It's a pretty fun game, but honestly, the difficulty level ramps up wayyy too hard on level 27, then it calms down on 28-29, and then level 30 is amazingly frustrating and this is coming from someone who did all the C-Sides on Celeste. There's a handful of frustrating levels that I'll mention later, but now is a good time to talk about movement through the lens of level 30, which I feel like my main problem stems from. The main movement is pretty decent, but I feel like it could be tuned a bit. It feels very generic and floaty. In the water, the movement problems are exaggerated A LOT. I feel like if one of either of these are addressed, then the game would be much more enjoyable:
[olist]
[*]The spike size is slightly reduced
[*]The ball size is slightly reduced (when I say slightly for these, I mean probably about a 5-10% size decrease)
[*]Or most importantly, the water movement is improved. Gravity feels like just a slowed down version of gravity out of it. I feel like an easy way to fix the movement in water is to either add a way to swim downwards or give the player a variable jump size based on how long they press the button (i.e. like how Mario has short and long jumps). The second way would probably be the best way to fix the movement, since it seems a lot of puzzles are designed difficulty-wise around the fact that you can only press space to move up in water and then let the gravity pull you down.
[/olist]
I would prefer probably a mix of both paths in solution 3. The movement feels close to being good, but it gets frustrating to work with. Other than that problem and some very frustrating levels that appear after several easy levels, the game is pretty decent, but those issues just take too much away from it for me. The sound design is pretty average for an indie game and there could be a few more sound effects for when the ball is jumping and interacting with the environment, but I do love the music a lot. Furthermore, the Steam Achievements and Badges is a plus, but I hate the achievement for beating the game without dying since so many levels are ridiculous. I feel like some people have cheated that achievement in with SAM. This game doesn't do anything original, but it offers some fun platforming for those who can't get enough. I'm open to changing my score if the movement can be tweaked and some level frustrations are looked at.
A few more things I forgot to mention is there is a semi-annoying bug that I found in level 30, where if you press jump and hit a horizontal platform's corner at a certain angle, you get boosted up at a far higher speed than your initial jump speed and this has killed me several times. I've gotten this to happen on level 30 after you get through the first maze and have to go back up the pathway on the right side to the exit. The first platform ceiling inside that pathway is where it has occurred a few times. It seems like this can also happen when falling down onto corners too, but I haven't had that occur as much because you are more likely to hit corners going up than down. The next thing is another difficulty scaling problem where levels 31 to 34 are very easy and then 35 gets frustrating a bit, but not nearly as level 30. Level 36 gets pretty frustrating as well at the beginning until you learn that you can use gravity to get the ball to fall through the water faster, but this isn't tutorialized that much, so it can be a tad bit rage inducing the first time through with those moving spike pistons. This also feels like a bug, since when you enter the water normally, you start falling slower, but if you enter at a high speed, you just keep going faster and faster like the water isn't even there. The end of this level also kind of sucks. The spike pistons move WAY too fast and I couldn't beat it until I learned that I can just travel around the downwards gravity pushers by going off-screen. This feels like a bug too, but again, without it, the end of this level is FAR too frustrating and feels like you need almost frame perfect movement. Level 37 is horrendously precise and frustrating at the beginning. This was all done on "Easy Mode" by the way. I'm not sure how the difficulty affects the game, but I suspect it might just get faster. The next issue that probably needs tweaking is the clarity of the player's ball with the background. It can get pretty hard to see, so I would either add an outline to it or make the background a bit darker. Lastly, I have a very modern CPU and GPU (Ryzen 9 5950X and a 4070 Ti) and I have experienced several crashes. One was when I turned the game on for the first time and my entire computer crashed (wtf?) and another when I've crashed several times in a level but my computer was fine.
Overall, the sound effects are decent enough and the music is quite nice, however, the game is weighed down by its movement, especially in the water. I weight the movement a lot because it is a platforming game, and good movement is imperative to a user's enjoyment from them. There are also several crashes I've experienced, one of which crashed my entire PC, which has pretty new hardware. This game needs a bit of work, but it has some good bones.
