I picked this up because it was tagged as a Metroidvania, and I guess, to an extent, it is.

Area gating definitely happens, but the monster holding the power-ups at least in the first four hours I played happened to be the merchant that wanted to sell you your double jump, triple jump, force cube, and such. I did eventually pick up a few other power-ups on my own through puzzle solving, but a number of them felt extremely optional.

For what it's worth, the puzzles are pretty fun to figure out, but because they're the meat of what this game is, the game really feels more like a puzzle sandbox than anything else. There's combat as well, but combat is pointlessly awful. Sure, it's briefly fun to drop your Force Cube power-up on an enemy or blow them up by spawning it inside of them, but that's like 30 seconds of enjoyment amidst A LOT OF TIME in which you just slash-slash-slash-slash-slash-slash-slash until an enemy is dead because they're in the way of the next puzzle you're heading for...or worse, shooting at you or launching themselves at you to distract you from the puzzle you're working on.

Exploration is simultaneously fun and frustrating because the game is happy to push a triple jump on you fairly early on along with the Force Cube you see in the title image for the game -- basically another free jump that you can spawn beneath you. Exploration is thoroughly encouraged...until it isn't. Sometimes, you can find yourself getting up to places you don't belong and the only real signal is when your body no longer touches the ground you're standing on and proceeds to slide around in a spastic manner. Sometimes, you can get another jump or two out despite this happening, and sometimes you can't. It shouldn't sound like a big deal, but the game also will let you into areas you shouldn't be in at all in certain instances.

I definitely softlocked myself twice by making it onto seemingly easy ledges with my jumps and the cube, only to think I found a secret cave because you could crouch and sneak into the cave like all the other previous crouchy-sneaky caves, but I ended up finding dead ends and could not crouch my way back out of the area I ended up in. Of course, I also used space like this to reach chest loots (usually some attack or regeneration stat power-ups) I shouldn't have been able to access from where I was. The end result is that it's fun when things work and occasionally rather annoying when they don't.

The game seems very reward heavy -- it reminds me a bit of Lootbox Lyfe in that regard, but I had a lot more fun with the power-ups from Lootbox Lyfe, even if it felt a little more linear in terms of exploration at times. I guess the difference between the two for me is that I finished Lootbox Lyfe and this one is going back into the backlog. All the positive reviews I saw on Steam make sense, but this game isn't grabbing me like it grabbed so many other people. If there's a demo, check it out. If you're hard-up for a Metroidvania, this feels like it fits the mold, even if it also feels strongly like nothing more than a puzzle game with monsters that get in the way.

Reviewed on Mar 14, 2023


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