GOD'S GIFT

An unforgivingly rewarding trial of patience and sacrifice First, it is impossible to discuss this game without mentioning the visuals. If you like the Eldritch, this game is for you. Even if the pixel art looks inoffensive, the ways cultists are used to summon gifts are...impressingly horrifying. It's also impossible to not mention that this game was developed by a team of 3 people, if I remember the end credits correctly. That adds a lot of awe to many of the things accomplished. This is a game that starts simple and ramps up fast. It does not shy from asking you to really rack your brain, and it utilizes every mechanic ("gift") in its arsenal to as far as they could've possibly been taken. Gifts from hour 2 still had new ways to be applied right up to the penultimate levels. Despite the nature of the game, I couldn't help starting the game by trying to keep as many people alive as I could, restarting checkpoints many times to save a little fool who had slipped (or who I had made to trip). By the time I reached the first world's end though, I had already stopped seeing the cultists's lives as nothing but expendable. And this game has no "S Rank" or "Complete all Levels with no deaths" achievement, which in hindsight should have freed my gameplay a lot faster. It was still fun to try less bloody solutions sometimes, but it was pretty liberating to just yeet a cultist into acid for my own gain. The game feels suffocating at first until you realize how many more resources than you need . I'm pretty sure 15% of the levels I completed through sheer jank, but looking back I'm sure there were simpler solutions. Still, with the generous checkpoint system I was free to try out 2 or 3 approaches to solutions before settling into the one easiest to reproduce, with least gifts expended and risk of cultist death. A detriment to the game is that sometimes the minion AI can be a bit dumb, especially when interacting with the Witch Gift. They are all too happy to float aimlessly into lava cascades! Although I mastered placement and management to keep them safe, it felt more a flaw of the design than an intended difficulty. The gifts are taught through gameplay, as they have no tooltips, so some minute details of their use may not be apparent until a lot of head scratching and trial and error. I encountered some unfortunate glitches when using certain gifts too close to the corner, but the developer is active on Discord so I'm hoping the issues won't remain for long. Some solutions also require quite a lot of precise positioning, which can be difficult when using the Face gift to push cubes and some other examples that elude me right now. On a matter of personal taste, some levels are more long than I'm accostumed to from a puzzle game. You may need to set aside a good hour or two to complete a level, but a big part of that time is actually figuring out your pathing and solution. On a repeat of a long level after my computer unfortunately turned off, I got back to my previous point a lot faster than expected. The music is pretty good. It's very few tracks, but none are grating. Given the average of 5.5 hours per world, it's a testament to their catchyness. (I have skipped the level editor in this review, as I haven't dabbled in it yet, but if it can do anything the game does it has so much potential!) All in all, this is a game you have to brace yourself to finish, for it asks a lot of you. But the rush I felt every time I reached the end of a long gauntlet is hard to get other than in a game of this difficulty. 8/10

