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.
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.