The Chiptune soundtrack is nice, at least for the Mines area. The Catacombs were a bit lackluster for music and the Gardens were decent.
I think the procedural generation can only take the game so far, as it's a fun idea, but it has distinct limitations imposed on it that hamper its ability to create fun and memorable environments. Honestly, some of the room designs were nice and if the game needed anything, it was polishing in terms of what/how many spawns in a given area and more unique rooms to add to the queue when generating an area.
As an example, there's a room in the Mines area that you can enter from the left side. It has an area below that you can drop down to, though you can't initially see the bottom. It also has an area above you with platforms letting you head up to whatever's awaiting you above. On the right side of the screen is an exit you can't go through yet because there's a metal barrier blocking the way that you need to find a switch for.
In that same room, you can drop down to the bottom and work your way over a very basic set of small acid pools and find the first switch, which opens a metal barrier all the way up in the top-left area of the room. On your way up to that area, you'll fight a goblin-like creature that throws rocks at you as you move across the platforms toward it.
When you get up to the top and hit the switch, you'll remove the barrier from the passage on the right side of the screen, across from where you initially came in. On your way back down, you might notice that there's a dead-end passage available on the right and also another passage in the top-right you can't reach yet.
Why do I mention all of this in several paragraphs? Because for all that environment, the goblin-like creature was THE ONLY ENEMY YOU ENCOUNTER IN THE ENTIRE ROOM. This is an issue that repeats itself depending on room structure, but the enemy count seems fixed to the room-type based on what I saw from watching speedruns where people got the same room I did.
The end result is that even if the rooms themselves might be clever, the sparseness of enemies leaves the rooms feeling rather lifeless...for some mines (and other locations) that are populated by monsters, there's a distinct lack of population density that creates an uninhabited look and feel for the areas.
I can't help but think that this game needed either to never be procedurally-generated or needed way more rooms and room care for the arrays. Instead, this is a very okay game and I might go back and finish it at some point, but I'm not in any hurry to do so with potentially better Metroidvanias waiting in the wings.
I think the procedural generation can only take the game so far, as it's a fun idea, but it has distinct limitations imposed on it that hamper its ability to create fun and memorable environments. Honestly, some of the room designs were nice and if the game needed anything, it was polishing in terms of what/how many spawns in a given area and more unique rooms to add to the queue when generating an area.
As an example, there's a room in the Mines area that you can enter from the left side. It has an area below that you can drop down to, though you can't initially see the bottom. It also has an area above you with platforms letting you head up to whatever's awaiting you above. On the right side of the screen is an exit you can't go through yet because there's a metal barrier blocking the way that you need to find a switch for.
In that same room, you can drop down to the bottom and work your way over a very basic set of small acid pools and find the first switch, which opens a metal barrier all the way up in the top-left area of the room. On your way up to that area, you'll fight a goblin-like creature that throws rocks at you as you move across the platforms toward it.
When you get up to the top and hit the switch, you'll remove the barrier from the passage on the right side of the screen, across from where you initially came in. On your way back down, you might notice that there's a dead-end passage available on the right and also another passage in the top-right you can't reach yet.
Why do I mention all of this in several paragraphs? Because for all that environment, the goblin-like creature was THE ONLY ENEMY YOU ENCOUNTER IN THE ENTIRE ROOM. This is an issue that repeats itself depending on room structure, but the enemy count seems fixed to the room-type based on what I saw from watching speedruns where people got the same room I did.
The end result is that even if the rooms themselves might be clever, the sparseness of enemies leaves the rooms feeling rather lifeless...for some mines (and other locations) that are populated by monsters, there's a distinct lack of population density that creates an uninhabited look and feel for the areas.
I can't help but think that this game needed either to never be procedurally-generated or needed way more rooms and room care for the arrays. Instead, this is a very okay game and I might go back and finish it at some point, but I'm not in any hurry to do so with potentially better Metroidvanias waiting in the wings.