bosses in the game. Plus, while there is a large health bar at the bottom like all the other bosses, each gargoyle has its own health bar, and when its depleted, the other two heal (even if you “killed” them before) and the one you killed does a desperation attack: the left one spawns a bunch of sine-curve claws in a row, the center one spawns a drone that sweeps the arena with a laser and is nearly unavoidable, and the right one has a drone circle the arena, shooting killable eyes at you (despite the fact that non-desperation moving eyes can’t be killed). Also, since each gargoyle “death” speeds up all their attacks, you have to spread out your attacks between the gargoyles or else their attacks will become impossible to dodge.
The castle also has a boss at the end of each split path. The top one has one of the more sinister gimmicks in the game. At first it seems like you can attack the boss easier than many others, though sometimes a yellow bar resembling the gargoyles’ individual “HP” shows up and quickly drains. However, you’ll notice this boss’s HP seems to be going down way slower than other boss’s HP. After a few deaths, you’ll notice that, sometimes, attacking the boss causes its HP to go up. At this point, it’s just trial and error trying to figure out what causes this, since you can’t be looking at the boss and the boss’s HP at the same time (much less the boss’s attacks and your position in relation to them). Is it when the boss summons tiny fires around itself to indicate an attack coming? Is it a shield you need to break? After several deaths, I figured it out: when you hit the boss once, a black hole appears around it (going away when the yellow bar runs out), and if you attack the boss while the black hole is up, that’s when your attacks heal the boss. In other words, this is one of the more tedious bosses since you can only deal 1 damage per second, max. Also, when the boss’s HP gets low enough (around 4/10 HP), it becomes invulnerable and summons a black hole to spit fire outward in a spiral pattern, and since it moves faster than you, the only way to avoid damage is to memorize when it stops and suddenly reverses course.
The bottom path’s boss requires you to drop down to reach it when dropping down in the previous room resulted in death. This one has two bosses, but they each have fully-separate health bars; however, you still can’t just focus on one since as soon as one runs out of HP, it’ll slowly regenerate back to 3/10 HP while the other is alive, so you have to kill them right after each other. At the beginning of the battle, a spikey ball spawns near the upper-left of the screen, launching tiny, hazardous spikes away from it, and the only indication you have that this one can be killed is that it’s orange. One of the bosses can shoot arrows onto the arena, and if you don’t kill the arrows, they’ll spawn tiny, hazardous flames when they die. One of the bosses’ potential combo attacks is they both turn invulnerable and jump onto where you are, so the only way to avoid is if you already know what they’ll do (can’t just react to it) and get as close as possible to one of them, then inch back until they go back to individual attacks. Another combo attack they can do is to spawn hazards that bounce off the edges of the screen, though they spawn so suddenly that if one of the bosses summons a land-chasing enemy right before (which you have to jump over it to avoid it), you’ll have no room to avoid bounce hazards when they spawn.
The semi-final boss summons purple projectiles (wide sine-curve pattern) in front of a purple background. Also, randomly, red spikes will spawn around your character, and they’ll charge inward when you hit the attack button; this means you need to be moving in a specific direction to avoid them, all while dodging the boss’s other attacks, before you can attack the boss again. The arena is also made up of tiny platforms, and every now and then, a random pair will sink offscreen, and the only way to bring them back up are to touch masks that float back and forth across the top of the arena (which you have to do along with avoiding the red spikes and other attacks, lest you be left with zero platforms). Also, unlike all previous bosses, this arena is wider than the screen, so stuff can happen offscreen and you wouldn’t know it until you go over there. When the boss’s HP gets low enough, it’ll summon black holes that also have bone claws jab out at you very suddenly, and if you don’t kill them (yeah, you can suddenly kill this one type of black hole), they’ll grow and stretch almost from the top to bottom of the screen. Thing is, if you do kill them, the boss will just spawn another to take their place, so it’s better just to leave them alone and focus on the boss. Oh, and if you attack the boss 5 times too quickly, it’ll become invulnerable for several seconds, making it possibly more tedious than the castle’s top boss.
