Just a note, I played a bunch of this on my steam deck over the past few days while I was travelling, and as usual steam is screwing up the total game time, so it shows me as only having 5 minutes in game. I've got a couple hours in at this point on steam deck.
This is a cute game. Love the graphics and the general feel, especially the saturated color palette. They did a great job with that. Overall control of the character is good, I didn't have any control issues. I played primarily on steam deck.
This game reminds me much more of something like Spelunky than it does a roguelite... in fact I think even saying it has roguelite elements is a bit of a stretch. There isn't much in the way of permanent meta-progression that I can detect. Pretty much when you die you lose everything and start over. There are one or two unlockables but most of the actual upgrades are either found during the run and go away when you die.
What I really don't enjoy about this game is the oxygen mechanic. They use oxygen as a run timer. If you ever played Spelunky, you are familiar with the ghost timer, which was probably the least popular mechanic from that game. This is the same idea... you have to race very quickly through the level. You cannot dilly dally, and even fighting monsters is usually a waste of time if you can get around them. The oxygen mechanic here is a bit more useful because you do have an oxygen bar, so you can see how far along you are, and you do also have the ability to recharge oxygen during the run (extend the timer). In this game though, when oxygen runs out you just die. No mercy, instant death and run ends.
The problem I have is that the randomness of the level design makes this super hit and miss. I have some runs where the only oxygen refill is right at the very beginning of the level, and needs like 32 coins to use... there's no way you have 32 coins until you are most of the way through the level. And by the time that happens, you are already running out of oxygen. These levels are like mazes as well, so even if you wanted to run all the way back to the beginning to recharge, you would probably get lost and die on the way. If you did make it... you get barely any oxygen at a refill station, so you probably die while you work your way back through the level.
Sometimes you don't even find an oxygen refill. I'm sure the game is programmed to have one somewhere, but these levels are big and mazelike... you do a lot of backtracking, you find a lot of dead ends... and the chances are you may or may not even find one. This is quirky and random, and sometimes that is the idea, I get it, but it's also not really good game play.
They do give you a recharge station before the boss room, which is after the level, but the problem is it doesn't always give you oxygen. I had several runs where that station instead wanted me to pay oxygen and it would refill a heart, which was useless. I had one game where I beat the boss, but on the way to the right side of the screen my oxygen ran out and I died. It's really super frustrating, not fun, and not rewarding in any sense. I walked away from the game more frustrated than anything, and it just didn't seem worth my time to play more when it was just randomly killing me without being fair and giving me an opportunity to refill oxygen.
The game constantly reminds you via tooltips that oxygen management is key, but my problem is that there is no system to manage oxygen... you basically get lucky when you come across a station or you don't. That's it. There's no "management" of anything, there's just race through the level and hope you get an oxygen station at the right time. Also, the stations really don't restore very much oxygen.
The rest of the game is really cool, I like the powerups and everything but the oxygen problems above really frustrated me and made the game not fun to play.
If you really enjoy the spelunky experience, with all its rage inducing capacity, then you might enjoy this as well but if the tight timer and randomness of ability to offset that problem are an issue for you, perhaps think twice.
