Honestly, I have very mixed feelings about this game. I love it, but I hate it as well. These two worlds kept colliding for the whole duration of my playthrough. I played all of this game in one single sitting. It took 5 hours.
So, let's start by why I hate it. This game is basically a Celeste clone, with only different graphics, and some new things. I, unfortunately, couldn't get past this reality while playing Germinal. Next up, the controls. Given that Germinal is a precision platformer, good controls are necessary. The controls are clunky and sometimes don't react that well, walljumping off of sticky surfaces while holding onto them either triggers the double jump or just hover ability by accident, so game over. The movement feels off, it's like playing Super Mario on Nintendo Switch, the character needs a lot of "steering" to control them properly. This issue isn't present in Celeste, however. Madeline moves exactly as you press the keys on your keyboard/tilt your Joy-Con. This is by the way one of the reasons why I love Celeste so much, because the controls are 100% accurate.
I feel like this game was not playtested properly. There are tons of spaces with incredibly strange timing or bad camera. By "incredibly strange timing" I mean those frame perfect cycles that are everywhere in the fifth chapter. And by "bad camera" I mean places where you usually drop down and you see nothing beneath you until you actually hit an obstacle off-screen. The camera certainly needs a lot of improving.
Achievements were, for some weird reason, malfunctioning. I did not earn the achievements for comleting "Crossing the Bridge", chapter one and chapter two. While we are at it, I would also like to note that there are, according to some other player, more bugged achievements like this, to which the developer openly admitted. There is no way one could release their game if they knew major features were broken.
Last, but certainly not least, the collectible exclusive rooms has one massive flaw - usually, you only have to grab the collectible, it gets collected and then, you just are stuck there. The only way out is to either get lucky with leap of faith blind falling down, hoping you don't hit anything or just die. These really mess up the death score. I think there should be something that would return the player to the room start upon grabbing the collectibles in certain rooms.
To summarize things I like, I really liked the story, it was really dark and creepy at times, it was not like Celeste whose story was sad with funny moments at times, Germinal was incredibly dark and it was talking about a very serious problem that certainly needed some attention. One thing I like as well are the notifications when you are about to enter a room that does not allow you to go back. I wished this was a feature in the original Celeste, as I very often found the correct path by accident and missed the oppurtunity to collect the collectibles, meaning I had to go back later. I also liked the Super Mario 64 like thing in fifth chapter (jumping into paintings).
To summarize it, I had fun while playing Germinal, but, like I said, I can't get over the fact that this is basically a clone of Celeste, along with a lot of bugs and inconsistent controls. The soundtrack wasn't anything extraordinary either, it was pretty much average. The only really praisable things are the level design, which is very decent and the story, that's basically everything I can think of. I honestly think that this is a very controversial game. I think you should play it, but I think you shouldn't play it too. I don't know, but I didn't feel like I was playing a new game at all. I felt like I was playing a Celeste mod instead. A paid Celeste mod. Which is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, because all Celeste mods are free.
