A free Metroid clone passion project with a lot of love and care. Totally worth playing, especially since it is free.

I was not expecting much from this. It's a free game. It really surprised me though. It's not perfect of course. But it's one of the better metroidvania games I've played.

First and foremost, the music is full of bangers or they set the mood of the area well. Like some of them are Axiom Verge level good. The game also knows how to set the tone with silence and or spooky vibes.

The controls are mostly good. The game is very much a Metroid clone. It plays like Metroid. Some of the controls are jank. The double jump specifically either has weird timing or eats your input. The other kind of jank mechanic is charging up missiles. It just doesn't feel good. It takes too long and sometimes just refuses to do it. Other little things like directional aiming and have a crouch lock button can be annoying.

My biggest complaint are the bosses are not well balanced. They are tanky. They don't give enough ways to replenish health/missiles. Or the ways you can replenish stuff is slow. They do too much damage and have obnoxious hitboxes that extend too far or infuriating moves the stay on screen way too long. The 2nd to last boss is just annoying and doesn't make a lot of sense. As far as I can tell it had no way to replenish things. The final boss was actually fun though. My one issue was that it didn't signpost damage like everything else in the game. It just made a noise without any flash.

The map is small but fun to get around. All of the major items are visible on the map. However the single missile packs are not. Which is a bit annoying/disappointing. You just have to happen upon them or see a very hard to see glint. I wish they were also on the map. I would have collected them.

The areas are well varied. The enemies are good. It's yet again a Metroid clone so expect to take damage just trying to speed through rooms. Sometimes it's not worth the time to not get damaged. The art in general is pretty good.

The story is sure something. I didn't pay too much attention to it. It's pretty dark from what I gleamed from it. They do give you an option to play the game without the "triggering" data logs. That is a nice touch. And yeah, some of the data logs are a bit much and can be triggering. So good on the dev for that.

You can save at anytime. IDK what it really did though. As you always start from the recovery/checkpoint areas. The game does seem to save everything you do as soon as you do it. Good thing too. Because I did get stuck in walls twice. I restarted and it saved the items I just collected and the map progress. So the only real harm was having to walk back. Although it does feel you can def death warp to exploit the game for speedruns.

All in all, this free game was very good. I had a lot of fun with it. Axiom Verge is still better but it reminded me a lot of it. I'm very happy I gave it a chance. If you love Metroid or metroidvanias, don't skip out on this game. IT'S FREE!