Utterly bizarre abrupt ending that really killed what was otherwise a pretty great metroidvania. Cookie Cutter features exhilarating combat and a very solid loop of discovery that a lot of the other games in the genre i've played recently have lacked. However, it's held back by a few key issues: like the parry mechanic not working in the slightest--fortunately the game can mostly be played without it, but the parry mechanic is explained in a misleading and incorrect way that doesn't actually communicate how it works. It's frustrating.

The ending is extremely abrupt, and due to a lack of information about the game online, it's hard to tell if I missed a True Ending signal or the game really was just gonna cut to black on a sequel hook. I definitely enjoyed myself though.

Pretty much the very definition of "just okay". If I was a teenager, I would've adored this and its punky aesthetic and attitude so much, but as an adult, I can't value the theme over the gameplay and the latter is just decent here. Pretty much a bog standard metroidvania with cool animations and a different kind of aesthetic (in everything from the character graphics to menu design).

Really, I don't know what there is to say about this game. You run around a 2D world and you obtain various movement abilities or puzzle solving abilities, like how the first major upgrade might be the double jump (the game offers a split path to start out with and you get double jump first if you head left, which I did), but then you also get a gun that can be used in combat but is also fired at crystals to open doors. You get a few abilities like that, like a ground stomp that both hurts enemies and opens up hatches in the ground. Just...typical stuff. If you're even looking at this review, you're probably already into metroidvanias and have seen everything this game offers on a mechanical design level. Double jumping, air dashing, dodge rolling and, of course, a few obstacle courses that combine all of this.

The world is fine too. Nothing special, but not bad and empty either. Just enough secrets that are just fun enough to find, and just enough stuff to find in order to complete each area 100% in order for it not to be boring, but also not so much that endgame cleanup became a major drag where I had to zoom in on Demajen's maps and scratch my head to find that one collectible I missed. It all flowed pretty nicely, I found the majority of the secrets myself and the game does strike a nice balance that rarely becomes annoying, but it also rarely becomes exciting and engaging. It's just fine.

The major thing worth mentioning is, of course, the aesthetics. Some parts I love, some parts I don't. I really love the graphic design and how, for example, the loading screen is an icon of the main character punching her fists together and it looks almost exactly like a punk album cover come to life. I do like those parts of the aesthetics; the menus, the icons, the general vibe. I'm indifferent on the animation style and character design. It looks to carry a bit of Bryan Lee O'Malley influence, which is confirmed by the fact that there's a painting of Ramona Flowers in one room, but I don't think I overall like how it looks. I'm not sure why the main character is an oddly shaped, bow-legged robot with a giant ass that's actually a plot point. No, really, the other characters comment on how yours has a massive ass. That just kind of leaves me non-plussed. I'm not excited by it, nor am I offended by it. I'm also not sure why your character does the fat girl thing of wearing a skirt that starts right below her armpits, because this isn't an inclusion or diversity thing. The character is very sexualized and shows off her panties literally constantly, not to mention the comments about her ass, so I'm not sure I understand her fashion choices. She's just kind of an ugly and annyoing character, and I don't mean in that incel "Aloy isn't hot enough" Twitter thing, because, as I said, this character is very sexualized. I just don't think she's well sexualized for my tastes, I guess. It's weird and the sexualization and all of the profanity in both dialogue and info boxes just leaves me kind of shrugging. It's supposed to be edgy and irreverent and I suppose that it by definition is, but it's not very exciting or offensive to me. It's just kind of there.

Combat is also just fine. To start, the enemies are incredibly spongy until you've leveled up the basic melee "charm" (as this game, of course, borrows Hollow Knight's charm system), adn the only reasonable way to kill early on is to slowly smack them with your special move and repeatedly knocking enemies down until the instakill finisher triggers. You better enjoy seeing the gory finishers, because you'll be seeing them a lot, as the combat doesn't become conveniently playable until the late game. Thankfully, enemies stay dead until you also die, which makes it much more acceptable that the combat is fine at best and kind of crappy at worst.

