Saw this for basically pennies on sale, and decided to give it a go. This is a very frustrating experience, not because its hard, but because you can see how in a different universe there is a version of this game that is good, great even. A particular complaint for me is the artstyle. Don't get me wrong, the game has an animated, cartoony look to it that is really pretty, but I take issue with how it handles its premise. Hyper intelligent fish on mech suits with a medieval aesthetic? Sign me the fuck up! It's an incredibly original idea that sadly gets wasted in my opinion. The robot designs are nice, but there's not nearly enough and the enemies start repeating pretty fast. They're funny looking and I like them, but there's no point to them being all fish. It feels like they came up with the idea but then immediately forgot about the fish part. It does not influence the story, any mechanics or the environment. They're just fish and they can subsist on oil and antifreeze, shut up. I am genuinely surprised there's no underwater section at any point, they're not always great, but it would've helped with the monotony. There's like 3 biomes in the game, and they are all bland. Combat is serviceable, and after a few upgrades found it does feel pretty good to control Attu, but the enemies barely evolve their tactics and besides the movement upgrades everything you get feels useless. I basically never used bombs for anything that wasn't breaking walls and the different flavors of electricity you get near the end seem like they might do more damage to certain enemies but I could never quite tell. There's a lot of pieces of armor too, but I basically only equipped stuff that gave me extra damage. some sort of transmog system might've been nice, cause I think there's some drip to be made mixing and matching pieces. Music was whatever, it felt like there was 3 tracks at most, and the story is nonexistant. You get a cutscene at the start, and one at the end that's basically just "good job" with nothing inbetween. No dialogue either, the only character you meet that isn't trying to kill you is the merchant and they never say anything. They have a cool design but they might as well just be a vending machine. I have been pretty rough on this game, but I think it can be decently fun, it just makes me sad to imagine how it might've been better. I'm hoping the devs one day circle back to this and a theoretical feudal alloy 2 is made, there's just so much that could be expanded on.

Enjoyable, but flawed, little metroidvania thing that has a good foundation with solid controls, good upgrades and a charming aesthetic, but also suffers some rather major exploration issues that really bring the game down more than a few notches. The basics are just what you'd expect; you play a goldfish that controls a robot and you explore a 2D world by running back and forth and collecting keys and abilities. One of said abilities is a double-jump, so all is well in the MV universe, but there is a combination of design mistakes that makes exploration kind of a nightmare and I've never had to do so much backtracking to re-explore the entire game world just because I'm completly stumped as to where to go next. This is obviously a major problem for a metroidvania and it takes a game that could've been excellent all the way down to just average or even a little below.

The exploration issues compound and are due to the following issues:

Sometimes you exit a room via the door to the left and enter the next room via...the door to the left. That's not how 2D worlds work! Very unintuitive and nonsensical and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it in the genre, at least not done repeatedly throughout the game. If your world design didn't work out as you piece each room together, and you're left with rooms that are illogical like this, you really have no choice but to design one more room to go between them. You cannot shortcut like this.
Much more often than the above, you will leave rooms by opening a door that's on the background wall, so you walk into the depth of the world rather than sideways, but the map does not account for this and shows this door as an exit to the right that leads to a room to the right. This causes even more unnecessary confusion.
Your player icon is always in the middle of the room and not where your character actually is in the room, and combined with the above, the only real way to make sure that you're standing in front of the right exit on the map is to simply use the exit, open the map and see what room you ended up in. In a 2D game world with a square-based map, this has to be considered a pretty major failure.
Some large rooms combine all of this and you can enter and exit through normal sideways exits and background doors and still technically be in the same room. This happens mostly with each area's large central hub room.
The map is crudely drawn on purpose and the squares the designate rooms aren't always fully filled-in. In some cases, this is an indication of a secret passageway in that area and, in those cases, this is actually a brilliant little design choice. However, it all falls apart when the artist also chose to make incomplete lines a purely aesthetic choice in other areas. Good luck remembering which incomplete lines indicate a shortcut and which are just doodles!
Things you need to access later are rarely shown before you gain access. So, doors that need to be unlocked with a certain skill will only really start showing up in the area where you obtain said skill, which sounds like it makes perfect sense on paper, but it also leaves you with no recollection of having seen a door that you can now open, with the knowledge of where to go to unlock said door. You just gain a skill and don't really know what to do with it yet. If you're reading this early in the game, you probably think I'm being stupid since the first electrified metal door you can find is in the first real room of the game, but that's the exception and the first type of metal door is the only one that's dotted around the map and that you see all the time before you finally get to start unlocking them. Every other door type, and there's kind of a lot of them, behaves like I described above.

Combine all of the above and you have the worst metroidvania exploration experience I think I've ever had, with Outbuddies as the only exception, and I think Outbuddies may have been less frustrating because I didn't get stuck literally constantly with no obvious open routes on the map and no clue what to do next. On top of that, there are a few other strange issues like the game just having way too much loot for no reason. There's no difference between these two platinum swords I found as they have the exact same stats and one was purchased in the store and one was found in a chest. Why do both exist? It makes even less sense when you find out that this game has limited inventory and that limitation does not account for the amount of items in the game, so you will end up having to delete (since you can't sell) old items, which just feels wrong and strange.

I'm complaining a lot, but the game is mostly fine until the last 80% or so, where it devolves into a mess of aimless backtracking for what feels like no reason and while having no actual clue where to go. The first majority of the game is addictive and fun, but then it becomes a clusterfuck that's a struggle to finish. Since I bought this game for $2 on sale, I feel like anyone could do worse than buying this game even if they only finish about 75% of it and then stop as it becomes irritating and time-wasting to continue. A cautious 3/5 with a big warning for this one. Only get it on sale and only if you're a metroidvania fanatic.

