This game was made by Good-Feel, who helps out on first party Nintendo Titles like Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It's unclear what role they serve but after playing this my guess is they probably contribute contract labor, especially visuals/animation.

This game has the same camera as Kirby and the Forgotten Land, but has a really sprawling type of level design. Occasionally level design feels a bit 'denser' and reminiscent of something like a Super Mario 3D Land / Super Mario 3D World, but a lot of times it's just a visually stunning setting (a cruise ship roof, a beach, etc) with a lot of little visual candy - sandcastles with nooks, watermelon enemies, small caves.

Enemies are strewn throughout the levels, although they're usually dancing or walking around in circles... you're quite powerful, and gain extremely powerful upgrades to mow down the enemies. Getting hurt is usually from something coming off screen or being unable to see things properly. There is a dodge roll and parry.

The effect is it feels like we're slaughtering a bunch of monsters having festivals. In fact the goal of each level is to shatter 3 festival lanterns in order to 'repel the evil celebration!' But the power divide between you and these joyful enemies (imagine mowing down people dancing on stage or in a parade) creates a strange effect.

The levels have collectibles which tell you fun facts. These range from bad jokes to legitimately interesting facts - did you know Japan has underwater mailboxes?

I also like how the levels are organized so that there's one for each prefecture in Japan. Have Americans made a 3D platformer for every state yet? Let me in on that...

So is it good? It depends on what you're looking for. This doesn't feel challenging in the way older 2.5D platformers like Goemon did. At the same time there's a shocking amount of polish and visual stuff put into this game, and it feels a bit at odds with how simplistic and repetitive the design elements are. I feel like there's a weird story behind this game's development under the surface, but we may never know..

i got this on here nice... this is my first big game i made. it's a flash platformer... go play it hAHA https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/595009 .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65KrnulRsgg

mechnically actually i still think it's cute. it's a simple stage-based platformer where you have to collect notes and reach the goal, but you also have this like... timed anxiety meter where you need to grab pills to reduce it, or you die if it fills. kind of bizarrely stressful but eh it's very playable!

if you can get all the notes and clear the stage fast enough you get medals.... please get my medals.

I feel like the puzzles are hampered by having to view things in 3rd/1st person. It's hard to keep and get a sense of all the information in the puzzle, I feel like I spend a lot of time just figuring out the layout and what I even have to work with.

There's a 3D Zelda-y feel to the busywork of rearranging objects, in the way this game engages with 3D space - sort of like a '2D sense of seeing everything' projected into 3D.

I feel like a big reason most puzzle games end up being 2D is that there's an immediacy to the puzzles - it's easier to take in all the information. Puzzles can work in 3D, but I think if they are phrased in a different language, e.g., a platformer with organic environments that require puzzly navigation (Jusant, Sephonie, presumably the upcoming Baby Steps, some Shadow of the Colossus bosses)

On the narrative side.. I'm interested in the SF story and the mysteries, and the android setting is neat, but the amount of puzzle work required to see it feels too high.

THAT BEING SAID, if you enjoy these kinds of 3D puzzles I think this would be a great game. The puzzle variety, solutions and mechanics are all fun on paper - I'm just not that big into all the work that goes into solving them in 3d space

Loved the cooking mechanics here - they actually felt like the process of learning a new recipe. And the integration with the story and the way cooking intersects with life and memories was great too. The story was pretty heavily tragic and it was interesting how it balances that with the lighter aspects of life!

While it doesn't go into detail, I guess for time's sake and the overall tone of the game, it speaks a lot to the waves of immigration from one country to the 'friendly first world white countries'. While this is a specific family's story, the general sense of helplessness the family feels as their kid negotiates multiple cultures feels very 21st/20th century to me - having your original identity ripped away from you as you're forced to adapt into Canadian/American society. I feel like it's a very 21st century condition to be feeling alienated from some sense of cultural roots due to how easy travel is nowadays.

What then is there to do? I liked how Venba's story ends - the mom moves back home, and the child reconnects with his mom. It's not framed as the solution but it feels right for Venba who was very isolated in Canada.

