Pseudoregalia is one of the best executed 3D metroidvanias I've seen. It's a game almost entirely focused on movement, and it really nails that. Your abilities are fun and interesting, and many of them aren't the generic upgrades you'd expect from many games in the genre. You can find them very out of order and it feels like the game almost encourages sequence breaking with the amount of opportunities it gives for that. The combat for the most part is just there, it's not great but it's not in the way to the point of being annoying either, with the exception being the final boss fight which I found surprisingly fun. The vibes of this are great, you're exploring a huge castle with very N64-inspired visuals, and it gets those right in a way that feels very authentic and nostalgic as someone who grew up with that system. The music is also really good and adds a lot to the tone of the game.
My biggest complaint that while the castle has a variety of areas, navigating between them can be a little confusing. The game doesn't have any sort of map, and I mostly respect that decision. I feel like if it had one I probably would have been over-reliant on checking it constantly, and the challenge of mapping everything out in my head in a complex 3D space was pretty fun. That's a pretty fine line to walk though of balancing that complexity without frustrating the player, and where it failed at that was near the end of the game when I had to backtrack to specific areas. Within a single area I was usually fine with navigating off of memory, and didn't get stuck often at all, but in the later parts of the game I would know a specific location I needed to get to, and remembering where the zone transitions were and figuring out how the areas all connected together was more frustrating than fun.
Overall it's a very neat game that's good at what it does, and it's very short and underpriced for what it is, so it's an easy recommendation. I could see myself replaying it just to see how doing things in a different order went, or trying to speedrun it as it seems like a really good game for that.
My biggest complaint that while the castle has a variety of areas, navigating between them can be a little confusing. The game doesn't have any sort of map, and I mostly respect that decision. I feel like if it had one I probably would have been over-reliant on checking it constantly, and the challenge of mapping everything out in my head in a complex 3D space was pretty fun. That's a pretty fine line to walk though of balancing that complexity without frustrating the player, and where it failed at that was near the end of the game when I had to backtrack to specific areas. Within a single area I was usually fine with navigating off of memory, and didn't get stuck often at all, but in the later parts of the game I would know a specific location I needed to get to, and remembering where the zone transitions were and figuring out how the areas all connected together was more frustrating than fun.
Overall it's a very neat game that's good at what it does, and it's very short and underpriced for what it is, so it's an easy recommendation. I could see myself replaying it just to see how doing things in a different order went, or trying to speedrun it as it seems like a really good game for that.