Bye Sweet Carole

I really wanted to like this game. It has a lot going for it. The art is great, the voice acting is good and the narrator adds a touch of class. However, the gameplay is mostly tedious and often annoying. After you take an action, there is often an unnecessarily long delay before you can take another one. The loading screens are frequent and long. Much of the gameplay involves solving puzzles, which would be fine unto themselves but frequently you have solve a puzzle while avoiding a monster by outrunning it and then hiding. The areas this takes place in are small without a lot of room to maneuver. It becomes so frustrating when you know what you have to do but can't because you have to wait for the monster to go away. The game has a few great ideas but you have to wade through numerous half-baked ones which ruins the experience. The combat is lame and tedious, but infrequent. There is a balancing mechanic which takes the air out of the traversal. The platforming is janky. I enjoyed the puzzles but there was too much in the way to make them stand out on their own. Early in the game, you are introduced to pink mailboxes which you end up finding in every chapter. There was a tooltip explaining them on the first one but I skipped through it too fast and wanted to re-read what it said and couldn't. You can interact with each of them but I went through the whole game without ever figuring out what they did or if they were actually important. The story is decent but you have to get to the last chapter before it all comes together to make sense. I had to force myself to finish the game. They give you 4 save slots but I can't imagine ever wanting to play this again. There are achievements indicating you have to play the game at least twice to get them all. No thanks. I deleted it as soon as I rolled credits. It's cool if you want your game to look like something from 35 years ago, but don't make it play like that. There are so many modern 2D games that emulate the look of something retro but still feel modern. This game just feels like the devs put as much friction as possible and it's just not fun most of the time. I can't imagine this game had any significant amount of playtesting. I would love to play another game that looks like this that has a lot more polish.