I think this one just wasn’t for me. I needed save points to be more frequent or oil to be easier to come by or to have a clearer idea of what was going on with my stats or SOMETHING to ease the way. I just wasn’t enjoying myself constantly repeating the same path from a save point, then eventually dying because I sustained too much damage over time. The game wasn’t necessarily too hard for me to progress - I was learning all the time and figuring out how to deal with each room’s enemies - but I do think it was too hard relative to how much satisfaction I was getting out of it, which made it hard to want to continue.

I've seen a lot of negative / disappointed reviews of this game, and while I don't think the criticisms being made of it are untrue, they also seem overly harsh. I thought this was a very fun, engaging, beautiful, and rather flawed Metroidvania.

To start with probably the biggest selling point: the art is gorgeous – I love hand-drawn games when they're done well, and this one had a lot of character. The way swinging your sword, dashing, explosions, electric shocks, etc were represented were all really dynamic and nice to look at. And the sound design worked in tandem with this to help sell the immersion. I got a very Crash Bandicoot or Donkey Kong vibe from this, actually – the way your character bounced, or got electrocuted, or broke boxes or barrels apart, or the way you and your enemies both exploded into gears and bits of machinery upon dying all had this kind of charmingly goofy, cartoonish, arcade game feeling that puts it in a different lineage of platformers from many Metroidvanias.

If you're a fan of Metroidvanias in general, I think you'll find the gameplay and level design to be relatively solid, though not particularly stand-out. The balance of discovery, backtracking, non-linearity, secret areas, etc all felt pretty good to me – there was only one non-essential endgame area I had to look up a map to figure out how to access, but I also never felt like I was being handheld or forced down a single path.

One complaint I've seen is that the environments and enemies feel repetitive. While I think there's definitely a point there, I also wonder how far into the game these reviewers got. There are three areas in total, and certainly the look of each area is distinct. But it also takes waaaaayyyy too long before you get beyond the first area, and I think more could have been done to distinguish the areas through introducing new environmental challenges rather than just different backgrounds. I will say the map could be frustrating, as it didn't give a great representation of the actual spatial relationships in the rooms / actual entrance & exit locations, and doesn't give any indication of where within each room you are.

Likewise, the enemies you encounter as you progress are for the most part souped up versions of the ones you encounter at the beginning of the game, but they're not just lazy palette swaps either – I thought the designers did a good job of finding creative ways of creating variation that necessitated finding different ways of combating them. Still, a little more surprise and variation in that department would have been appreciated. One major disappointment was the lack of bosses: there's only two in the entire game, with 3 or 4 areas where it feels like bosses should be, but which instead are filled with tournament-style arenas with waves of ordinary enemies. I think this probably contributed a lot to many player's feeling of repetitiveness in level and enemy design.

Speaking of combat: here's one area where I really have to defend the game against some of the criticisms I've seen of it. I think a lot of people got frustrated that they couldn't just go running in, wailing on everything in sight and expect to survive. But this isn't that kind of game. You figure out pretty early on that you have to use an attack and retreat method in engaging enemies, learning their attack patterns and then using that to your advantage. The cool down meter that limits the amount of consecutive attacking you can do does a good job in encouraging a more strategic approach to combat. The different varieties of bombs and the different abilities you gain as you progress also add variety to the possible combat styles (though I never really figured out the usefulness of the ice or molotov bombs, and the controls for getting the electric wave/punch to work were frustratingly hit or miss).

I enjoyed the RPG elements: leveling up, a skill tree, gear with various buffs... but I do think this could have been extended further. I wish you were able to see your stat totals outright. And it would have been fun to have debuffs on certain gear and a slightly more elaborate skill tree, with slower leveling, to really force player choice and distinguish more sharply between distinct builds (as it is, I acquired every skill by the end of the game without doing any grinding, and I didn't notice a drastic difference in attempting to min-max different stats).

My main complaints with the game were mostly more subtle design flaws. There wasn't a good indication of leveling up beyond the first time it happened, so I went half the game wondering why I hadn't advanced to level 2 before realizing I'd been leveling up the entire time. It also took me halfway through the game before I realized what the teleporter pads actually were. There were many, many small little things like this – aspects where the player should have been nudged toward understanding something, but the nudge was missing – that individually weren't that big of a deal, but cumulatively made for an often frustrating or confusing experience. What's disappointing is that all of this seems like the kind of thing that could have been fixed with just a few extra months of play-testing.

But really the game's biggest flaw is it's complete and total lack of story, lore, and worldbuilding. There's basically an opening cut-scene, and then you play the game, and then there's a (somewhat anti-climactic) closing cut-scene. I'm not the type of person who plays games for story. I usually don't really care at all. But it would have helped create a sense of purpose, variety, and general color to at least have some NPCs sprinkled throughout that you can talk to. (This would have also been an opportunity to explain certain features.) There was actually some really cool environmental storytelling going on – backgrounds filled with discarded appliances, dinosaur bones, etc – which implied a certain amount of world-building which never gets elaborated on.

So yeah, long story short, this was enjoyable, but not spectacular. If you're into Metroidvanias, and it's on sale, it's worth giving a try imo. Not sure I'd pay full price.

This is supposedly the designers' first game. I think it's a pretty solid effort, and I'm looking forward to what they make next!