The final boss is on a seesaw arena, and if you’re standing on it when the boss jumps on it, it’ll launch you up (there are spikes above the top of the screen, so you’ll just die outright if you hit them). The boss can also throw giant stalactites onto the arena, and if you kill them, they break off, teleport one unit towards you, then ricochet upwards before falling back down again. There’s also a skull icon chasing you, and if it touches you, a yellow bar (resembling the gargoyles’ individual HP) goes up; when the meter is full, the boss becomes invulnerable and does a Kirby inhale with stalactites coming at you from the other side, taking several seconds to quit. You’d think that’d mean you’d want to avoid this, but the boss’s pattern becomes untenably fast after losing only around 2-3/10 HP, and that’s the only way to slow the boss down again. Thing is, it’s possible for the Kirby inhale to heal the boss: every now and again, the boss spawns yellow eye stones at you, and they’re pretty easy to avoid, but if you don’t kill them (even if they go offscreen for a while), they’ll come back when the boss Kirby inhales and heal the boss for each one you missed.
You get a checkpoint before the second phase of the final boss, but as you can expect, all the games worst qualities shine through here. First of all, the platform ends right at the screen transition, so you end up falling into a pit before the fight even starts (that’s not even the first time the game does that, by the way). Then you see the boss: a floating eyeball with a tail, and said tail will often suddenly whip at one of the only two safe platforms in the arena. The boss will often dive below the screen and show up at one of three spots in the arena, but like the semi-final boss, the arena is wider than the screen, meaning the boss can easily end up off-screen where you can’t even see what few foreshadow animations it does have. The boss starts off with just three attacks: shake for a bit then charge at you, or bite down the platform you’re on and slide across. Also, sometimes, the boss will snake above the screen and summon floating hazards, then after a notable delay, come crashing down at your location, so the only way you can dodge is to count how long it takes the boss to crash down after it leaves, then try to pre-empt the attack by sliding out of the way (this attack made me go to the options to turn off screen shake; it’s so drastic, you can’t make proper precision jumps with it on). The boss gets a couple more attacks after losing 2/10 HP: one of these attacks is to fire a laser downward, then curve upward, and you might think you can just jump over it before it peters out, but no: it goes too high for that. Instead, you have to walk off the platform quickly so the platform stops the laser from hitting you, then jump back up. The other attack is to throw bubbles towards the ceiling (but the boss is low enough that the bubbles can still hit you on their way there), then they crash down in random trajectories, and the only way to maybe know what those trajectories could be is to see how they move when they’re up there (if you see what looks like two moving away from each other, getting between them is your best bet for safety). The boss will also charge a screen-wipe attack, and the only way to avoid it is to reach a protective dome that spawns on alternating platforms, so if you’re on the wrong one, good luck getting to safety in time. When it reaches 4/10 HP left, the laser upgrades to loop back down, and the ceiling bubbles upgrade to throwing a second set after the first one. Problem is that now, a worm can spawn, and now you gotta go through trial and error to figure out what causes it and how to kill it before it traps you into taking damage. I’d walk you through my pain, but I’m tired, so I’ll just say it: it spawns right after the boss does the platform bite move. In other words, right after you’ve double-jumped over the boss and are falling down towards where the chasing worm will spawn. To kill it quickly, you need to jump to the other platform so you can batter it with projectiles AND finish it off with a melee attack, except if you go too far away too quickly, it won’t spawn until you go back to the platform, which is part of how I had trouble figuring it out.
Also, you’re constantly poisoned during that entire second-phase fight, and the only way you can break even on HP is to collect slowly-spawning health drops that alternate between the two platforms. No, you can’t use the health drops to regain HP lost from getting hit by the boss’s attacks.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, the start menu doesn’t actually pause the game. Need to take a break between checkpoints? Better hope there aren’t any enemies or other moving hazards nearby (or worse, you’re in one of those lengthy crumble-platform segments). Plus, if you’re using a wireless controller and run out of batteries, the game won’t let you move anymore; not only is there no warning or pause message, reconnecting the controller does nothing and there’s no way to reset the controls.
Overall, this is one of the most unfair games I’ve ever played; whatever effort was put into the game was done in service of making it as unfair as possible, but subtly enough that it doesn’t come across that way in the trailer. Games like this are why I stopped buying games, regardless of how promising they seem. I’ve used the term “kaizo hack” to describe games being unfair, but it has never been quite as accurate a description as it is to this game.
Not recommended.