Full disclosure: I fully believe in supporting Indie studios, which is the primary reason I bought this game. I saw it at PAX East and it was an interesting twist (no pun intended) on a genre that I CAN enjoy, but I'm not a die-hard fan of.
Gameplay: This feels pretty....meh? I tried both Eagle Island and Eagle Island Twist (these are similar but NOT the same game!) and both felt pretty meh.
Soundtrack: Nothing that's going to blow you out of the water, but the tracks I did experience were pretty enjoyable. Very mellow.
Graphics: Intended to be a retro pixel game, this does fit up to the standard. There are options to "enhance" them, but it's just like an SNES emulator - it only "enhances" so far, until it starts to make it look blurry/muddy.
Controls: This is a primary gripe I have for the game, I prefer to play with a gamepad and I just couldn't get used to aiming/shooting the owl.
Caveats: The game penalizes you if you enable certain things, like respawning after death (which you lose all your coins and such anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of a respawn IMO), double/unlimited aiming time with the owl (otherwise, the owl auto-launches after a couple seconds of aiming, whether you're ready or not) and some other "perks" you can enable. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth that a game is going to penalize me for turning on what I believe should be some automatic QOL hacks when I'm not playing on a hardcore mode or anything - the normal "entry" difficulty should just have these things included, or if optional (as they currently are), not penalize me for enabling them.
Overall, I'd suggest only getting this at a discount. Make sure you watch your two hour time limit - I'm within my rights to refund right now as I'm only 80 minutes in (at the time of this writing) but as I said before, I saw this at PAX East, and I like supporting small studios. Although this game isn't totally for me, they've earned my money. Give this one a shot, but play both game modes before you make a decision. One is a rogue-like, the other is not.
Have fun folks!