I did like the (more or less) hidden references to music. One secret room has the Fear Inoculum album cover in it, and another has that Death Grips album I don't know the name of. As an older person who lived the 90s, I found it amusing that Prodigy is now "obscure alternative music" that fits into a game that also references Death Grips. Young people don't understand what an enormously overplayed hit Firestarter was! Oh well, the references were cute and I also liked spotting Penitent One from Blasphemous stowed away in the background art. Speaking of music, though... This game really ought to have put in the effort to find a local pop punk band to record a theme song. Pop punk band grows on trees, you can probably find a bunch of them in Italy (where the dev team appears to be from) and the game really could've used some actual punk on the soundtrack. According to the credits, they hired an audio studio that is clearly competent and background music and they even tried to write a few riffs for a couple of boss fights, but the game is sorely missing a fun pop punk jam to either begin or end the game. It can be more Blink than Leftöver Crack; that's fine and the game doesn't need to reach a certain level of "punk enough", but it should maybe have had any punk at all in it.

I suppose I'm at a loss for words here even though the review is starting to get lengthy. I liked the aesthetics, I thought the gameplay was at least fun enough that I kept going and finished the game, but I never truly enjoyed myself and just kind of went through the motions and finished an acceptable, perfectly playable metroidvania that doesn't really do anything special on a gameplay level. It's fine. You probably won't hate it if you like the game's style, but you also probably won't excitedly love it. It's just kind of there and I'll probably forget about the gameplay, while remembering the aesthetics, in just a few weeks from now. All of this negativity aside, I didn't actually hate it, I just kind of cruised through it and didn't really react to much. Bopped some enemies on the head, collected some movement abilities, scouted for some secrets, unlocked some upgrades via material gathering. Typical MV stuff that's all just fine. That's the lead word of this review. It's all just fine, nothing more and nothing less.

(All that said, I do believe that this game deserved much better success than it has achieved so far. It seems like literally no one, not even MV fanatics, are playing this one and that's a shame. It's not a fantastic game, but it's better than that. Oh, and another side note; completionists beware. The PS5 version currently, nearly six months after release, has a bug where you cannot achieve 100%. You can get the platinum, but there are about 30 collectibles that cannot be saved, because they're in rooms that are supposed to avoid writing the collectibles to your save until you obtain all of them, but the game still forgets that you did it if you succeed and reload your save. So you can temporarily have 100% completion if you complete the collectible challenge, but the next time you load up, those 30 collectibles will go back to being uncollected and you'll drop back down to like 80%. If this bothers your completionist OCD, stay far away.)

Cookie Cutter has such a strong artstyle, seeing it in action felt truly special. I also really like Cherry and her moveset from the get go being fighting game inspired. It felt really good to chain light attacks into specials. She has alot going on. Though unfortunately you hit that stride by the time the game is reaching it's end. It's shorter than I expected.

I didn't have much gripes outside of wishing Cherry had a faster movement option on land, walking to the fast travel spots was a bit tedious. The game's abundance of instadeath spikes towards the latter half was annoying too because there really isn't anything to use to avoid them more effectively (they were p annoying in Golden Tower too). Enemy variety isn't very vast, I did find it really cool they animated unique glory kills for enemies though, but I imagine most people wouldn't use em once you make Cherry a high power killing machine with upgrades.

The strange decision to have voice acting at the beginning and then cutting it for the rest of the game was...baffling. Which is a shame cause I really did enjoy the voicework of Cherry & Raz (I mean come on, Cherry has a design that tells you off the bat what she sounds like). I chalk it up to a budgetary thing clearly most of it went into the presentation which is no slouch.

The ending was also...very abrupt? I felt like this game could've done more to make Cherry regaining the memories of her past as a more gradual buildup rather than just being shoved in last minute after the climax. Granted, the story wasn't amazing/super duper engaging (not poorly written at all, it was just by the numbers for me) but I wish the importance was carried throughout gradually rather than at the start, kinda nothing inbetween with small buildup, then the giant drop at the end. The Infonet and Denzels stuff was neat though.

Overall though, Cookie Cutter is a solid ass game and it shows a ton of promise for this dev studio. They're constantly updating and tweaking it too which is really great to see. They really do care about this world they made and that's a great thing to behold.