Con la sobredosis de metroidvanias que hay últimamente es raro encontrarse con un juego como este. Metroidvania pixel art como tantos (que de hecho Playism publica unos cuantos de estos) pero que apuesta todo a una mecánica bastante fresca: el gancho. Y en base a esto gira todo el juego: un diseño de niveles mucho más vertical de lo que se suele ver, combates contra jefes (fantásticos casi en su totalidad) donde la movilidad en todas direcciones es clave o desafíos de plataformeo donde la puntería y la controlar la inercia son esenciales.

Aunque cuenta con sus coleccionables y mejoras a encontrar (relacionadas con nuevas armas, mejoras en estadísticas o piezas de lore), el set de habilidades no se amplia demasiado, ni falta que le hace. Al final es un juego donde parte del viaje es dominar el gancho y como, si al acabar el juego empezases otra partida desde 0, podrías hacer cosas al inicio que ni sabías que podrías lograr o llegar a lugares rompiendo la secuencia planteada de avance en el juego solo por la soltura que has ido ganando con el gancho.

Un juego obligatorio para el que le guste el género.

The movement mechanics are amazing, and worth playing the game for alone.

That being said, it's open ended to a fault because a fair bit of the time you feel like you shouldn't be in a certain area yet, bosses have the worst curve ever which leaves combat feeling one dimensional. There being only six main weapons is a blessing and a curse because a fair bit of them add some interesting movement with their acquisition while the other half feel redundant and almost like they serve no purpose.

The game on the whole is well worth a playthrough though, and the issues feel a lot more personal. I don't play many metroidvanias but the only thing that really pushed me along were the movement mechanics, and even then I felt like I wasn't challenged nearly enough. The more interesting mechanics felt shallow (namely the back half of the game) so it's hard to recommend unless you're really willing to sit down and learn the game but if you choose to it's damned rewarding

Having writing be my current source of income has come with the adverse effect of making me enjoy playing games on keyboard and mouse less. While you can play Rusted Moss with a controller, it recommends playing with keyboard and mouse, and I think it's worthwhile to do so. The combination of your movement tools, alongside a very strong suite of engaging boss fights make Rusted Moss one of the better indie metroidvanias on a gameplay level. Unfortunately, when it comes to atmosphere, progression, and exploration I feel it falls a little flat. I feel like this game could've used one more major upgrade to your toolkit, maybe an alternative grenade or something.

Best hidden gem of the year, if not game of the year honestly. Everyone knows that if you want to make a good game, you put in a grappling hook. Both of rusted moss' platforming and combat sides are centered around one of the best feeling grappling hook mechanics in any game i've ever played. Swinging around never got old throughout the 12 or so hours it took me to complete this game in full. Big recommend, but only if you play with keyboard and mouse, it's not really made to be played with a controller.

rusted moss is a really great game bogged down by some bad moments/areas. certain platforming sections and enemies/encounters really dont play to the games strong suits. also feel that visual clarity is a really big issue in this game, whether its not knowing certain platforms are actually platforms and not background or enemies teleporting behind you with little warning. i may be ragging on the game a lot but the core gameplay here is really amazing, the movement is some of the best ive played and the shooting is also nice

Un magnifique metroidvania tout pixelisé avec un grappin comme mécanique principale.

Le simple fait que la mécanique de grappin fonctionne aussi bien tient du miracle : c'est fun, facile à utiliser, versatile. Et les différentes améliorations finissent par rendre le jeu super facile à traverser. On sent vraiment la progression d'un point de vue mécanique et de la palette de mouvement disponible.

Le level design est pas en reste, et offre un monde interconnecté qui s'ouvre peu à peu, découpé en zone bien cool visuellement qui vient renforcer l'ambiance unique et la narration du titre. On se perd quasiment pas, et il y a toujours des choses à explorer.

Les boss sont aussi super cools, et l'histoire qui entoure chaque perso, ainsi que les quêtes annexes, rende le jeu vraiment super complet.

C'est dur de trouver de vrai défaut, en partie car le jeu est pile ce que j'attends des metroid vania indépendant, et avec une narration pile dans mon style préféré : éthérée, nébuleux, mais qui résout de nombreux "arcs" lorsqu'on approche de sa fin.

Vraiment un plaisir à découvrir et à jouer. Je recommande de fou !

I played the demo early last year thinking. Yeah that was pretty good. Wonder how it will do. Then I heard nothing about it really. Over the winter sale I decided that I wanted to check out the full release and see how it was. The answer is better!

