This review contains spoilers
Good:
Combat felt good for most of the game. Parrying is satisfying and the feedback of hitting stunning enemies is great. There is a lot of weapon variety to choose from and evading/parry feels responsive.
Glad to see a gay female lead in a relationship. Hard enough finding female leads let alone gay ones so I'm glad for the diversity.
I'm a fan of the visual design and the spritework is cool beans
I liked the puzzle stuff and most of them felt pretty fair.
Traversal feels good once you have most of the abilities.
Chip system / cog system was fun to tweak and mess around with, it was a good use of customization
Map was pretty detailed and I didn't have any problems navigating it
Neutral
The NPCs were cool but I never really felt attached to them. There is one or two side quests in the game. I should have just let them die instead of trying to save so many.
Stamina system made the game feel worse. I know it's a balancing issue but you should really start with more. It never gets better late game without stamina cog spam or lots of green chips
Sword felt much better than Axe due to the fact of how much faster it was but this is a personal issue
Needed a manual save. I understand that it probably auto-saves to prevent save scumming but let me manually save for my sanity. if you're just going to just checkpoint me back to a terminal just let me save at that point.
They build up the bosses to be super cool and I thought they were but they provide zero context to their backstories. You're supposed to feel bad or dismayed that you're destroying them but they don't give you enough background info to actually care. I think you see one boss in a flashback and that's it.
Negative
The timers, possibly my biggest gripe with the game. The timers is like the anti-thesis of metroidvanias (especially with puzzle elements). I basically felt like I had to speed through the game constantly and not explore every nook and cranny because I was under a time pressure. It really clashes ideologically with what people want to do in a metroidvania and I personally did not care for it at all. The timer needed to be laxed a little bit because some of the NPCs just straight up die very early in the game if you don't use the game mechanics to save them. Also if you're going to include somewhat challenging puzzles in the game, the game shouldn't be timed or make the game lapse slower or lapse not at all in dungeons. In the optional dungeon, I think I spent probably an hour doing the puzzles. My solution was to pause the game and re-create the puzzles in on a website so I could think about them and solve them without worrying about the timer ticking down me because at that point me and several NPCs were at 24 hours or less. When I spend more time on a website trying to play your game than actually in your game, that's a design problem. I love puzzles but not under the time constraints of the game. I know you can tell me to play on Explorer difficulty but that completely undermines the game design because it's clearly intended that Meteor Dust is a limited commodity and used to make difficult decisions. Without it then the dust is basically a glorified friendship increaser to get different perks from all the NPCs.
The weapon mapping in this game is terrible. Why give me all these cool weapons and restrict it to two weapons. Let me map the traversal items to different keys, there is an abundance of keys on controller and keyboard that would have let me use one of my items hookshot instead of just taking up a weapon slot. By the end of the game I didn't even use ranged weapons because I'd rather have quick traversal and not go into my menu constantly. A quick switch or anything, going into menus to switch your one weapon is some weird game design that belongs in like SNES Zelda games, not in a 2021 metroidvania.
I loved the bosses but the idea of increased difficulty of a boss in Unsighted is to add more and more annoying adds. Make more engaging mechanics, don't spam adds that require me to parry constantly to kill them. The optional dungeon boss was the worst offender of this. I'd rather deal with mechanics like bullet hell then having to deal with adds that keep on spawning. (thank god they eventually stop spawning if you kill enough)
The game is fun combat-wise at 2-3 enemies max and when one enemy isn't constantly spamming attack. There is some late game enemy packs where one enemy will constantly spam attacks and while you parry them, the other enemies just attack you and lock you down in a parry/clash war.
While the art is great, the way the game is drawn and animated means there is definitely some depth perception problems where I can't tell if I'm in the background or foreground. This isn't an issue while doing combat but more so when you have to do puzzles or wall jumps. This is especially evident when the game tries to convey any sense of height and you really can't tell how tall things are.
I hate tutorials but the game really needed to do an extensive guide on how to do long jump, wall jump and throwing items at the beginning of the game and not at the end. Not to mention there is a secret technique where you can instantly increase your stamina to max by double-tapping dash when you're tired that I never saw in game and only saw because it was mentioned somewhere on a guide I looked at later.
ENDING SPOILERS START HERE
This one is spoilers so (best ending spoilers) The true ending completely undermines the whole premise of the timers and permanent in the death of the game. You go back in time to day 1 and all the NPCs + Alma revert to their day 1 timers. The true ending basically extends all the timers and restores the NPCs in an attempt to let the player do what they want (like a pseudo-post game) but it does not feel good at all. I spend the whole game trying to save all the NPCs and getting the best ending just completely undermines the message and design of the game. If you're going to do that you mine as well just not have made a timer, just leave the timer on Alma to put some sense of dread into the player.. Not to mention there was no way a normal person could find all the required items for the best ending because it uses a lot of secret walls that you can pass through but they appear solid in the game.
ENDING SPOILERS END
If you don't mind the timed aspect of the game or don't care about trying to save every NPC, I think the game would be more enjoyable for you but it was my real complaint for the game.
