One of the most hot and cold games ever made. The amount of brilliant ideas this game has makes it comparable to other indie title greats like hollow knight, hades, celeste...but I feel that, more so than not. it falls flat on its face in execution.

The gameplay mechanics themselves are incredibly well made and thought out. The combat is very satisfying with loads of build options that vastly change how you approach battles. The level up system is excellent too, getting better armour, weapons and stats via questlines and level up feels good and you can instantly see the difference it makes. This is all fine and dandy until you run into the baffling game design decisions made throughout the entire game.

The puzzles are well made but the insane amount of precision and timing for the game to actually let you progress is infuriating. Most of the time on these puzzles I figure out what I need to do, but can't do what the puzzle asks of me consistently and it results in me fiddling with the controls for minutes trying to make minor changes to my aim until the game decides that I may progress. This is especially bad when you have to complete multiple puzzles in a sequence to progress into the next room, since if you fail during any one of them, you are gonna have to repeat the whole segment all over again, fidgeting with you aim and all.

The side quest design in this game is genuinely one of the most tedious I've ever seen. 80% of the time you will be looking for, and getting lost on your way to the quest itself due to the poor map (the map just tells you in which room the quest is located, which is an issue since the rooms can be quite large). The quests themselves are fine but the pure amount of backtracking makes me want to not even bother with them. I kid you not, some quest required me to run to and from 2 locations on 3 separate occasions.

This game is also heavily reliant on platforming for level progression which would be fine if it wasn't for the non existent depth perception. More often than not I'm just making leaps of faith when it comes to platforming due to the fact that 95% of the time I do not know if the platform I'm jumping towards is above, below or the same level as I am. Similarly to the puzzles, the platforming is, more often than not, sequenced - if you fall, you have to do the whole sequence all over again, which you can imagine is an issue if you don't know what platforms you can and can't jump to.

All of this coupled with the occasional annoying enemy makes the game frustrating as hell to play, especially due to the fact that the game does so much right. It feels incredible to play, the controls are smooth as butter, the pixel art is fantastic, the music incredible...but all of that falls flat on its face because of the issues I've mentioned before. Its like if you build a ferrari and decided to put cinder blocks in place of the wheels. This game feels like it should be fantastic, and in segments it really is, but the glaring issues made me drop it halfway through.