Another example of detritus stuck to the bottom of your Steam library.
The game is bad, let's just rip that off right quick.
Element4l is a game where you play a stupid little sprite thing with a perpetually happy face. You can turn into an ice cube by pressing left, a bubble of air with up, a rock with down, and a fireball with right. The big idea is that when you turn into a bubble, a fireball, or a rock, you gain some upward, downward, or rightward velocity. Then you use this to attempt to slide on surfaces to progress through the levels. That's about it.
I would more describe the game as a puzzle game personally. The puzzle elements come in the form of figuring out which order you have to use your abilities, in order to progress. That's it. And it'll be consistent, or relatively consistent, so long as you do the right abilities, in the right order. This is one of the biggest problems I had with the game because when you are stringing together like 6 to 9 inputs, or more, over the course of 20-30 seconds, it becomes extremely frustrating. Even if you know what the game wants from you, figuring out exactly how you are meant to arrive there, can be completely unclear.
I guess I need to be clear about what you actually DO in this game, and mostly, you just go down slopes. That's it. It's like skiing down slopes. You just go down them then up other slopes. Then you go down some more. Then up. Occasionally you break a few walls using your rock or ice cube form. The game has a real hard-on for, once in a while, forcing you to 'somehow' go left, because you don't have any buttons that directly give you leftward momentum, so you need to usually just go up or bounce off something to get some leftward velocity. That is literally all there is to the game, just sliding on slopes.
There aren't even like, what we would think of today as advanced elemental... stuff. Hell, even at the time there was Magicka, Magicka 1 came out in 2011! And that game is loaded with playing with all the elements. Here, despite the game being called 'Element4l' it only has like... 6 or 7, if you count INSTANT DEATH (radioactive terrain?) as an element. Other than your four, there's lava, and water.
The game touts itself as an 'immersive and experimental indie platformer with a strong focus on flow and smooth gameplay with an exceptional soundtrack'. I think I disagree with all of these claims.
For one, this game is not at all immersive. It just isn't. To be 'immersed' in a game generally relies on the fact that one feels they're somehow in the game, or being drawn into it. The game is too amateurishly put together to really do that. An immersive feel could have been achieved by, having a more detailed environment, or having more elements to play with, or something like that, but as it is, the game just feels like you're playing someone's Line Rider level.
I don't think you can call your game 'experimental' just because it only uses 4 buttons. It's certainly not for the physics-related stuff, or the 'combining' elements stuff - that was all in very mainstream video games. So it's down to the four buttons thing.
Did you know there were games produced in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that only had 1 or 2 buttons? Just putting that out there.
I think that the 'strong focus on flow and smooth gameplay' is more of a weak focus, because I think almost at no point in this game did I ever manage to clear even one section without dying, or without being confused as to what the game actually wanted. There might have been one or two bits in the first quarter of the game where I was like alright, I get it, but especially once you reach the second half, it just breaks down into retrying the same part over, and over, and over again. This is not smooth! This is not flowing at all!
A game like 'Thomas Was Alone' where you see the entire stage and just lose yourself in 'the zone' of moving cubes around the screen without stopping, that is what I would call a 'flow' state. Or even like Tetris, if you like Tetris - certainly not this, a game where you die nigh constantly trying to figure out what to do.
And then there's the 'exceptional soundtrack'. I don't know how many songs are in this game, it feels like maybe 3 or 4, because I kept hearing that one track with the laughing children on it and the annoying chime or whatever that was. If you really want to hear an annoying, inaccessible, weird soundtrack to a game... this is it. I would more call this music 'experimental' more so than the game itself. And I understand, this was a one-man dev team throwing a game together in Unity in 2013, when everything in the indie scene was harder than it is now. I get it.
Still, I'm gonna point the music out as not great, and at worst, distracting. The music, in fact, is one of the greatest reasons why I could not get immersed into this game even if I tried. None of it really fits the game, and the track I referred to actually had more of a horror sound to it - that kind of bells or chimes along with the sounds of laughing children, makes it sound like a horror theme. It's inappropriate for this game, it's just tonally inconsistent.
So now I'm done ripping the store page apart, let's also take this chance to talk about the technical problems this game has. Stuff that's not just my opinion but a fact about the game.
The game is a physics-based game made in Unity in 2013, the game was designed with a 60fps frame rate in mind when they were designing the game. Unity games, when you play them well above the correct frame rate, their physics tends to bug out and stop working properly. This can manifest in several ways - let's say you're playing at 180fps, on a 180hz monitor instead of 60fps on a 60hz monitor, this can mean that some forces that shove the player might shove too hard, because many more instances of 'shoving' is happening per second.
This also means you get slowed down way faster, at almost triple the speed, because surfaces that would normally leech velocity from the player, now are leeching 180 times a second, instead of 60. This is how I understand it anyway, but regardless it's just a known fact. Even modern Unity games like 'Outer Wilds' have problems where the physics can break down and cause bugs in the game.
This is an entire game based on physics. There is no way to cap the frame rate. Not only that - Element4l does not even have a 'video options' menu WHATSOEVER. There is no vsync, there's nothing at all, so I had to manually use an external program to hard-cap my FPS to 60 so that the physics would work correctly. This for me was one of the most frustrating things, because I knew all about this before I even played this game, but if a layperson were to try to play this on their nice modern system, they'd probably pretty quickly get stuck on something, somewhere they weren't meant to get stuck, and then get frustrated and quit.
And I know a lot of players already did just that - because this game has something like a 7% completion rate. So only 7% of players, actually beat this game. With some quick maths, that means only about 30 people who left a review on this game on Steam alone, actually beat the game. Wow.
Anyway, I sure did. It was complete pain and suffering and by the end I was just relieved it was over, which in itself I think is a bigger problem than anything else I mentioned - that I was incredibly angry and frustrated for the three hours it took me to beat this game - but yeah, I beat it.
Special note here about the incessant pop culture references. You might look at the game and be like wait what are you talking about, except for no reason at all, maybe as a private in-joke (let's see how badly I can date my own game LOL) the game just name-drops Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, The Goonies (1985), and a handful of random known figures, like Tony Hawk. I did not like these, I didn't find them funny, and they were distracting.
So yeah. Avoid this game.
