Enjoyable, but flawed, little metroidvania thing that has a good foundation with solid controls, good upgrades and a charming aesthetic, but also suffers some rather major exploration issues that really bring the game down more than a few notches. The basics are just what you'd expect; you play a goldfish that controls a robot and you explore a 2D world by running back and forth and collecting keys and abilities. One of said abilities is a double-jump, so all is well in the MV universe, but there is a combination of design mistakes that makes exploration kind of a nightmare and I've never had to do so much backtracking to re-explore the entire game world just because I'm completly stumped as to where to go next. This is obviously a major problem for a metroidvania and it takes a game that could've been excellent all the way down to just average or even a little below.
The exploration issues compound and are due to the following issues:
Sometimes you exit a room via the door to the left and enter the next room via...the door to the left. That's not how 2D worlds work! Very unintuitive and nonsensical and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it in the genre, at least not done repeatedly throughout the game. If your world design didn't work out as you piece each room together, and you're left with rooms that are illogical like this, you really have no choice but to design one more room to go between them. You cannot shortcut like this.
Much more often than the above, you will leave rooms by opening a door that's on the background wall, so you walk into the depth of the world rather than sideways, but the map does not account for this and shows this door as an exit to the right that leads to a room to the right. This causes even more unnecessary confusion.
Your player icon is always in the middle of the room and not where your character actually is in the room, and combined with the above, the only real way to make sure that you're standing in front of the right exit on the map is to simply use the exit, open the map and see what room you ended up in. In a 2D game world with a square-based map, this has to be considered a pretty major failure.
Some large rooms combine all of this and you can enter and exit through normal sideways exits and background doors and still technically be in the same room. This happens mostly with each area's large central hub room.
The map is crudely drawn on purpose and the squares the designate rooms aren't always fully filled-in. In some cases, this is an indication of a secret passageway in that area and, in those cases, this is actually a brilliant little design choice. However, it all falls apart when the artist also chose to make incomplete lines a purely aesthetic choice in other areas. Good luck remembering which incomplete lines indicate a shortcut and which are just doodles!
Things you need to access later are rarely shown before you gain access. So, doors that need to be unlocked with a certain skill will only really start showing up in the area where you obtain said skill, which sounds like it makes perfect sense on paper, but it also leaves you with no recollection of having seen a door that you can now open, with the knowledge of where to go to unlock said door. You just gain a skill and don't really know what to do with it yet. If you're reading this early in the game, you probably think I'm being stupid since the first electrified metal door you can find is in the first real room of the game, but that's the exception and the first type of metal door is the only one that's dotted around the map and that you see all the time before you finally get to start unlocking them. Every other door type, and there's kind of a lot of them, behaves like I described above.
Combine all of the above and you have the worst metroidvania exploration experience I think I've ever had, with Outbuddies as the only exception, and I think Outbuddies may have been less frustrating because I didn't get stuck literally constantly with no obvious open routes on the map and no clue what to do next. On top of that, there are a few other strange issues like the game just having way too much loot for no reason. There's no difference between these two platinum swords I found as they have the exact same stats and one was purchased in the store and one was found in a chest. Why do both exist? It makes even less sense when you find out that this game has limited inventory and that limitation does not account for the amount of items in the game, so you will end up having to delete (since you can't sell) old items, which just feels wrong and strange.
I'm complaining a lot, but the game is mostly fine until the last 80% or so, where it devolves into a mess of aimless backtracking for what feels like no reason and while having no actual clue where to go. The first majority of the game is addictive and fun, but then it becomes a clusterfuck that's a struggle to finish. Since I bought this game for $2 on sale, I feel like anyone could do worse than buying this game even if they only finish about 75% of it and then stop as it becomes irritating and time-wasting to continue. A cautious 3/5 with a big warning for this one. Only get it on sale and only if you're a metroidvania fanatic.
The exploration issues compound and are due to the following issues:
Sometimes you exit a room via the door to the left and enter the next room via...the door to the left. That's not how 2D worlds work! Very unintuitive and nonsensical and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like it in the genre, at least not done repeatedly throughout the game. If your world design didn't work out as you piece each room together, and you're left with rooms that are illogical like this, you really have no choice but to design one more room to go between them. You cannot shortcut like this.
Much more often than the above, you will leave rooms by opening a door that's on the background wall, so you walk into the depth of the world rather than sideways, but the map does not account for this and shows this door as an exit to the right that leads to a room to the right. This causes even more unnecessary confusion.
Your player icon is always in the middle of the room and not where your character actually is in the room, and combined with the above, the only real way to make sure that you're standing in front of the right exit on the map is to simply use the exit, open the map and see what room you ended up in. In a 2D game world with a square-based map, this has to be considered a pretty major failure.
Some large rooms combine all of this and you can enter and exit through normal sideways exits and background doors and still technically be in the same room. This happens mostly with each area's large central hub room.
The map is crudely drawn on purpose and the squares the designate rooms aren't always fully filled-in. In some cases, this is an indication of a secret passageway in that area and, in those cases, this is actually a brilliant little design choice. However, it all falls apart when the artist also chose to make incomplete lines a purely aesthetic choice in other areas. Good luck remembering which incomplete lines indicate a shortcut and which are just doodles!
Things you need to access later are rarely shown before you gain access. So, doors that need to be unlocked with a certain skill will only really start showing up in the area where you obtain said skill, which sounds like it makes perfect sense on paper, but it also leaves you with no recollection of having seen a door that you can now open, with the knowledge of where to go to unlock said door. You just gain a skill and don't really know what to do with it yet. If you're reading this early in the game, you probably think I'm being stupid since the first electrified metal door you can find is in the first real room of the game, but that's the exception and the first type of metal door is the only one that's dotted around the map and that you see all the time before you finally get to start unlocking them. Every other door type, and there's kind of a lot of them, behaves like I described above.
Combine all of the above and you have the worst metroidvania exploration experience I think I've ever had, with Outbuddies as the only exception, and I think Outbuddies may have been less frustrating because I didn't get stuck literally constantly with no obvious open routes on the map and no clue what to do next. On top of that, there are a few other strange issues like the game just having way too much loot for no reason. There's no difference between these two platinum swords I found as they have the exact same stats and one was purchased in the store and one was found in a chest. Why do both exist? It makes even less sense when you find out that this game has limited inventory and that limitation does not account for the amount of items in the game, so you will end up having to delete (since you can't sell) old items, which just feels wrong and strange.
I'm complaining a lot, but the game is mostly fine until the last 80% or so, where it devolves into a mess of aimless backtracking for what feels like no reason and while having no actual clue where to go. The first majority of the game is addictive and fun, but then it becomes a clusterfuck that's a struggle to finish. Since I bought this game for $2 on sale, I feel like anyone could do worse than buying this game even if they only finish about 75% of it and then stop as it becomes irritating and time-wasting to continue. A cautious 3/5 with a big warning for this one. Only get it on sale and only if you're a metroidvania fanatic.