To be clear up front, I paid into this via Kickstarter, I didn't get it for free and I'm choosing to write this review because of how much I genuinely love this entire concept. I realize that I don't have a lot of play time visible on Steam CURRENTLY in the release build of this game, (This WILL change in the future!) but I want to stress that I put a LOT of time into the standalone demo build that was released via Kickstarter and from what I've played with so far in the release build, it's only gotten better! Let me start by saying that if you're a fan of Lemmings this game will one hundred percent, [i]definitely[/i] scratch that itch! I can't even begin to describe the maniacal glee(or absolute horror!) you're going to feel when you find your first unknowable, cyclopean altar and watch what happens to your adorable little purple cultist as they willingly confront a fate worse than death just to get you that ability you needed... The art style is genuinely pleasing to the eye, and surprisingly unique and iconic. Everything feels just perfectly stylized. The sprites have got a simple but effective, flat cell shaded style while the backgrounds evoke the flat layered sprite style of something like Out Of This World on the SNES. The art manages to be incredibly intriguing without being overly detailed and losing coherency. The benefit of this is that you genuinely never really find your cultists getting lost in the background or struggle to figure out what is and is not a path or a hazard. The character design is top tier as are the animations. It's a TON of fun watching your cultists mutate in incredibly smooth, gruesome stages, each lovingly rendered for maximum eldritch horror! So we've talked about the art, let's talk about the sounds. The music slaps. Seriously, the soundtrack for this is top tier and I genuinely never get sick of it no matter how much I listen to it, to the point that I listen to it outside of the game! Each piece of music feels distinctly 16bit but much lusher, and all of it has a distinct thematic feel from song to song. They range from generally melancholy to funky to driving to exciting without ever straying too hard from a general motif that ties all of the music together into one coherent package. In short, it's perfect music for a game like this because while it's GOOD it never takes you out of the game or becomes so bombastic that it distracts you from playing. It's also great for focusing. I'm unironically listening to it as I write this. So, Level Design(tm), and the actual game play itself, the Big Bads that will make or break a game like this. I am happy to say that both the level design AND the game play are intuitive yet challenging. Never so obtuse as to be impossible to figure out, and never so easy that you simply trudge through the levels using ability A and ability B until you reach the dopamine hit, and then end up rinsing and repeating ad infinitum. This game mixes things up without ever really throwing you a curve ball you can't figure out with some legitimate effort so that you never, ever manage to get too bored but you also never end up so frustrated that you end up hating it. I'd honestly say it's perfectly in the range of the average player who enjoys puzzle genres or games like Lemmings, Lost Vikings, or Pikmin and has some experience with the difficulty level of classic retro gaming. It doesn't skimp on a REASON for you to be turning all these little cultists into meat slushies while walking around insanity dimensions either! It's actually a fun little Lovecraftian horror story from the [i]Horror's[/i] point of view and I mean, come on, how often do you get one of those, right? Getting to play as a little(Actually quite large.) one eyed horror from beyond the sphere of reason that the cultists MUST follow around in the game world definitely adds a fun extra punch when this easily could have been entirely menu based like Lemmings. Also? Two words: Level. Editor. So that's basically infinite replay value in a game of this style especially with the ability to share levels. And I mean, the play time isn't exactly super short either, 24 levels is nothing to sneeze at so it's got quite a few levels baked in already. This is genuinely an S tier game, completely 10/10, and it had a lot of development time put into it and it shows, so I heavily recommend grabbing it even when it isn't on sale and especially literally right this moment as you finish reading this! :3

Wonderful premise and look. Puzzles grew tiring fast.

This game is a near forgotten gem - near forgotten because it kickstarted 6 years ago and I had forgotten it. :) However, now that it's out, I've played the first couple of levels and it's a good game. I'm glad the developer finally finished it. As I'm sure others will say, it evokes the feel in both gameplay and increasing difficulty of lemmings back in the 90's. It also has a level editor that isn't fully functional yet, but I hope gets implemented at some point. For the price point I'd recommend it.

slay king most of my guys survived did the gods like that?

Pretty great platformer, a distinct feeling of care permeates the art design throughout the game. The levels are well thought out and become steadily more difficult, forcing the player to cleverly combine their knowledge of the game mechanics to proceed. I found myself surprised at the difficulty of some puzzles, but once you start thinking outside the box, the solutions become clear, which feels very rewarding. You can tell how much love went into the gruesome, yet charming, sacrifice animations. The intro is a fantastic set-up for the game's themes and general vibe, a Monty Python style of eldritch dread. However, the game's sound design lacks the same level of care as the art received. Many interactions, menu's, mechanics, etc would have a stronger sense of weight if there were some more punchy sound effects to accommodate them. The soundtrack is also particularly inspiring. Finally, i have found that when making mistakes in routing along the way, there can be a lot of back-tracking and resetting, since the previous puzzles are solved, re-treading the path feels a bit lame, and can be pretty time consuming without feeling engaging. Checkpoints help, but it's easy to accidentally activate them before you're properly prepared to. I feel a quick-save/load system would have improved experience. Overall very solid platformer, and priced accurately, IMO. Great job, devs!