The game is really all about movement, If you are familiar with Umihara Kawase, just like it the game uses moment from a grappling hook as the primary form of movement which doesn't stray too much from the path. But increases in complexity, which means that You are tested on what you learn, and any repeats will likely allow you to sequence break. The game looks great with some classic indie style graphics you'd find in momodora or cave story, and the story albeit tame is quite an interesting take for an area that is usually often in the limelight. at 10 hours long, for 95% completion. This feels like a great addition to any metroidvania library, maybe a must have, definitely my fav from the subgenre in 2023. And one I recommend to anyone want that spice of difference in the honestly pretty safe genre.

Probably gonna be my GOTY for 2023. The best feeling game I've ever played. Movement is just phenomenal. Grappling hook + boost + rocket jumping allows for some insanely creative platforming and skips. The music is pretty solid, the visuals do a lot for me, and by Jove do I love mythology and folktales. This game hits so many checkboxes for me that it would be a 5/5 if it weren't for the wind area and Elfame being so absurdly annoying to do platforming in. It's such a shame the game has those areas because I cannot overstate how much fun I was having throughout the entire rest of the game. The boss fights are crazy fun, the moment-to-moment combat can mostly be skipped and the parts that can't usually have some fun little platforming gimmick to go along with it.

momentum-based-grapplehook-bullethell-ish-metroidvania-platformer; a shameless but good-intentioned amalgamation of “indie speed game” tropes, mechanics, and ideas that are sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating, but obviously brimming with passion.

like most teenage gamers with ample free time, few skills, and an earnest but underdeveloped critical eye for games, i dreamed of one day making a game. for me. my ideal. i’ve wanted to make a game for as long as i can remember. throughout highschool i scribbled into my spanish notebook margins drawings of characters and enemies and my understanding of level design to an obsessive degree: detailed maps spanned pages, obscuring practice conversations we’d recite, intermixed with conjugation tables were sketches of character upgrades and their applications. i’m not sure i learned much spanish the semester i became entranced with my never-to-be notebookbound video game. when i wasn’t in the mood to get caught doodling i’d just stare at the poster denoting spanish words for colors and break into a cold sweat playing out perfectly choreographed boss scenes. in my mind. it was devoted thinking time.

the game i desperately wanted to create was a momentum-based-grapplehook-bullethell-ish-metroidvania-platformer; a shameless but good-intentioned amalgamation of “indie speed game” tropes, mechanics, and ideas that surely would have been horrible though brimming with passion. spurred on by my then recent discovery of the perennial masterpiece metroid fusion, i was excited by the possibility of the genre and the breadth of options it gave players. of course, those familiar with metroid fusion may see the problem already, and where this may be going.

which means it’s time to talk about rusted moss. hi, rusted moss. i’ve been waiting for you for a long time.

i tell this story about the game i once yearned to create to establish that rusted moss was always going to happen. one way or another, this game was going to get made. it’s too enticing. that string of words, that mouthful abomination steam tagline buzzword laundry list headlining the review, that’s what the idea of rusted moss feels like. it’s beyond having cake and eating it too; rusted moss is downing the entire city cafe dessert menu in one, big. gulp. it's the end goal for games designed to last an eternity. it’s pieces of inspiration scattered across all of indie-dom jigsaw’d into a game, not out of any amount of cynicism, but reverence. love. rusted moss is the collective game of our dreams.

a bunch of cool shit from other cool video games thrown in because having cool shit times eighteen is, mathematically speaking, cool as shit.

i think it’d be a waste of time to detail the popularity and prevalence of metroidvanias (or “search action” if you dont like fun words. [small tangent but metroidvania is absolutely the most aesthetically pleasing descriptor for a genre, like, ever. what a word. i don’t care much for the arguments against it nor the arguments for search action solely on the basis that i love how fun “metroidvania” looks and sounds. ok tangent over.]) throughout the indie scene since basically ground zero. we all know it. indies love they metroid. almost as much as they love games that encourage speedrunning, games about movement, games that are a little unfair, semi-bullet hell-ness…
this is all no secret. rusted moss is not trying to deceive you. it’s upfront with its inspirations. the game’s site is plastered with references that allude to such. “Traverse the perilous lands of a dying world in this bullet-hell inspired metroidvania!” the first sentence presupposing the entire page. a pax east 2022 demo listicle cited on the same page said rusted moss “ticks an incredible number of boxes.” this reddit comment from rusted moss developer happysquared transparently states how the game was built around their tastes, citing the high skill ceiling, speedrunning, and sequence break potential as important to the game’s identity.

