DragonLoop

This is a very solid time manipulation and routing oriented Metroidvania. There are a lot of upgrades, many fairly unique to this game, and you have a lot of movement potential with those movement abilities to perform sequence breaks and open up alternate routes. To get some of the secrets and macguffins, you do need to perform some of these sequence breaks so the game has you constantly looking for ways to get around having to use one of the zones that advance time. You only have 5 days before you're forced back to the start of the time loop, and there are well over a dozen routes through the areas. Xi's sprite is great and I like her animation, she's adorable. The other characters all have solid and varied designs. Overall it's a really pretty game. There are a few visual difficulties in some places, where it can be hard to tell where exactly platforms and where backgrounds are, but there's aren't enough to really negate the overall look and feel of the game. The translation isn't the best, but it's still better than a few other (still very enjoyable!) Chinese games like Afterimage or Journey of Realm: Dawn Dew. It's mostly concise and understandable. Level design is extremely good. There are so many shortcuts, pathways, options for difficult and not so difficult sequence breaking, and you get a lot of abilities to help with that. There's a decent amount of different environments for being a smallish world, That said, the way passages, npc's and shops, and routes change based on the day of the loop can make it tough to route while also being difficult to track since the game's map doesn't always show what you can reach that you couldn't before, or what is now closed off. As for abilities, you have two types, movement oriented and "tools", both of them help with traversal and bypassing various obstacles (and some of them even do damage and play a role in combat!), the tools are activated with the B button and you have to switch between them with up+B (unsure of the keyboard controls). Switching between while in combat (you can't switch while paused) can be tough and adds a bit of tedium to some routes where you need to use a variety of tools. The movement abilities are better, though I strongly suggest mapping a key to the arrow skill as it's really unreliable when activating it normally. You can map boomerang to a key as well to make it more reliable if you have enough buttons (eg a SteamDeck/SteamController back grip button). There's a normal and a true ending, and I never would have found out the route to the true ending without looking it up. It's complex, requires several optional skills that are not available in the main game, and requires that you have opened up almost every shortcut ahead of time. Even triggering the ending isn't easy, as you need to defeat a particular optional boss then reach a particular area on a certain day, you need to not waste a day and need all the shortcuts open to perform this. Combat in general isn't bad, but bosses are VERY aggressive and very fast. You have very little time to react and punish with your own damage, and Xi's really fragile. Your heal takes some time to cast AND has a significant delay before it actually heals you so you need to be very careful. The true ending final boss is a big gauntlet and was quite difficult to get through, I had to switch which passives I was using along with spirits (familiars/summons), plus use the food/shield mechanic just to be able to get through. I don't have the reaction speed to beat it otherwise. You can grind, as you can spend money on stat upgrade currency between loops. Techwise it ran perfectly on my Linux system, and the CPU and GPU usage wasn't high so it would probably make a very good Deck game. Overall, I really liked this title! It was a challenge but I'm a sucker for good movement and good level design, and this absolutely fit the bill. It also has one thing I liked about the Ori games in that enemies weren't just obstacles, they were a core part of your movement.