This is an all-new and original Metroidvania-style action. Make use of a wide variety of weapons while traversing vast, sprawling stages in this exploration-style 2D action-adventure title.
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A game made by a very small team, has a lot of good ideas but ultimately can't fulfill all of them and ends suffering from a lack of understanding of the strengths of metroidvanias.
All the sprite art and animation is great, and I love the idea of a bite-sized metroidvania. But to start with one problem, nearly all your attacks are on the same button, each needing a different direction of the d-pad to use. Some also only come out in the air, or in the air with a direction pressed. I don't know why this method was used considering all the buttons in this game that go unused, but it leads to a lot of using the wrong attack in tight situations, or just nothing happen when you expect something to happen because you just landed on the ground so the game doesn't know whether to use a ground or air move.
Despite this, the movement is pretty fun, the double jump in this game stops between the two jumps to allow you to move straight to the left and right. It's also a broomstick, so it's a nice bit of theming as well. This game's version of the morph ball is turning into a cat, and even includes bomb-jumping in the form of yarn bombs, it's really cute. As for the titular 66 mushrooms, they're spread all throughout the level and it's fun to consistently find new ones and solve mini environmental puzzles to do so.
The two real killers here are the pace of progression and navigating the world itself. For some reason, the main way of getting experience points to upgrade your weapons is collecting certain groups of the titular 66 mushrooms. Not certain amounts, but groups, as all the mushrooms are split up into random groups, and when one is filled, you get a certain amount of XP. The problem is each group is made up of mushroom all over the game, and by the end of the game I only had one group complete, every other one missing one or two. This meant my weapons had almost no upgrades, and remained around the same attack power for the whole game. In fact, the game has several items that upgrade your stats and health, and they're all not found until the last third of the game basically. It feels like someone took a normal game and just ripped out 90% from the middle, leaving only the beginning and end.
Navigation also feels kind of sloppy, the only reason I never got lost being the game having a system to always tell me exactly where to go, and even then I had trouble discerning how to get certain items. It doesn't help that the one walktrhough I consulted for help got one item through a glitch. That's another thing, this game had a lot of real rough glitches, like getting stuck in the wall and having to reset, or entire rooms being corrupted and having to guess how to navigate it by referencing how the room is supposed to look. I'm willing to forgive it here more because as stated, this is a very small game, but it's bad enough that I wouldn't recommend this game to someone unless they were able to look past a lot of glaring issues. One thing I won't give a pass on is the final boss. I guess I won't give any spoilers, but it is DIRE, and uses a mechanic that the game basically never requires you to use.
Overall, a lot of cute aspects and ideas plagued by a lot of problems that come with not having the ability to polish and refine the way bigger games do. But at the end of the day, it's kind of encouraging to see a game like this released on Steam. The glitches, errors, and skewed priorities of the game reveal a certain humanity in this game's creation. It's a reminder that game dev is tough, but eventually a game comes out. It's also a reminder that anyone can make a game, and that's ultimately a good thing, no amount of bad Steam games can convince me otherwise.
All the sprite art and animation is great, and I love the idea of a bite-sized metroidvania. But to start with one problem, nearly all your attacks are on the same button, each needing a different direction of the d-pad to use. Some also only come out in the air, or in the air with a direction pressed. I don't know why this method was used considering all the buttons in this game that go unused, but it leads to a lot of using the wrong attack in tight situations, or just nothing happen when you expect something to happen because you just landed on the ground so the game doesn't know whether to use a ground or air move.
Despite this, the movement is pretty fun, the double jump in this game stops between the two jumps to allow you to move straight to the left and right. It's also a broomstick, so it's a nice bit of theming as well. This game's version of the morph ball is turning into a cat, and even includes bomb-jumping in the form of yarn bombs, it's really cute. As for the titular 66 mushrooms, they're spread all throughout the level and it's fun to consistently find new ones and solve mini environmental puzzles to do so.
The two real killers here are the pace of progression and navigating the world itself. For some reason, the main way of getting experience points to upgrade your weapons is collecting certain groups of the titular 66 mushrooms. Not certain amounts, but groups, as all the mushrooms are split up into random groups, and when one is filled, you get a certain amount of XP. The problem is each group is made up of mushroom all over the game, and by the end of the game I only had one group complete, every other one missing one or two. This meant my weapons had almost no upgrades, and remained around the same attack power for the whole game. In fact, the game has several items that upgrade your stats and health, and they're all not found until the last third of the game basically. It feels like someone took a normal game and just ripped out 90% from the middle, leaving only the beginning and end.
Navigation also feels kind of sloppy, the only reason I never got lost being the game having a system to always tell me exactly where to go, and even then I had trouble discerning how to get certain items. It doesn't help that the one walktrhough I consulted for help got one item through a glitch. That's another thing, this game had a lot of real rough glitches, like getting stuck in the wall and having to reset, or entire rooms being corrupted and having to guess how to navigate it by referencing how the room is supposed to look. I'm willing to forgive it here more because as stated, this is a very small game, but it's bad enough that I wouldn't recommend this game to someone unless they were able to look past a lot of glaring issues. One thing I won't give a pass on is the final boss. I guess I won't give any spoilers, but it is DIRE, and uses a mechanic that the game basically never requires you to use.
Overall, a lot of cute aspects and ideas plagued by a lot of problems that come with not having the ability to polish and refine the way bigger games do. But at the end of the day, it's kind of encouraging to see a game like this released on Steam. The glitches, errors, and skewed priorities of the game reveal a certain humanity in this game's creation. It's a reminder that game dev is tough, but eventually a game comes out. It's also a reminder that anyone can make a game, and that's ultimately a good thing, no amount of bad Steam games can convince me otherwise.