we all know what kind of game this is.

i’ve found it hard to admit that rusted moss didn’t meet my impossibly high expectations. rusted moss was not the game of my dreams. it wasn’t as good as i imagined it to be in the margins of my high school spanish notebook. it could never be. it’d be criminal to place that responsibility, of being as good as i wanted it to be, in the game’s hands. in many ways, rusted moss is acutely attuned to the type of player it knows knows about it. it delivers an experience ripe for exploitation, mastering its mechanics and taking them to illogical extremes, impressively so. in many ways, rusted moss is really good.

it’s just not for me. not any more. it’s taken several frustrated sessions through rusted moss for me to finally come to this conclusion, sad and desolate as it may be; withstanding axiom verge, gritting my teeth through hollow knight, dragging my legs like a giant metal plate on concrete through tens of hours of dead cells, and getting pingpong’d across metroid “lock-all-the-doors-until-you-fight-these-completely-unfun-space-pirates-for-the-fiftieth-time” prime’s map for what felt like an eternity

i don’t necessarily like metroidvanias. i just really like metroid fusion.

i mistook my love for metroid fusion as a sign i’d love the genre it resides in, despite my real attraction towards it being its narrative, themes, how it corrupts the concept of “metroidvania” and metroid itself and invasively interweaves it into all aspects of its design. coming to this realization, that the game i dreamed about was born out of a false understanding of my love for a different game, it crushed me.

rusted moss honestly left me devastated, and it's my fault

–

i feel somewhat guilty for waffling on about how i gaslit myself without directly addressing rusted moss’s quality, which i think should absolutely be noted. if you’re looking for a recommendation, i say yes. the world is beautiful and open-ended, the grapplehook has its fun moments, and most of the bosses are great.

Pretty much what every self-described "speed game" should be.

Frankly, I've grown quite tired of the speedrun/challenge run culture surrounding a lot of the mainstream discussion around videogames. The incredible popularity of Twitch streams and youtube videos of people "playing the game wrong" has created a lot of expectations for basically every title to allow for such approach, and it gets criticized if anything goes against that (see people being mad at the maze catacombs of Elden Ring because they "are slow").
However, for some reason, Rusted Moss made fall in love with that aspect of gaming again.

Very few games can say that they're literally built for speedrunning, and Rusted Moss is among them. But unlike a lot of the others you don't feel like "missing out" by not engaging with that aspect. The implementation of the "speed tech" is so varied and broad that every single casual play will discover something unique and cool to do while playing with the momentum-based mechanics of the game.
Even the smallest discovery feels like unlocking a whole different layer of this game. You get rewarded for each and every single thing.

Rusted Moss demands a lot of you to get 100% completion, but that "lot" contains different things for each player. You can do that without discovering the most advanced tricks, or without realizing the most basic interaction, it is truly one of the most freeing (and yet tightly designed) experiences you can have.

The world itself is also extremely worth all of your dedication. Varied and vibrant environments still shine as you blaze through them with your newfound techniques. Piecing together the (admittedly fairly simple) lore and watching all the ways Fern and Puck interact with each other and all the inhabitants of the world never gets stale, as everything culminates into the final True Ending of the game.

Not a revolutionary experience, but one that is confident in its building upon conventions of everything that preceded it, and I am very glad I got the chance to fly through it.

After finishing this game, i still don't know how to feel about it. There are lot of things that i love in this game. First the artstyle and atmosphere are incredible, really loved the music (even if most of the bosses use the exact same soundtrack), and i really liked much more focus on challenging but fair platforming. When it comes to the exploration though this is where the game falls a little bit flat. Most of the time i found myself going through some difficult enemy encounters and very difficult platforming sections only for my reward to be some lore dumps, which isn't a bad thing by itself, but it felt really frustrating going out of my way to explore something only to find out that the reward is completely useless. Most of the enemies are really annoying to fight especially in one of the endgame areas. Bosses are a mix bag as well. Most of them are easy to defeat without thought. There are some bosses that are pretty difficult but their quality ranges from diffcult but fair to just absolute garbage to fight. I will say the final boss is probably the best (not the true final boss, he is kinda shit).
Overall while there are some flaws with this game, I think people should check it out for themselves.

Story is interesting but could've been explored more, still good for what it is.

Gameplay is so much fun, the grapple takes a little getting used to but once you do it's the most satisfying thing ever.

Weapons feel under-explored, since 80% of them you need to REALLY go out of your way to find them, but all of them are fun to play with.