I’ve been debating with myself if I should give this game thumbs up or down. It’s not an offensively bad game in any means, I think it’s just largely undercooked and in many aspects boring.
You are presented with two difficulty options: Original and Explorer. Original takes away chunks of your health after each death, which require spending the in-game currency (nanogel) to restore. It’s tedious for both those who just hate this kind of mechanis, but also for those who want to try and engage with it, since all you need to do is to go one screen over from your save point and farm nangel from bunch of scrub enemies. It doesn’t add anything interesting to the gameplay loop except additional grinding.
In the end I went with the Explorer mode, which gets rid of that mechanic altogether and I’m glad I did, because the game still had plenty of tedium in it to annoy.
The game is structured as a series of fetch quests. Your first goal is to reach the typical metroidvania hub, after which you’re sent to collect five items and bring them back. The first two items have to be collected in a strict order, the rest can be picked up whenever. The thing is, you can carry only one of those at a time, so anytime you pick up one of these quest items, you gotta backtrack directly to the hub (and you aren’t allowed to use fast travel points). I guess the idea was that the player will have to plot the safest route back once they are carrying a mission-critial item, which in practice means traversing a bunch of empty hallways.
Speaking of those, there’s a lot of them. And your sprint sucks. Some of the big vertical shafts that become accessible once you get wall jump are literally a pair of parallel walls with no enemies, no jumping puzzles, nothing. You just mindlessly spam your all jump until you reach your destination.
Now, here’s the thing. I know what the game is trying to go for. The attempt at creating an alienating, isolating, dead alien world is clearly visible and commendable, and shows itself through the admitedly great background art (which I totally vibe with, personally. It’s suitably weird and unsettling, without going into gory or disgusting territory. Some of the backgrounds I’d even call beautiful). But at some point the player will just zone out because there’s no gameplay stimulation. And I’m not talking from a perspective of some godlike Silksong/Nine Sols challenge freak, I like my metroidvanias on the chill side. But man, just make the rooms smaller. Throw a small platforming challenge here and there. Anything.
Speaking of challenge, the game is pretty easy, and I feel in some instances not in a way it was supposed to be. Like I said, I played on the Explorer difficulty. Most enemies didn’t pose much threat, except maybe two or three types (the annoying punching guys for one). Once you get enough health and firepower upgrades, enemies become pushovers. Which is fine, it’s the standard Metroid formula, and admittedly feels great in this game too. What feels weird is how certain upgrades let you cheese some bosses in a way that doesn’t feel intended. Like, yo ucan sometimes just park outside the barriers that denote a boss arena, and start spamming homing projectiles. What? That doesn’t seem like an easy fight because I selected the easy difficulty, it feels like it’s easy because devs forgot to program something in.
Let me go back to the visuals for a moment. I mentioned that the backgrounds look great in my opinion. Well, what about the rest? The game is based on the paper doll style of animation. Personally not a fan of this style, but I’ll admit, Ghost Song did a good job at making it feel less janky and inorganic than most games that use this technique. Enemy design ranges from suitably alien-ish, to literally just a blob. I guess artists sometimes just want slower days at work. I can relate. What weirdly stands out in a negative way are the foregrounds. You know, the shapes that are used to obscure the geometry of the level, make it feel a little less gamey and more like an actual existing space. They’re kinda bland, and in a couple of instances literally hide a platform yo ucan reach, but you’re just standing there, wondering if you need double jump. There also is almost no layers to the foreground. There’s the ground layer that you stand on, and then there’s just black silhouettes. It’s less jarring inside caverns, but it also happens in outside areas (for example, literally the start of the game). It’s really weird.
In the end, would I recommend the game? Ehh, not really. You’re not missing much by skipping this one, unless you’re a huge metroidvania freak. Even then, I’d say get it on sale. It really feels like this game needed some more time in the oven, which is crazy once yo urealize it took 9 years to make (2013 – 2022).
