Transiruby

released on Dec 09, 2021

Explore the mysteries of an unknown land! Transiruby is a metroidvania game where you explore the world as a cyborg protagonist named Siruby. Slash and shoot your way to reveal its hidden secrets!


Reviews View More

I've loved Skipmore games since playing Fairune on my phone in 2013. I've been antsy for a big new adventure from them since Fairune II five years ago, and this was worth the wait. Movement feels great, the puzzley bits are fair and smart, and the last area goes hard in a JOYOUS way. I just loved exploring and existing in this world. The FM Synth DLC is extremely worth it!!

While exploring the world of Transiruby is interesting at first, the Metroidvania style Action Adventure gameplay keeps switching from doing skill free, simple, and fun exploration to then doing complex, difficult, and unnecessary puzzles which leaves the player confused as in what there doing. The Platforming is probably the best part of this game unintentionally since as you go on you get more ways to traverse the levels in fun ways, but the same can not be said about the Fighting which stays the same the whole game and could've really benefited with some extra moves or upgrades. So yeah that's my review, I'm going to be giving Transiruby a Strong 5 on the recommendation scale.

Watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtthkdFuhE

This game is neat, but I didn't enjoy it much after the first play session. Siruby is cute, at least.

i keep making mistakes like misreading the tiny map or missing a small jump and getting punished with incredibly long walkbacks. i don't mind precision platforming and this is pretty generous as it goes but i am not good at these games. i really needed a reset button and as far as i can tell it doesn't exist

Can a Metroidvania be a little too simple? For me, that's the case with Transiruby.

I really enjoy the graphics -- color choices contrast well so there's a lot of eye candy going on and pixelated art feels crisp.

The music is catchy enough, but very limited in tracks. I'm particularly fond of the music from the second area of the game, as it reminds me a bit of Wonderboy in Monster World's opening music that's a reprisal of Mecha Dragon's Castle.

In theory, there's a lot of exploration, but also...there's actually not. Progression in the game is made by collecting these mini-chips -- and when you have enough, you can open a door to another area...with more chips. But also, there's a lot of one-shot gating items located here and there between worlds, so a lot of time is spent going back and forth between worlds with your one new item, just so you can open up one more door or start one more platform to progress to the next mini-area full of chips in the major area before one of those checkpoint doors.

On controls in general, they're extremely precise and movement feels absolutely golden when traversing platforms.

Combat is way too easy -- it's just swinging your blade by repeatedly pressing the Sword button, occasionally choosing to down-swing if you want to plunge onto enemies. You can also fire shots at smaller enemies -- you use this a lot for freezing enemies so you can either get life back occasionally from kills or to have them function as stepping stones for climbing. Enemies die REALLY easily to the downward plunge attack.

Bosses are a joke. The patterns are especially simple, and inevitably you get an obvious opening where you take a huge chunk of their health with an appropriate stab. Most damage you deal when their weaknesses aren't exposed is insignificant and just used to charge your gun, which you can't normally use on bosses anyway.

The thing is, even with the bosses and enemies being fairly pedestrian, you might occasionally die (especially if you discover how very much you can't swim as a robot-girl). But it's not really a big deal, as the game is very proactive in maintaining your progress to the best of its ability -- you die, you spawn at either the last key item you picked up, the last save point, or even the last optional item you picked up. Save points are practically irrelevant unless you're trying to be extra careful. Die to a boss? Get dropped outside the boss room with full health. In fact, the save points don't heal you, so it's generally more useful to just take a death after the game autosaves your progress because you get full health and full EP for your gun on respawn.

The game is just a continuous treading and retreading of the same ground while picking up chips to make progress and if that's your jam (the retreading -- everyone loves chips), then you'll probably dig it. But without a sense of challenge, it's hard to really appreciate the game beyond the fact that it's short and sweet -- I can't see it taking more than eight hours for a first-time player.

One weird thing worth noting -- in order to quit the game, you have to go to the option menu while in-game, choose to return to the title screen, then go to the option menu in the title screen, then choose to quit the game. What a strange place to allow the user to exit the game from.

I believe it's priced at 14.99 on Steam. I can't recommend it at that price, but if you see it on sale for 50% off, you could definitely do worse than to kill a few very easy hours with some catchy music. I'd rate it higher, but it just didn't do anything for me.

A short and sweet Metroidvania! Gorgeous art and lovely tunes.

Fun level design, cheeky writing, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Combat is fast, fluid, and easy. The focus of this game is exploration and collecting.

As with most Metroidvanias, there's some point where I got lost and looked things up... sadly the game doesn't seem very popular, so I had to just watch a Lets Play on YouTube to get thru it.