Derelict Star

I've never had a game demand I master every intricacy of a small set of mechanics in such a small package. It is like having normal mario levels and kaizo mario levels exist in a single small world. It is so mysterious and challenging, and each step forward feels like significant progress. 10/10 would spend 20 min trying to make a jump between 2 spikes again.

One of the harder puzzle platforms ive played, but gave me a that fuzzy feeling that only Animal Well had given me so far. This game deserves to be much more popular

It reminds me of NPLUSPLUS momentum based movement, leap year's intuition style of exploration, Animal Well's puzzles, and Celeste's precision. Wonderfully simple. Good soundtrack as well.

Incredible game! It's a true open-world exploration precision platformer. You have all your movement skills available from the get go and discovering how it works is part of the fun. The game displays your speed and movement state on screen at all times, helping you visualize it, and there's an incredible Hint menu / glossary going progressively deeper into the details of every mechanic, with you being able to choose how much you want to reveal yourself. It is a pretty hard game, but there's an Assist menu with a bunch of options for you to make it fun for yourself. I'm using Custom Checkpoints + Progress myself.

"Oh, I can definitely pull off this jump this time-NNNOOOOO!" Derelict Star is a great example of how a seemingly simple design can produce immensely complex challenge that is all around impressive, though for me it was simply too much to deal with. With miniamlist visuals and music, the game has very little to show off in the audiovisual department. Some passable chiptunes that play on rare occasions, the endles bumps of boots and physics impacts and very little else are on offer when it comes to sound, and the blocky pixel art is functional and passable, while obscuring the core of the game. Derelic Star lives and dies on its mechanics. A pure physics-based platformer where a running start and clever use of the jetpack and wall bounces are keys to success, with a vast variety of obstacles and challenges to overcome. Much of the finer detail of movement comes from the sub-pixel movements taking place under the hood, which provide a level of precision the art cannot convey, and can also lead to frustration when a control input does influence the game in ways that may not be represented visually as any form of character movement at all. There are sure to be a lot of people out there who will jump with joy at the pure challenge on offer here, but for me it was just too much to deal with. Just finding a path to one of the batteries that need to be collected to advance the game is a challenge and the way back is a gruelling, unforgiving slog of pixel-perfect jumps and bounces and leaps where a sigle mistake will send you all the way to the beginning of the sequence. I'd imagine the vast majority of players will give up early on, unable to rise to the occasion, much as I did. As it stands, for most people, I just cannot recommend Derelict Star despite its impressive mechanics. Based on achievements less than 10% of players seem to have come anywhere close to beating the game, suggesting at a remarkably high rate of attrition. But if you are the rare breed that thrives on frustration, repetition and perfection, you will find something special here that might just scratch an very specific sort of itch for you. Playtime: 3+ hours (A single session of play until a good old-fashioned ragequit) Ratings (1-10) Visual: 6 Audio: 3 Story: 2 Gameplay: 8 Overall: 4

This game is tough as nails, and definitely one that requires frequent breaks for the sake of sanity. However, once you tear through a section you've been struggling with, the feeling of relief and accomplishment is pretty unparalleled. You can only find this degree of masochism from developers who trust the player to succeed. Absolutely recommend for those with enough patience and platformer acumen. Great stuff. Also, if you're looking for a good game to play while watching something on the second monitor, this is really excellent. Story beats are very, very scarce and you know when they're coming. There are no upgrades or enemies. Just you versus the levels. Really great for dual focusing while you reach a near-meditative state making tricky jumps. The only downside in doing so is that you'll likely want to turn off the in-game music, which is a shame, because it's really quite fantastic.

The movement mechanics are really interesting and are introduced or suggested pretty naturally throughout the world. The sense of discovery when realizing some new movement trick is fun, then applying it to bypass some obstacle you got stumped by earlier is even better. Even in the later parts of the game I was still discovering new things. Really impressive depth and variety to the movement. I really liked the world design and sense of exploration trying to find new areas. Different regions emphasize different aspects of the controls and gameplay in neat ways. I had been worried the game might be too difficult or finnicky to make any progress after seeing a little bit of the gameplay, but it ended up being pretty approachable. Don't get me wrong: the game is difficult. There's just a reasonable difficulty curve and the hardest challenges are mostly optional. There's also enough checkpoints so you don't need to redo too many rooms or game segments. I can't overstate how much I liked this one, it's just great overall.

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i'm in green world and i'm scared 10/10

I took a month long break to play other things because I wasn't sucked into the game in the way that I was expecting. Clearly I wasn't in the right headspace because I restarted this week and everything clicked into place. It took a little bit for everything to click into place, but if you have the willingness, that time is worth it.