Elephantasy: Flipside

If Tunic and Fez had an Elephant baby. This is a good exploration game that does have, in my opinion, a bit too much friction leading to a bottleneck in the mid-game. But is otherwise a memorable and enjoyable experience. To elaborate, you start with every item available to you in the hub, but you can only carry one item at a time, limiting how deep you can explore. With each saved Soul, you can hold an additional item. So the majority of your early-mid game is regularly going back-forth to the hub to swap your item as you find something new to explore. And while there is a fast travel system, it takes up an item slot, so you're probably not using it until you have 2-3 slots. Once you get past this bottleneck, it feels like the game really opens up. The interesting point of the item system is that none of the items are explained to you straight away (except for like 2-3 if you talk to the big dog, or if you read the PDF Manual), so you get to experiment to figure out what each item does and how they interact with your other items. You can also find NPCs that will also give you hints/explicitly tell you about more unique uses of your items, which helps reinforce the thought process of "Oh, what if I do THIS with THIS item?" at all times. There's also a bit of mystery and riddle solving with vague hints by NPCs and partially translated ancient monoliths. In short, it feels like every room has some secret to hide. A cool experience, just be willing to deal with a bit of friction and you'll have a good time.

I tried very hard to like this game, since it reminded me a lot of Solstice for NES, and the dev admitted it was a partial inspiration. That said, I feel there is barely a game here, or, if there is, it's hidden behind such an obtuse opening section that it makes me feel more stupid and frustrated than any attempt at a puzzle game I've ever made before. A giant directionless world is fun and inviting if there are things to explore and actions you can perform, but you cannot interact with anything in this world meaningful at the beginning, and the two-button control scheme made me redundantly summon my bird companion so much I now hate him without any real reason beyond his constant appearance when I wanted to do simple things like move a box or jar or pick up a chicken thing. Your only method of interaction at the beginning of the game is to jump and 'check' things, and the information is so sparse literally anything could be going on in any way and I would have no way to tell, because every direction is just a vast expanse of vaguely attractive nothingness and head-scratching scenarios that make me think "why can the character I'm controlling do literally nothing of value". I get that this is a puzzle game, a genre I do not play often, and that I am dumb, but I have had much more enjoyable experiences with other puzzle games because they at least fed me a tiny morsel of what I was supposed to be doing at the beginning. The dev of this game blatantly told me where to go first (the only thing I'd managed to already figure out on my own), and after watching the first ten minutes of a playthrough on YouTube I learned that basically the only way to go is the way I'm going, except there's some magic tiny thing I'm missing that somehow makes the entire rest of the game accessible. I don't know, I tried a few times, but the feeling of wandering around in this game unable to interact with your surroundings in any way made me feel angry, like I wasn't even playing a game. Like I paid money for something that isn't even designed to be played. Obviously this review is somewhat more emotional than 'logical', but in my view, if a game can make me feel this negative in such an absurdly short section and in so many ways, it deserves calling out. I am sad, because the elephant is cute and I love Solstice. Also the dev seemed nice. At least they got my money.

Fun. Exciting world to explore. Haven't played a game with this graphical perspective before, much less a platformer - and it's great! I wanted to experience that. Also, I like the elephant.