Outbuddies DX

released on Oct 15, 2019

Run, gun and explore an open undercity in this otherworldly non-linear Metroidvania adventure about the Old Gods, strange creatures and the remnants of a lost world!


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It's "worse Axiom Verge", for me.

Soundtrack is similar, but uninspiring.
Visuals are similar, but worse (and areas look very same-y, as do room-to-room designs).

Gameplay feels like someone tried to take some solid principles of Metroidvanias and do their own thing with them, resulting in design choices that are either worse or similar but pointless. Bombs that you have to physically attach to things you want to check, rather than being able to just drop them? Being able to rotate between which of two buttons shoots the missile versus the charge beam (as opposed to just...using the other button when needed) -- things like that. None of it feels intuitive, but just like another layer of unnecessary complication tacked on to a game that didn't need it.

I decided to put this one back into the backlog after managing to softlock myself because the game let me travel a LONG distance out of my way to an area I shouldn't have been in because there were no clear indicators of where I should go to get more items for gating progression. Ended up dropping into an area where there's instadeath fire on the ground, no way back up, and the only forward progress is through a boss that is extremely RNG-heavy and everyone suggests bringing a weapon from an entire previous area that I never got. Couldn't even get the boss below 75% health most of the time, so I definitely shouldn't have been there, but there was no clear signposting that I was going about things the wrong way.

So, I guess -- the game is fun when it doesn't get in its own way, but I would hardly ever actively reach for this game when there's so many better options out there. Maybe I'll feel better about this when I pick it back up (thankfully, the game didn't let me save in the area where I softlocked beyond the point of no return).

Pretty solid metroidvania, there is a bit of a learning curve to the controls, but you get used to it. It's not breaking any barriers or innovating super hard in the genre, but it's a perfectly serviceable and fun game.

I hate this game. I hate this game so much. I hate everything about it. At first, I thought it seemed average, but I'm a metroidvania nut so I wanted to finish it even though it didn't exactly feel immediately compelling, and the further I got, the more I was filled with seething hatred for everything in it.

I hate how cumbersome and slow movement is, and how little sense momentum makes. Sprint and jump off an edge and you will randomly lose momentum for no reason. The wall jump is annoyingly short, and I hate that too. At least the ability that lets you stick to walls in morphball form is pretty fun to use.

I hate how the world makes no sense and is as cumbersome as movement is. The map is just one big sprawl that rarely connects back to itself, and when it does, it doesn't feel like you entered an area from a new vantage point and can see new opportunities, like in a proper metroidvania, but instead you will follow a path back towards where you've been before and find that it was just a pointless passage that seemingly does nothing, since those passages generally add very little traversal convenience. When the game really wants to mess with you, this pointless passage back also contains something that makes going back to the fork in the road impossible and now you have to travel around half the damn map to get back to where you were meant to go. Fast travel exists but only back to the central hub area from various locations, and the sprawling map makes getting around painful and slow.

I hate how so many rooms are designed to only be fun from one direction, which is admittedly a common metroidvania mistake that even the best ones sometimes make, but it usually happens in less than a handful of rooms per game and this game feels like it does it in every other room.

I hate how about half the bosses are an annoying RNG nightmare because they attack with lazily slapped-on physics code instead of an actual attack pattern. This can and does constantly lead to unavoidable damage because the randomized physics made projectiles bounce into each other and create an undodgeable situation.

I hate the graphics and how every area feels the same. It's all just pink and purple vegetation everywhere. Sometimes the wall is red, sometimes it's grey, but the overall feel is just pink and purple everywhere, and it feels ugly.

I hate the steam gimmick, because it just makes things unpredictable with no real gain. Can you triple jump here or did you have a pixel too little steam left? You'll find out when you either make the jump or land in insta-death acid! Oh yeah, I hate the insta-death acid and fire too.

I hate the map most of all. It can't be zoomed out and I've seen the developer blame Clickteam Fusion for it on the Steam forums, but even if that's true, it doesn't explain why he didn't just make the map at a smaller scale in that case. The map is far too zoomed in and it's impossible to get a good overview of where you've been or where you need to go next, and too much time I spent scrolling the map around, trying to figure out where to go. The map is like the singular most important part of metroidvania games to me, and this one is the worst I've ever seen. I will admit that the idea of having unknown areas represented by rectangles and having them transform into the room's actual shape once you visit it was a cool idea.

I'm being harsh, and I do recognize that it's always admirable when someone makes a game all by themselves, and I can also admit that at least the soundtrack is pretty good, but being a singular developer only buys you so much goodwill now that it's such a common occurence, and the guy who made this game is charging more for it than Team Cherry ever charged for Hollow Knight. That means I get to be as harsh as I want and say that this game fucking sucks.

Aunque su control no es del todo intuitivo la experiencia mejora conforme se adquieren habilidades, el buen diseño de niveles, el sentido de exploración y su atmósfera inspirada en "Metroid" lo convierten en un título decente, sin quitar su mayor defecto siendo algunos jefes enemigos y su apartado visual.