A Song in Elyel Nalore

Mixed feelings. It's quite short with some rough edges and while feeling quite metroidvania-esque, you don't really get lots of abilities to backtrack with like you would in a typical metroidvania. I played it through to beat the final boss and suspect a normal playtime to take around 40 minutes. It's "okay" if you don't have high expectations and take heed of the following note; [b]**NOTE**[/b] It isn't obvious that when you level up, you gain access to new abilities that you can see on the pause menu. Each ability listed there has a level requirement beside it. Attaining that level will automatically unlock that ability. I wasn't expecting much going into [b]A song in Elyel Nalore[/b], so to see the existence of some form of map was a surprise. The map is very basic and doesn't even show your position on it, it's just a bunch of rectangles that don't mean anything unless you're keeping track of every time you change screens yourself. You don't map as you go, every room is already there as a rectangle. One of the first things I noticed was that when moving around the graphics seemed to blur a bit, I don't know what specifically that is but it was a little irksome to adjust too (but I did get over it). Combat is servicable enough (but not great) once you get to level 1 to unlock the dodge roll, but enemies do attack quite fast and it's a bit finicky sometimes to avoid the damage. Boss fights felt like minor variations of each other, nothing very interesting, you just dodge roll out of the attack and then start swinging again with all of them. There are a number of places in the game where you need to take leaps of faith, or where you can be stuck if you didn't take the 'intended' path. There were a few technical issues I encountered: -I had a save file get corrupted, unable to load it. The dev suspects that It is possibly due to me uninstalling and reinstalling the game. -Music loops don't loop. They finish and then there's silence (until you walk into another biome). The compositions themselves are alright though. I know I've mostly levelled criticisms at the game, but I did think it was actually quite playable and even bordering on fun. With a much better map and a bit more content, I think I would have enjoyed it more. The game was quite smooth to play once I learned how the abilities unlocked. You could do a lot worse picking a microvania to try than [b]A song in Eylel Nalore[/b].