Chirax's Fortress

If you're a fan of retro platformer's Chirax's Fortress is a must. It's fun and tricky with tightly designed levels, interesting mechanics, and loads of charm.

Quite the adorable game and well fleshed out.

A hesitant recommend, for now. The game wears its Yoshi's Island inspiration on its sleeves, but it also has unique mechanics and enough charm of its own. The hydra's 3 heads are used in some pretty cool ways, and the overall level design throughout the game is good. Difficulty is low, but that's fine. The length might be a tough selling point, as it took me less than 3 hours to 100%. As of now this is a nice little platformer with a great art style and music, but I think there are a number of ways the gameplay could be fixed or improved: - Bosses need more attack variety. This is my biggest problem with the game currently. Most bosses only have 1-2 different attacks, and they don't change as the battle goes on. Some ideas to help with this: The ship boss could summon some smaller enemy ships occasionally (currently it only fires cannonball the entire battle). At low health, the puppet could spawn some small obstacles in the arena that you have to jump over as the room rotates. Valvegear could have a couple projectile attacks which also consume water, instead of just using its 1 melee attack the entire battle. - Occasionally gems are just given away for free, which is disappointing. It feels like a much better reward when they're hidden or locked behind enemies/platforming challenges. - After finishing a level, the game spawns you at the start of your current world for some reason. Why does it not spawn you in front of the level you just completed? - The pipes in valvegear's castle (w5) make the camera go kinda crazy. - The first time I beat valvegear, the door to exit the level didn't spawn. I had to quit to the overworld to get out. Thankfully the game had saved my progress, but this was definitely a bug. - The current credits and ending feel unfinished. The game loads into a "thanks for playing" screen with no info about who actually made the game, and it just loops from there. As far as I can tell, you have to pause and exit to menu to get out of the credits, which is very strange. I'd definitely recommend going through and reworking this. - A way to rebind the controls would also be great.