Hoo boy, ok. So first off, I wanna start by saying I really applaud how beginner friendly this game is with its lack of game overs. Call me whatever you want, but nothing turns me off more in a platformer than getting a game over and having to start the entire level (or god forbid the entire game) over again. And I'm talking about having to replay multiple maps/screens worth of gameplay. So thankfully, whenever you lose all your hearts here, you get reset at the start of whatever map you died on. The music and art are also really nice. Nothing insanely incredible, but nice. And that's about where the nice bits end.

I'll preface this by saying I played with a controller. The itch.io page does state you can use a controller, and actually seems to be the preferred method of play since it originally released on XBOX 360. But although I played with an XBOX controller, I still couldn't seem to figure out how to play the damn thing. This game suffers from the common indie game problem of not telling the player how to play the game. I mean, it may have been mentioned in the opening cutscene (although I doubt it) however I couldn't get it to play so I can't tell. Sure, obvious things like movement don't NEED to be explained, but I didn't even know that the main mechanic involved picking up enemies and throwing them/using them as tools because the game just did not explain it to me, or even tell me how to pick them up! One of the first places this is needed is at a wall that's too high to jump over, so you need to pick up an enemy and throw them by the wall to use them as a step. I didn't know this, and stood there jumping against the wall, wondering if there was a double jump or wall jump I was missing. There's also water in the game, that acts as a secondary 'bottomless pit' type of thing, and at first I thought all water was dangerous because I fell in some and instantly died, no sinking off screen or nothing. But then a few levels later I fell into water that had a visible bottom and I was completely fine? It makes sense in hindsight, but that still doesn't mean it was effectively communicated at first.

There's also no button prompts for things like opening doors or talking to NPCs, so after beating the first boss and getting my kingdom restored, I tried talking to the new townspeople and, to my knowledge, they don't talk to you. They just stand there.

Furthermore, the game lacks a lot of prompting. When I got to the first boss, I couldn't even tell that the boss WAS the boss because there was no cutscene, health bar, or any kind of indication other than the music being more intense. The boss is a stationary wall with a closed eyeball that doesn't even attack at first, it doesn't do anything at all actually, which is weird because the intense music plays from the beginning. I think it would've been cooler if the music started once you 'woke up' the boss. It also did this thing where it opened its eye and wouldn't move again until I hit the eye, but it only did that once? Not sure what that was about, it didn't open its eye again after that.

Finally, there were a few things that felt kind of dumb to me, like how there were moments where I took damage after stepping off an enemy, but there were other moments where I stepped off an enemy and nothing happened. There were also certain puzzle challenges that felt way out of place in terms of difficulty, not because they were super impossibly hard on their own, but because they were in between much easier challenges?

Ultimately though, I shelved because I just stopped having fun with the game. Not because it was atrociously bad or hard, but because I just stopped having fun. So take with that what you will.