The beginning was very confusing and should have had at least a prompt to say you could jump/double jump to get into the first level. But after that it has pretty good pixel art for the little cultist deaths, and the monsters they turn into, and pretty good puzzles

自分に付き従う信者をあの手この手で「活用」して仕掛けを解いていく2Dパズルプラットフォーマー。 独特のテーマとビジュアルが特徴的なので、トレーラーを見て惹かれるものがあるならプレイしてみて良いかと。 ドット絵でデフォルメされてはいるものの、ややグロテスクな演出が頻出するので、そういうのが苦手な方は要注意。 英語のみで日本語非対応ですが、ゲーム中に出てくるテキストはUIと最低限の操作説明くらいなので、英語が苦手でもプレイに支障はありません。 Steam Deckでもサクサク動きます。 パズルとしては「どの能力をどの場所でどの順番で使っていくか」と言う計画性が求められるタイプ。 難解な手順を要求されることは無く、大体のステージは行き当たりばったりで進めても何とかなります。 とはいえ後半のステージになるほど全体が広くなり、「複数のエリアをどの順番で攻略すべきか判別する」「一つのオブジェクトを様々な用途で使い回す」「あらゆるオブジェクトや能力の相互作用を駆使する」といった要素が求められる為、クリアするには相応に考える必要が出てきて時間が掛かります。 特に、オブジェクトや能力の相互作用はゲーム中に全く説明もヒントも出てこないので、自分で試行錯誤して攻略方法を見出す必要があります。 なお、アクション成分は控え目で、ところどころ操作のタイミングを意識する場面が出てくる程度です。ただ、場所によってはタイミングがシビアに感じることはあるかもしれません。 純粋なターン制パズルではないのでアンドゥはありませんが、代わりにチェックポイントからリトライできるようになっています。 チェックポイントは程良い間隔で設置されており、特に詰み易そうな難所の手前にはちゃんと設置されています。 場所によっては何度もリトライする羽目になることがあるのですが、チェックポイントからのリトライは一瞬でできるので、ロード待ちでテンポを削がれることはありません。 全体としては満足していますが、実際にプレイしていて気になる点が幾つかありました。実際にプレイする際は以下の点に注意してください: [list] [*]上下に移動するプラットフォームの両端で稀にPCやNPCが異常な高さへ跳ねることがある。あまりにも高く跳ねて画面外に行ったまま全く落ちてこないので、こうなったらリトライ必須。 [*]特定のGiftを壁際で発動すると困ったことになり易く、そうなるとリトライ必須([spoiler]「オブジェクトを転送するポータルを開くGift」を壁際で発動すると壁の向こう側に転送されることがあり、そうなると概ね詰む[/spoiler])。 [*]後半のステージほど広いので先を見て計画を練る必要がある。その為のScout modeがちゃんと用意されているのだが、ステージの広さに対して移動速度が遅い。 [*]チェックポイントからのリトライにやや癖がある。「チェックポイントに達した瞬間のゲームの状態」を記録して完全再現する形なので、例えば「多数の信者の移送途中」のような微妙なタイミングが記録された場合、リトライする度に移送作業の続きをやる羽目になる。 [*][2024-08-25追記] 終盤のステージは環境によってはクラッシュし易いかも? 自分はSteam Deckでプレイしましたが、3-7は2回クラッシュしました。クラッシュすると最初からやり直す羽目になり、後半のステージほどクリアに必要な過程が長いので、大分やる気が削がれます。 [/list]

Great pixel art, great animations, great OST, and great puzzles/level design. 2 hours and i'm only 7 levels in, gameplay is well worth the price point. Highly recommend the game and hope it gets the love it deserves.

很有趣，玩法很有意思