A very benign, short little game in the "artistic not-mechanically-tuned-enough-to-be-a-full-Metrovania-but-grazing-the-surface 2D platformer" genre that I finished in about a day of casual gaming. I was reminded of two games playing this, one being Ori and the Blind Forest (with a smaller budget) and the other being Kajenx's flash game William and Sly 2 (with a bigger budget), and it certainly scratches that itch if you're looking for a pretty low-energy 6 hour puzzle romp with no enemies to kill.
The narrative of this game is what you expect; a cute fox (or, rather, a spirit inside a cute fox) has to save the forest and the glowy-eyed big animal guardians from some sort of spooky threat that has a bunch of scary brambles, and they harness the power of the elements in order to make 4 times the color palettes and art assets for each level as they solve platforming puzzles.
What I did not expect is that the sinister undertones of your character's actions to help your mysterious benefactor are intentional, so if you're thinking to yourself "Wow, that glowing spirit just possessed that fox and took over its body, that's kinda messed up!", then I'm happy to report that the game actually accounts for this rather than just leaves this as unspoken fridge horror. The writing isn't amazing but hey, props for this fun little narrative twist.
Unfortunately, where it shines in artistic merit, it falters in the actual gameplay. The biggest problem is the backtracking. This game has an area where you start at the center, travel to one of the four corners (one for each season/guardian), travel back to the center, and rinse and repeat until all four corners are accounted for. This was great the first time. This was acceptable the second time since you unlocked all of your season-changing powers and it's nice to see what new areas could be unlocked with your full arsenal. This was...kind of a slog when, in the final act of the game, the Guardian bear told me I had to do it all again a third time in order to roll credits. Sure, slightly different areas opened up that third time, but I was still running through the same locations for 80% of the time I was doing the final Ritual section with no map or options for fast travel beyond the extremely situational warpstones and magic ziplines.
That being said, it's hard to fault this game for the padding when, even with said padding, it only took me about 6 hours to hit Platinum.
Gorgeous game and at a nice little bite-sized length, but also this game made me do the same Cicada Tree three separate times and there's only so much waiting for floating platform cycles that I can take before I ask the game "what did I do to deserve this".
The narrative of this game is what you expect; a cute fox (or, rather, a spirit inside a cute fox) has to save the forest and the glowy-eyed big animal guardians from some sort of spooky threat that has a bunch of scary brambles, and they harness the power of the elements in order to make 4 times the color palettes and art assets for each level as they solve platforming puzzles.
What I did not expect is that the sinister undertones of your character's actions to help your mysterious benefactor are intentional, so if you're thinking to yourself "Wow, that glowing spirit just possessed that fox and took over its body, that's kinda messed up!", then I'm happy to report that the game actually accounts for this rather than just leaves this as unspoken fridge horror. The writing isn't amazing but hey, props for this fun little narrative twist.
Unfortunately, where it shines in artistic merit, it falters in the actual gameplay. The biggest problem is the backtracking. This game has an area where you start at the center, travel to one of the four corners (one for each season/guardian), travel back to the center, and rinse and repeat until all four corners are accounted for. This was great the first time. This was acceptable the second time since you unlocked all of your season-changing powers and it's nice to see what new areas could be unlocked with your full arsenal. This was...kind of a slog when, in the final act of the game, the Guardian bear told me I had to do it all again a third time in order to roll credits. Sure, slightly different areas opened up that third time, but I was still running through the same locations for 80% of the time I was doing the final Ritual section with no map or options for fast travel beyond the extremely situational warpstones and magic ziplines.
That being said, it's hard to fault this game for the padding when, even with said padding, it only took me about 6 hours to hit Platinum.
Gorgeous game and at a nice little bite-sized length, but also this game made me do the same Cicada Tree three separate times and there's only so much waiting for floating platform cycles that I can take before I ask the game "what did I do to deserve this".