Combat felt good for most of the game. Parrying is satisfying and the feedback of hitting stunning enemies is great. There is a lot of weapon variety to choose from and evading/parry feels responsive.
Glad to see a gay female lead in a relationship. Hard enough finding female leads let alone gay ones so I'm glad for the diversity.
I'm a fan of the visual design and the spritework is cool beans
I liked the puzzle stuff and most of them felt pretty fair.
Traversal feels good once you have most of the abilities.
Chip system / cog system was fun to tweak and mess around with, it was a good use of customization
Map was pretty detailed and I didn't have any problems navigating it
Neutral
The NPCs were cool but I never really felt attached to them. There is one or two side quests in the game. I should have just let them die instead of trying to save so many.
Stamina system made the game feel worse. I know it's a balancing issue but you should really start with more. It never gets better late game without stamina cog spam or lots of green chips
Sword felt much better than Axe due to the fact of how much faster it was but this is a personal issue
Needed a manual save. I understand that it probably auto-saves to prevent save scumming but let me manually save for my sanity. if you're just going to just checkpoint me back to a terminal just let me save at that point.
They build up the bosses to be super cool and I thought they were but they provide zero context to their backstories. You're supposed to feel bad or dismayed that you're destroying them but they don't give you enough background info to actually care. I think you see one boss in a flashback and that's it.
Negative
The timers, possibly my biggest gripe with the game. The timers is like the anti-thesis of metroidvanias (especially with puzzle elements). I basically felt like I had to speed through the game constantly and not explore every nook and cranny because I was under a time pressure. It really clashes ideologically with what people want to do in a metroidvania and I personally did not care for it at all. The timer needed to be laxed a little bit because some of the NPCs just straight up die very early in the game if you don't use the game mechanics to save them. Also if you're going to include somewhat challenging puzzles in the game, the game shouldn't be timed or make the game lapse slower or lapse not at all in dungeons. In the optional dungeon, I think I spent probably an hour doing the puzzles. My solution was to pause the game and re-create the puzzles in on a website so I could think about them and solve them without worrying about the timer ticking down me because at that point me and several NPCs were at 24 hours or less. When I spend more time on a website trying to play your game than actually in your game, that's a design problem. I love puzzles but not under the time constraints of the game. I know you can tell me to play on Explorer difficulty but that completely undermines the game design because it's clearly intended that Meteor Dust is a limited commodity and used to make difficult decisions. Without it then the dust is basically a glorified friendship increaser to get different perks from all the NPCs.
The weapon mapping in this game is terrible. Why give me all these cool weapons and restrict it to two weapons. Let me map the traversal items to different keys, there is an abundance of keys on controller and keyboard that would have let me use one of my items hookshot instead of just taking up a weapon slot. By the end of the game I didn't even use ranged weapons because I'd rather have quick traversal and not go into my menu constantly. A quick switch or anything, going into menus to switch your one weapon is some weird game design that belongs in like SNES Zelda games, not in a 2021 metroidvania.
I loved the bosses but the idea of increased difficulty of a boss in Unsighted is to add more and more annoying adds. Make more engaging mechanics, don't spam adds that require me to parry constantly to kill them. The optional dungeon boss was the worst offender of this. I'd rather deal with mechanics like bullet hell then having to deal with adds that keep on spawning. (thank god they eventually stop spawning if you kill enough)
The game is fun combat-wise at 2-3 enemies max and when one enemy isn't constantly spamming attack. There is some late game enemy packs where one enemy will constantly spam attacks and while you parry them, the other enemies just attack you and lock you down in a parry/clash war.
While the art is great, the way the game is drawn and animated means there is definitely some depth perception problems where I can't tell if I'm in the background or foreground. This isn't an issue while doing combat but more so when you have to do puzzles or wall jumps. This is especially evident when the game tries to convey any sense of height and you really can't tell how tall things are.
I hate tutorials but the game really needed to do an extensive guide on how to do long jump, wall jump and throwing items at the beginning of the game and not at the end. Not to mention there is a secret technique where you can instantly increase your stamina to max by double-tapping dash when you're tired that I never saw in game and only saw because it was mentioned somewhere on a guide I looked at later.
ENDING SPOILERS START HERE
This one is spoilers so (best ending spoilers) The true ending completely undermines the whole premise of the timers and permanent in the death of the game. You go back in time to day 1 and all the NPCs + Alma revert to their day 1 timers. The true ending basically extends all the timers and restores the NPCs in an attempt to let the player do what they want (like a pseudo-post game) but it does not feel good at all. I spend the whole game trying to save all the NPCs and getting the best ending just completely undermines the message and design of the game. If you're going to do that you mine as well just not have made a timer, just leave the timer on Alma to put some sense of dread into the player.. Not to mention there was no way a normal person could find all the required items for the best ending because it uses a lot of secret walls that you can pass through but they appear solid in the game.
ENDING SPOILERS END
If you don't mind the timed aspect of the game or don't care about trying to save every NPC, I think the game would be more enjoyable for you but it was my real complaint for the game.