A Hole New World

A Hole New World is one of the best retro platformers you can currently get your hands on via steam! The game has a basic story to explain what is happening and why you, the potion master, have to prevail against the forces of chaos. This is shown via the quick intro that leads you into the game where you just start playing, with no help or hints. Don't worry the controls, besides that they feel responsive, are quite basic and easy to grasp and whenever there is a new mechanic, the game will show you how to use it and in most cases, it will have some use immediately! It starts at a quite basic and chill difficulty level and quickly ramps up with every boss fight! It delivers the 'classic feel' from games like MegaMan, both with its mechanics and its visual and sounds! The visuals consist of pixelated models, effects and backgrounds, all well made and unique so you can easily distinguish each. The 8bit music further complements the retro theme along with the various sound effects that help you understand what is happening. The main feature of the game is that you can swap between 2 worlds, cleverly named Versee and ReVersee. This allows certain precision challenges to be created, along with the marvellous boss fights, that each has unique tactics and rewards you with an upgrade. In addition, there are secret areas that you need to explore in order to find, along with other areas, that while they are hidden there is a visual hint that something is there! Thus your observation is rewarded with more upgrades! Finally, the game features a game+, boss rush and challenge mode, available after you beat the game once, and, to my big surprise, multiple endings! For completionists, the achievements can provide an additional challenge, as there are various tasks, from do not take any damage in a boss fight to kill all enemies or even don't kill any enemies ones! You can easily play with both controller or keyboard, with the latter being customizable. The only negative I can think for this jewel, is quite minor, that if you want to play fullscreen you may get tired to the relatively big pixels. A Hole New World easily scores 8/10 not only because it offers this retro gameplay but it also offers it so well. You can easily tell that the game was made with love! As a final note, the game besides achievements features steam trading cards. ----------------------------------- Introducing Gamephasis www.gamephasis.com is a new gaming website featuring a talented team of game writers from around the world. Gamephasis features news, reviews, giveaways and much much more. Please visit us and join our Steam group. We're always looking for more talented gamers and writers to join our team.

Giving this a thumbs down makes me sad, but I can't recommend this game. The short of it is that the creative direction, art, and innovation were amazing, and honestly what caught my eye to buy the game; this was consistently great throughout. Gameplay execution, enemy, fight, and level design had major flaws that made it boring, unfair and frustrating in ways that it shouldn't, such as the necessity for frame perfect execution of the slide kick if you want to use it as intended (and as is necessary for blocking the charge of the final boss), or random instances where your invulnerability suddenly doesn't matter. I am excited to see the next game, but beating this game just did not feel good.

I love this game. It's like... Ghosts n' Goblins and Ninja Gaiden (NES) mixed with some Metal Slug and cute random NPCs. I've only just started but in less than an hour this is already one of my favorite 2D games. It's really fun. It has full controller support, the controls are crisp and responsive, and the art is great because of how unique it is. The art mixes perfectly, so each background, character, tree, etc, feels like it belongs in the same game-wrold. They've even got an opening sequence telling a story, speed-run options, and from what I've heard, a new-game+ option, not to mention special attacks and a reverse world you reach by falling into some holes in the ground. This allows you to avoid some obstacles in the above-world. The presense of this other world actually fits into the storyline. It's got achievements, and creative NPCs with animations. The world isn't static. Any fan of platformers should get this, and even those who aren't should give it a try.

SO MUCH POTENTIAL... WASTED POTENTIAL Sadly I can't recommend this game. I'm sure that, with some polishing, it could be a great game but unfortunately there are many unfair things in it that ruin the player's experience. Just to mention a few: - This has to be the very first game I've witnessed to have a save point system that is outright detrimental to the player. One wrong activation are you're set to ditch the game and start a whole new one from the very beginning. - Some jumps or movements must be performed at almost pixel or frame perfect rate. Certain bosses are far from fun because of this: you must repeat the same set of precise actions at a very specific pace to beat them. - Some achievements are absurd. How are you supposed to kill every single enemy in the game when some of them get missing out of the screen or don't appear? How do you find every NPC when they actually don't show up where they should? I've had to start over again and again many times because of these kind of bugs. - Level and enemy designs are probably the weakest points of the game. Progression feels like a chore and the upside down areas, while being a cool gimmick and a good challenge, are too vast and in the long run become an annoyance. Still, it has an enormous potential. I really hope the developers fixed this game. I'd be more than eager to give it a positive review.

