Cookie Cutter has such a strong artstyle, seeing it in action felt truly special. I also really like Cherry and her moveset from the get go being fighting game inspired. It felt really good to chain light attacks into specials. She has alot going on. Though unfortunately you hit that stride by the time the game is reaching it's end. It's shorter than I expected.

I didn't have much gripes outside of wishing Cherry had a faster movement option on land, walking to the fast travel spots was a bit tedious. The game's abundance of instadeath spikes towards the latter half was annoying too because there really isn't anything to use to avoid them more effectively (they were p annoying in Golden Tower too). Enemy variety isn't very vast, I did find it really cool they animated unique glory kills for enemies though, but I imagine most people wouldn't use em once you make Cherry a high power killing machine with upgrades.

The strange decision to have voice acting at the beginning and then cutting it for the rest of the game was...baffling. Which is a shame cause I really did enjoy the voicework of Cherry & Raz (I mean come on, Cherry has a design that tells you off the bat what she sounds like). I chalk it up to a budgetary thing clearly most of it went into the presentation which is no slouch.

The ending was also...very abrupt? I felt like this game could've done more to make Cherry regaining the memories of her past as a more gradual buildup rather than just being shoved in last minute after the climax. Granted, the story wasn't amazing/super duper engaging (not poorly written at all, it was just by the numbers for me) but I wish the importance was carried throughout gradually rather than at the start, kinda nothing inbetween with small buildup, then the giant drop at the end. The Infonet and Denzels stuff was neat though.

Overall though, Cookie Cutter is a solid ass game and it shows a ton of promise for this dev studio. They're constantly updating and tweaking it too which is really great to see. They really do care about this world they made and that's a great thing to behold.

I really wanted to love this game. Visually, the game is very appealing; the art is fantastic. And the idea of a Metroidvania being mashed up with a bullet hell shooter sounds so good on paper.

Unfortunately, the game is hampered by terrible checkpoint placement and a card system that makes battles tougher than they should be because you’re never quite sure which special attacks are mapped to which buttons without looking at the icons in the bottom right-hand corner, which obviously doesn’t work too well when you’re trying to avoid a sea of bullets.

Perhaps I would’ve stuck with the game if there was an option to lower the difficulty, but such a thing doesn’t exist, which is a shame.