(spoilers)

Finally finished this! It's a 2D platform exploration game where you'll use a wide variety of tools in a sandbox-like manner to seek out other items (to help you uncover more secrets). The most 'straightforward' goal is to defeat 4 bosses to reach the final boss, but there's an entire storyline (and arguably the focus of the game) revolving around learning about the characters who made the game. The platforming game itself is fun - it's a lot more playful with platformer conventions than say the standard metroidvania. The main movement technique is "Lime", which lets you ignore gravity but preserving your momentum. It comes into play in a wide variety of ways and was fun to learn the nuances of its movement.

I could list out the other fun platforming mechanics but it's fun to puzzle the uses out yourself. I like this space of platformer where there are sandbox elements, but there's still enough of a designer's hand that you're getting a sense for the designer's tastes and world designs.

Anyways, the story - I didn't know it had a story at first but you end up unraveling a story of the 5 developers (in the same school club) who made the game together. It's both a literal 'behind the scenes' dev commentary, but it goes a step further and turns it into a slice of life/romance story, and ties the world together in a nice way.

Check it out!

the whole Of The Killer series is brilliant - by a small team, including thecatamites of 10 beautiful postcards/space funeral.

Each episode captures the feeling of some aspect of living in the 21st century amidst strange social systems..

corporate call centers, family-focused exercise gymnasiums, century-old apartment buildings. the protagonist is witty, associated with the arts, maybe a bit jaded, but her personality helps make sense of all the wild nonsense of the world around her, as she runs away from each episode's goofy slasher-film murderer.

Each episode tells a short story through a novel narrative system where the text just stays on the screen and changes as you move near different parts, the effect is like a more efficient method of what those AAA games love to do with characters talking as you walk around.

except in the Of The Killer games it works better than the expensive fancy route because text appears near certain spots, it doesn't stop the game, and you can always walk back to see the text again. So you get this feeling of a '3D comic', and it works so well with the moving objects, sound design, 3D level design, etc.

As a game designer it's particularly tricky to try to portray any aspect of the present day without just resorting to what feels ultimately like primarily text, or kind of strange metaphors like having you smack your way through an american jrpg suburb with a baseball bat. not that there's an issue with those, but Of The Killer feels a lot more 'direct' in how it chooses to represent reality as a game. When commenting on the weirdness of museums, you're literally in a weird museum. When commenting on the kind of frightening, deep nature of your old building having layers of history and old stuff - you're in a labyrinthine-esque apartment floor that sounds and feels visually stuffy/moldy. and so on! i could say more but i'm tired

trust me on this and play through all 8 in the series! probably takes you 3-4 hours tops. i'm only on the 7th but they keep getting better

Really pleasantly surprised by this! Sleeper hit maybe. You grow small shops (and eventually automate or have other NPCs staff them). Except it has a focus on town/city exploration, meeting different characters, with a JRPG-esque story. There's unique humor and money systems here.

Managing items and stuff can feel a bit multitasky in a tedious way, but there's a lot of great ideas and design in this. Kind of reminds me of a weird spin on Trails in the Sky in some ways. check it out if you like rpgs!

I don't really get into sandbox-y games, usually because they expect long play sessions or learning a large bank of knowledge... and I want to be done with a game after 4-5 (maybe 8-10) hours rather than 'just getting started!'

But this sandbox-y platormer game centers physics-based 2D platforming, and the items you're given to clear levels are randomized and you're basically left to try and solve an open-ended puzzle with your toolkit of fish and boxes.

If you get stuck in Mosa Lina, you probably just die or try again with different items. So even though it looks like apuzzle platformer, it's not a 'pure puzzler' with designed solutions, which I'm not usually that into unless the puzzles are in service of something else (e.g. platforming puzzles in a story-focused game or something)

In Mosa Lina, with each cleared stage you're learning a little bit about whatever tool you used and maybe some object in the environment. So there's an interesting sense of growth, but instead, trying to solve a single level, you can just give up and try with a different set of 3 items.

The game is still sandbox-y though, it expects you to make your own experience. Sometimes the items you get are pretty ill-suited to some of the challenges, and you have to be okay with resetting.

That being said I find it's well-balanced overall and an amazing achievement. Even with a bad hand it seems like if I just keep dying/trying enough I can eventually get a roll that'll let me clear it, with enough ingenuity. Definitely a game I'll be thinking about and even coming back to for a while!

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My only real complaint is that the hitboxes of the spikes is a bit fiddly. They feel a lot bigger than they look and I find a lot of my deaths to them to be a little unsatisfying - either from failing to clear a jump by a pixel, my foot slipping, etc...