As beautiful as this microvania is, and genuinely interesting the combat system is at face value, I cannot recommend you play this versus the dozens of other microvanias available on STEAM. I'll have several points listed below, but the biggest thing is time. The experience was extremely short, but not in the sweet kind of way, and somehow I feel that was for the best. I have no doubts that multiple people beat this game and were able to refund it, and then chose to afterwards...
The World: It is very linear with minimal secrets, and yet somehow most of those secrets are all cluttered in the same general location. The background parallaxing is slightly off which makes certain room literally nausea inducing to walk through. There are some rooms to the right of the map that have background elements that are easily to mistake as foreground, causing you to end up in a bottomless pit instead. And the layout of the map is not nice to the player, considering you have to backtrack from the rightside to the leftside towards the end with no shortcuts. In fact, most of the map will not connect back to other places, nor will you have to make decisions on which area to traverse in order to progress. Ladders are heavily overused and become an excuse for designing vertical sections of a room. Lastly, elevators don't have a method of calling them, which means if you are like me and tried to go all the way across the bottom of the map to the town after having left the town from its top, you cannot access the town and have to go the entire other way just to enter.
Enemies: Enemies are stage hazards. They are not difficult to kill, but they do everything in their power to be annoying. Their aggro is triggered as soon as you either enter a room, or set foot on their platform. Some are locked into attacking a certain direction once they start, others can switch the way they are facing mid attack. This means for example, you could start a conversation with an NPC, and a flying enemy from the other corner of the room will path all the way to you and start attacking you mid conversation. Hope you weren't low on health. They also really like to camp the top and bottom of ladders, since their aggro is triggered so early, and makes those even more annoying then they already are.
Bosses: I don't know what the bosses in this game were on, but they really, REALLY like to teleport. Not to any specific location of course, just somewhere in the area. It is fast, they attack immediately afterwards (usually a projectile of sorts), and entirely untelegraphed. You'll often find yourself just jumping or rolling around the area trying to fight the boss only for it to teleport somewhere else before you even got remotely close. Halfway through the game, your shield also just stops working against most bosses. The shield is actually really interesting, as it's a defensive option that doesn't take stamina or leave you open like a jump does, with the one draw back of not working against magic attacks...or heavy attacks...or the final boss for some reason??? Basically, it becomes useless just because the game said so, making combat less complex later in the game which is a weird decision. Most of my strategies involved stalling because the stamina system and few equipables you can obtain actively encouraged it (From waiting for stamina or health to regen).
Achievements: My first and only playthrough I did I tried to "no killing common enemies". I thought this would be interesting; How do I stop enemies from killing themselves sometimes, how will I progress the world with a fixed income throughout the entire game, how might I progress through certain rooms filled with mobs. Uhh, turns out the answer to all of those questions was that they weren't actually questions at all. Only one room had an enemy that could potentially hurt itself, money really wasn't that useful in the first place, and most enemies could just be ignored and that would make your life easier. I have no idea how to get the true ending, I know it has something to do with the collectables but I was lacking 1 note and 2 flowers by the end and still got the ending. Besides that achievements boil down to complete the game and eventually get around to killing some random guys. (The rock achievement is worded horribly, I thought it was talking about the moss rocks for the longest time.).
Story: Doesn't exist. There is light set up, then the author suddenly didn't like the whole disease story and wanted a fantasy monster takeover instead. Neither of which really get resolved? Most NPCs are "do my quest", and there was an interaction early on that has me still bewildered. A dark blue NPC that looks like no other enemy in the game says some foreboding message and then just, dies?! It was strangely humorous, and the best part of this game.
Wrapping Things Up: I completed this game because I really like 2D pixel art metriodvanias. If that wasn't the case, I would've dropped the game and refunded it when I had 54 minutes in. It felt like the game was actively trying to make me hate it, and that sucked. I know this is a small team, and I can excuse it for being a little rough around the edges here and there, but a lot of this games problems come from the gameplay itself. I do believe too much time was spent on making the game look appealing to play instead of actually being engaging, and if this team ever makes another microvania I am willing to try it, but I'll enter cautious to see if they've learned from what went wrong here.
