The best 2D Zelda imo. A charming Zelda game metrodivania vibes. A game where you explore and backtrack a lot.

First off, as usually, the game looks nice. The music is great. The story is...fine/mid. It's basic. Nothing special. It does not ware out it's welcome. Honestly the length.

Let's get into the meat of this review though. The Kinstone system is a lot of fun, if you like backtracking. This is where the metroidvania feels come from. It wants you to backtrack a lot. Most of it is optional though. You connect a kinstone with a NPC and the world changes in some way. It's a neat little gimmick.

The kinstone system does have it's flaws though. You have no idea when a npc has a kinstone quest ready. So you spend a lot of time checking npcs over and over.

The other annoying thing is that they kinstone quests can be missed. Thus you miss out on certain things without ever knowing. Hiding massively important/beneficial items behind it is imo, not fair. Considering things can be missed with no knowledge. The game does not say, "Hey there is a quest here!" So you gotta check the same npcs 10x times and hopefully you catch them when they have a quest. But also hope you have the correct piece to connect with them.

The dungeons are mostly well designed. They are fun. The items are mostly neat. The bosses however...

This game doesn't have well designed bosses. The first and third are fun. The rest are very annoying. They are either terribly signposted as in boss 4. Or they seem to require you to take damage like boss 2 or have an infuriating time doing to the intended way. Boss 5 has too much going on so you are constantly getting hit. We will talk about the final separate though.

My biggest complaint is that the game has jank hit boxes. Like very jank. Enemies and bosses have unbalanced hitboxes while you lack any invincibility frames. This game is not above stun locking you into sevaral hearts worth of damage. Contact damage is devastating due to bad hitboxes and you having zero i-frames.

The final dungeon is fun but is lazy. You fight the same mini boss a total of at least 12 times. It's just lazy. The dungeon before it although not my favorite, felt much longer and well planned out. Had many neat puzzles. The final dungeon is mostly you fighting Darknuts over and over with the occasional puzzle/new mechanic.

The game is a bit jank. Enemies can turn on a dime but once you use an item you are locked in the direction. The copy ability is neat but also very finicky. It's almost inconsistent in terms of damage. If you copies get hit physically they disappear. No damage. If they get hit by fire, the fire affect will transfer to you. Which does not make any sense. But you don't take damage, you just run around on fire. If they get hit by electricity though you get damaged and stunned as if you got hit directly. IT'S JUST STUPID DESIGN. Makes no sense.

Prior to the boss you have to run through 3 rooms meant to just take your health away. The final room being 3 Darknuts. Darknuts suck. They are not hard. The are just hard to get consistent because they are so jank and can turn on a dime to block you. You gotta do these 3 rooms and a 3 phase boss with no way to replenish things in your bottles. It's brutal.

The final boss is badly signposted and infuriating. Only 1/3 phases I feel like was well designed and fun. The first phase is infuriating as it's just meant to damage you a lot. The second phase makes a lot of sense and is generally fair. The final phase makes no sense so you gotta trial and error it. It yet again has infinite ways to damage you. It can literally just block you in ways that force you to take damage. You can even fall of the side, as if we needed another way to take damage. It almost is not very intuitive. And it can give you terrible patterns. I'm glad I used save states because I doubt I could do it without them tbh.

I know I bashed this game a lot. But exploring this world is generally fun. Becoming tiny is neat. It has a lot of charm. It's a forgiving game mostly. It drops a lot hearts. Pots are consistient in terms of what they drop. So if it drops a heart, it'll always drop a heart. So you can farm hearts and consumables if you need.

You will like this if you enjoy exploring and backtracking. It's a fantastic game with some jank and bad design.

A walking sim that tries to accurately portray blindness and fails. I'm legally blind. I appreciate their effort but it's not a fun game.

First off, this game is pretty.The watercolor graphics are nice. It controls fine. It does have a few good ideas. The whole noise system is neat. She hears something but doesn't know what it is. Only figures it out when she is close. Cute idea. Kind of accurate to real life.

So as I said, this is a walking sim. It's pretty much only walking. Painfully slow walking. I get it, she can't see and thus walks slow. But it's not fun.

Okay here is where I get real critical. The story. It's cute, but there are some major issues in terms of accuracy. I want to remind you, I'm legally blind.

First, this is like an 8 year old girl. Where are her parents? And why would any adult leave her unsupervised knowing she is blind. That's bad parenting.

Secondly, where is her cane? She should know how to use a cane as this point. She is 10 and as far as we know, she was born blind. As someone who uses a cane for their sight, it is beyond me, why she doesn't have one. If she would one, have more confidence walking around and two, not fall, trip and struggle so much.

Like I appreciate the devs tried to make a game about someone who is blind. I appreciate they tried to convey a blind person's experiences of the world. However, I don't feel like they spoke to anyone in the visually impaired community.

The game is soooo tedious with such an obvious story. A for effort but fails in most ways.

A free Metroid clone passion project with a lot of love and care. Totally worth playing, especially since it is free.

I was not expecting much from this. It's a free game. It really surprised me though. It's not perfect of course. But it's one of the better metroidvania games I've played.

First and foremost, the music is full of bangers or they set the mood of the area well. Like some of them are Axiom Verge level good. The game also knows how to set the tone with silence and or spooky vibes.

The controls are mostly good. The game is very much a Metroid clone. It plays like Metroid. Some of the controls are jank. The double jump specifically either has weird timing or eats your input. The other kind of jank mechanic is charging up missiles. It just doesn't feel good. It takes too long and sometimes just refuses to do it. Other little things like directional aiming and have a crouch lock button can be annoying.

My biggest complaint are the bosses are not well balanced. They are tanky. They don't give enough ways to replenish health/missiles. Or the ways you can replenish stuff is slow. They do too much damage and have obnoxious hitboxes that extend too far or infuriating moves the stay on screen way too long. The 2nd to last boss is just annoying and doesn't make a lot of sense. As far as I can tell it had no way to replenish things. The final boss was actually fun though. My one issue was that it didn't signpost damage like everything else in the game. It just made a noise without any flash.

The map is small but fun to get around. All of the major items are visible on the map. However the single missile packs are not. Which is a bit annoying/disappointing. You just have to happen upon them or see a very hard to see glint. I wish they were also on the map. I would have collected them.

The areas are well varied. The enemies are good. It's yet again a Metroid clone so expect to take damage just trying to speed through rooms. Sometimes it's not worth the time to not get damaged. The art in general is pretty good.

The story is sure something. I didn't pay too much attention to it. It's pretty dark from what I gleamed from it. They do give you an option to play the game without the "triggering" data logs. That is a nice touch. And yeah, some of the data logs are a bit much and can be triggering. So good on the dev for that.

You can save at anytime. IDK what it really did though. As you always start from the recovery/checkpoint areas. The game does seem to save everything you do as soon as you do it. Good thing too. Because I did get stuck in walls twice. I restarted and it saved the items I just collected and the map progress. So the only real harm was having to walk back. Although it does feel you can def death warp to exploit the game for speedruns.

All in all, this free game was very good. I had a lot of fun with it. Axiom Verge is still better but it reminded me a lot of it. I'm very happy I gave it a chance. If you love Metroid or metroidvanias, don't skip out on this game. IT'S FREE!