Garenburg Penitence: The Riflebird

I'm playing story mode on normal difficulty, and I'm being sufficiently challenged by that for now. I like how short the levels are to beat/lose, so you just want to keep on playing. I'm also a big fan of how the music changes when you're about to lose. Technically not a Match-3 game, since you're matching one color to one marble, but it'll scratch the same kind of itch. I had to switch to easy mode for the [spoiler]doubles[/spoiler] levels and I'm considering switching to easy permanently for Act 6. The difficulty curve is probably fine. I'm just more of a casual and want to read more of the story.

Cute arcade-feel, pretty solid art

Turning out to be so much more than the filler I was looking for Mostly the story, but I do like the gameplay as well Playing further I can say that the game is pretty devious, It will not get uninteresting, so far it has only gotten better, even if not feel-good. This is just... It's too good. Too good. In a painful way, maybe, but still. This is so evil, no holds barred. Not a bad thing, but be warned. Just finished the main story. Really did not think this would be the best game I have played in a while, but here we are. This is so much more than the store page makes this out to be. Believe me. And 3 euros? That a joke? This game honestly means a lot to me.

Story kept me so hooked that it's only been out 1 day and I already have 11 hours in it. Each file keeps you wanting to keep playing to see what will happen in the next one. The levels are designed well, although there is a bit of a weird difficulty curve. Some levels would take me 15 minutes on easy mode and then the very next level would take 30 sec on normal. There were other glitches during my time playing, but they were all patched out as I brought them up. An amazing game by an amazing person.

TLDR: For the love of god, play this game. A story that continuously had me in tears for hours as I played through the later acts, shockingly fun gameplay for a genre I never thought I'd enjoy, an easy enough time if you just want to relax and shoot balls yet a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ challenge if you dare turn up the difficulty or attempt the achievements. The thought of playing a story heavy shooty ball game appalled me, but somehow I was hooked by both gameplay AND writing, accompanied by a unique visual style and music that perfectly immerses you in the emotion of the moment - whether it be the calm main menu, the upbeat story moments or the agonizing downfalls, the game's atmosphere encompasses you completely, to the point where as I played through the final few acts I did not realize it was 3am. This has amazing story, gameplay, audio and visuals, all in a ~10-15 hour criminally cheap game that will bring you to tears either due to an excruciating character betrayal or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wave mode. Play it. And don't just play it once and stop. Open it again. And play it to the very end. And then keep playing it.

Pretty cool, gameplay is simple yet tight, has beautiful multimedia visuals, and the story is interesting to delve into. Better than deltarune chapter 3.

Great, a little difficult, and fun enough to make it a tad difficult to stop. I love the story and the art style. Highly recommend

I'm leaving a positive review for this game out of respect to the amount of work and time put into developing and executing their artistic vision, and that I do genuinely believe that I got the asking price of this game in terms of content and enjoyment. This review is pretty much exclusively referring to the gameplay of Garenburg Penitence, as I intend on engaging with the database logs (how the story is verbally communicated) at a separate time, though from the snippets I read I'm inclined to assume that it's engaging in its own right. As far as the gameplay goes, the premise is simple. The foundation of color-matching and moving on a fixed path is one that can be expanded upon in many directions, but the game capitalizes on this an extraordinarily little amount. The game advertises 130 levels in its Story Mode, but with only 70-or-so unique level maps you're left with a campaign that repeats a good half of its content with no meaningful changes to it. You can clear the orbs in the first two acts quick enough to where your experience with the levels are practically identical for the first fifty-or-so. The second act teases a flip mechanic, but you're not given a level where you're forced to utilize it until the final act. The green levels are identical to the standard levels except every color is a different shade of green instead and it's frustratingly boring, regardless of its potential connection and importance to the story. The difficulty pacing of the campaign feels extremely arbitrary, with levels like 3.19 possessing welcome challenge in the middle of a horde of repetitive nonsense. Outside of those few levels and a frustrating experience with 6.2 (the mechanic in this level is difficult to navigate visually, and disabling all effects does not remove), the only time Garenburg truly experiments with its formula is during the final stretch, featuring [spoiler]procedurally-generated levels, non-bird controls, and trackless orb movement[/spoiler]. Really, the campaign suffers from insane bloat, perhaps as a method of artificially spreading out the story instead of presenting the player with multiple logs at once. If you pruned half of the levels from this game, you'd have a considerably more concise experience still spanning over an hour, but it wouldn't protect the game from its own monotony and refusal to experiment with and branch out from its own design. The game teases you with what could've been, and then ends. A lot of squandered potential in pursuit of pacing its story. There are a few quality of life changes that could the game feel better to play (e.g the addition of a flip button instead of having to press the button you wish to face), but the core problem with the level design is unable to addressed without redesigning a majority of the game. I'm so grateful and proud of the developer for finally realizing this creative project of theirs, and so I will recommend this game on that basis, but it is very clear that story was prioritized over gameplay here, and for that it suffers immensely.

This is the most I think I've cried to a single game before Thank you for making this Thank you for putting it out into the world

If I can be entirely honest, the gameplay of this game was too hard for me and I promptly switched on every difficulty modifier to make it as easy as possible for me, and I still honestly kinda struggled with it. But I think the gameplay is secondary for this game, it's the story you're really after, and this story is genuinely one of the best ones I've had the honor of reading. If you can somehow look past the gameplay and focus on the story, you will not be disappointed.