I'm not sure how I originally found out about this game, but I liked what I saw and have been following the developers on Facebook. I generally liked the aesthetic, the upside-down-world aspect (which kind of reminded me of Battle of Olympus) and the gameplay that looked like an interesting take on Mega Man. Overall, I've been happy with the game. It controls quite well, even in the upside-down-segments (which I tend to have a lot of trouble with it games). The level design is interesting -- it is obviously planned out, but also has kind of a random-feeling quality to it. Some levels are fairly straightforward left-to-right affairs, while others require some backtracking. I've enjoyed the weapon system too -- you get new abilities by beating bosses and can switch on the fly, ala Mega Man. Unlike Mega Man, there's no weapon charge meter, so you can use them to your heart's content. I've actually found the 4 I've found to be different enough to be worth switching between fairly consistently, it's not just a matter of picking the right thing for a boss. On that point, the bosses have all been pretty cool. They have patterns, but there is a lot of variety in those patterns. So I've found them to be challenging and largely fair. I am stuck on one boss now, but I know with some time I'll overcome it. This is made a lot less frustrating because while the game is difficult, it does have checkpoints -- I can keep retrying a boss easily, the main loss is that my score resets to zero (my impression is that this also affects the ending?). There are some things I don't love about it. The early stages, in particular, have some fairly busy backgrounds that are of a similar tone to the foreground -- so I've had a hard time differentiating between things. This was especially hard for me in a forest area where I was dealing with spiders jumping in and out of the underground world because I could barely tell where they were. I was glad to find this to be less of an issue later in the game. There are also situations where you just feel overwhelmed with enemies. It's certainly possible to overcome them, but having 10 clouds shooting icicles at you while dodging two other things is a bit much. That said, the fact that enemies don't instantly respawn offscreen makes this a LOT more managable than it would have been in the NES days. In fact, they don't respawn at all: there are a couple of achievements revolving around killing every monster in the stages. In the end though, I've enjoyed what I've played of the game and think it's a good example of its genre. The main game looks to be about 90 to 120 minutes if you blast through it, but there are items to collect and other modes that round out the package. So I feel like it's worth the $10. Looking forward to finishing it and checking out the New Game+ option.

If you want your nostalgy crawling into your veins, thats your game. Playing A Hole New World is like using a time machine; it has all the elements of old school games, jugability, story, graphics, music... I enjoyed it with all my heart. I recovered the real meaning of desesperation in this game, just like in Megaman or other classics. The last scenario is purely infernal, in the good meaning. The bosses are wonderful, with a real difficult level. The mechanics are fun and its replayeable so, what are you waiting? If you want to have a good -or infernal- time and raise your salt levels over the stocks, buy this game and play it. Full recommended.

Graphics, controls and music are all great. Starts off good- finish a level and get an extra power, cool. But the game is way to difficult, and not the good kind of difficult. Often enemies will chase you and there's multiple on-screen at the same time, plus shooting projectiles, which makes it extremely difficult to avoid. Bosses will do the same thing too- they'll spawn multiple enemies and there's not a whole you can do to avoid getting killed quickly.

TLDR: This retro inspired platformer is a great effort with very tight controls and a good challenge. There are a few flaws but they do not ruin the game for me. Nostalgia has led to an influx of many retro inspired games. Most of these games get buried and go unnoticed. And while most of them straight up garbage, some gems do get buried under mountains of garbage. A Hole New World is one such gem that needs more exposure. This retro inspired platformer is a very well done game but does contain a few flaws in my opinion, but it still plays well and is an overall enjoyable experience. To me the most important thing retro inspired platformers or really any platformer need are tight responsive controls, and fortunately this game has just that. Jumping over pitfalls, obstacles, and projectiles is a breeze which is further enhanced when you get the double jump ability. The responsive controls are much needed because there are a few issues with the hitboxes on some projectile attacks as well as some spike locations. This does not ruin the game but it can become an annoyance on a certain boss fight when combined with the over exaggerated knockback effect you character takes when getting hit. The game consists of transversing levels with a boss fight at the end. I would say the majority of the first four stages is pretty much avoiding the classic spike pits. There are enemies throughout each level and they increase in frequency as you progress, but yeah avoid the spikes by avoiding them by jumping to the underworld except there are spikes there too. I think the dev does a major disservice to the game by the overuse of said spikes as its just uninteresting filler to the boss fights. The underworld theme could of been pushed more instead of just mostly mirrored spike obstacles. When I first encountered the underworld the inverted castle in Symphony of the Night came to mind but alas it just ended up being spikes. The level design does get better by the fourth stage and can even become rage inducing at parts with the mob combinations, luckily there are checkpoints which eases the difficulty quite a bit for sloppy players such as myself. The boss fights, especially the later ones you have to pay attention to patterns as well as boss ai to exploit. When each boss is defeated you get a new power Mega Man style, which are used to bypass obstacles in certain stages to dispatching enemies more efficiently. Every power is even incorporated in a pretty epic satisfying final battle. After completion of the game newgame+ as well as boss rush mode opens up. To conclude: this was overall a pretty good game with a few flaws but some pretty satisfying boss fights, plus I <3 the sprites. Follow my curation page for more of my terrible opinions. http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Lesstalkmoreplay#curation

I haven't beaten this yet but I wanted to write a quick little review while my impressions are fresh. I really like this game. It's like Shovel Knight in all the right ways. There are 5 stages and, I think, a final boss level. You get different potions that do different things and this really opens up the game play. Levels are fairly complicated in their layout. There are a few branching paths and hidden secrets scattered about. I like that when you kill an enemy, it stays dead so you don't have to worry about backtracking through already traversed areas. My only gripe is that some of the achievements look to be a slog to get. I hate when developers make achievements super hard to obtain. Who has time for that foolishness?

Отличная игра. Всё как в этих ваших хороших платформерах. И управление отзывчивое и чёткое, и задние фоны прикольные, и секретики, и юмор, ну и графика приемлемая для NES-ориентированной современной игры. А ещё и дизайн прикольный уровней. Но есть один минус который немного раздражает это чёрные враги на тёмном фоне. . И одна из главных фич игры второй мир, который играется вверх ногами дико меня раздражает. Вроде бы тоже самое, но непривычно, неудобно и я уже [strike] стар для всего это д*рь [/strike] чот не хочу привыкать... Но я всё же рекомендую эту игру практически каждому, ибо в целом платформер играется очень приятно. Музыка классная, сценки с NPC прикольные, и секретики не такие сложные.