Grey Area

This game gave me super-tetanus. Jokes aside, the game is really, really good. Spoilers ahead. It isn't perfect, by any means. It's entirely possible to miss all the power-ups for the game, inadvertantly making the game harder without much recourse. Hints for getting everything can be easy to miss, though this may have been an issue with how fast I went through the game (I like to do things fast). The devs caught my stream and saw that I managed to get *nothing* for the entire game, including a health-up power-up. Bosses are this games weakest link, which is saying something because they're all incredibly creative in their own right. Certain bosses, such as Clockwork Borbo and Goddess of Ichor, have elements of RNG on top of large waves of simultaneous attacks in addition to bosses being invulnerable during otherwise perfect opportunities to attack that make fighting feel incredibly inconsistent and frustrating. Boss attacks aren't always well telegraphed or the intent of how you're meant to avoid hits isn't always clear, such as with the guardian fight not making it obvious you're meant to go to the room to the left to find a safe spot or dodge attacks. The platforming in this game is incredibly tight and well-put-together. Despite the name of the game, there are actually more than drab grey areas throughout the game, and it keeps things fresh and interesting. It's always clear that there are multiple paths around to explore and find things in, but unfortunately I managed to always end up going the correct way when I intended to find secrets. I don't think this was the fault of the game, purely my own failing to find things. My only real complaint is that there are a two major rooms that need checkpoints but do not have them, both towards the end of the game. Having one of the two be a long endurance test of skill is fine, but not two, and not at that length. The music is another phenomenal part of this game. It feels very natural to the world you're exploring. Boss fights are energetic and empowering, but the game is more than willing to have moments where its calmer and quieter, which helps the pace plenty. My biggest complaint is that the game has an unfortunate habit of restarting music a lot, when it should really keep it playing. Chase sections and bosses constantly have their music reset after a death, making the music more irritating by virtue of forcing me to listen to the intro over and over and over. Moving checkpoints and respawn points around to allow for the music to continue between deaths would improve the audio experience greatly with some (hopefully) minor tweaks. The story isn't one-note, it does a phenomenal job of just telling a story through its world, set pieces, and characters. Hailey feels like a kid dropped in a foreign and scary world. That being said, there are plenty of hints at something bigger going on, but the game refuses to put more effort into explaining it, because our protagonist sure as heck wouldn't be able to engage with it at her age. It's very good, and it's a nice and simple ending. Tell your parents you love them. Now I don't know if this was just an issue with my computer, or what, but the game had a nasty habit of completely freezing any time I tabbed out of the game. I was playing in windowed mode, if that helps. I sincerely hope this isn't something that affects more people, because it can be horrible to lose a lot of progress very suddenly without much recourse because you needed to respond to a message from someone. With all that said, this game is incredible. There was clearly a lot of heart and soul put into this, over its 3 year development, and the devs deserve great commendation for their work. Every nitpicky problem I list out here is one that I hope they take into account for whatever they do next, because they clearly have the creative ability to do more awesome things.

Overall a very good game, a solid precision platformer with light horror elements. Controls are fast and very responsive but it's a bit hard to stop your dashes in the exact place you want (which you need to do constantly). It has some rough edges, most notably that it's bad at telling you when you've saved (although it does so more often than it looks, and I'm guessing that'll be addressed in some future patches). It's short, only 5-6 hours, so maybe wait for it to go on sale. But do get it if you like precision platformers. Going for all collectibles is effectively a New Game Plus mode and can extend it to ~9 hours.

This game controls beautifully. The levels were expertly designed around the angles of each piece of movement tech. It's kinda difficult, kinda frustrating, and you can go really fast if you know what you're doing.

Most enjoyable 2D platformer I've played in quite a while. The secrets and optional collectibles are fun to find, level design is tricky but rarely outright sadistic, and the game feel is honestly almost perfect. The movement is snappy, fluid, and responsive, and the dive mechanic is ridiculously versatile and satisfying to use and master. The only problem is the camera - it's fine [i]most[/i] of the time, but in some stages it has a habit of whipping back and forth erratically in the middle of platforming segments, which can get really disorienting. Aesthetically, the game is great. It's cute, it's creepy without relying on obnoxious jumpscares, there's a lot of variety to the different areas, and characters, bosses, and enemies have a lot of personality in their designs and animation. The sound effect work is great too. The difficulty is good. I played on the normal difficulty and found it a satisfying challenge, even if some of the later stages got stingy with the checkpoints at the same time they got generous with the instant death pits. The game was frustrating at times, but, you know, the good kind of frustrating that motivates you to persevere rather than get mad and stop playing. I'm not a fan of how the saving in the game is done, though. [i]Sometimes[/i] you save at benches, [i]sometimes[/i] the game autosaves, and [i]sometimes[/i] the game doesn't save at all. It can be hard to tell when you can quit without losing progress, and if you miss the little notepad save icon it's often not very intuitive when the game decides to autosave. I beat a boss, sat through the monologue, moved on to the next room, then quit and took a break, and loading the save took me back to before the boss encounter. Maybe that's my bad and I didn't read the "last saved at" menu text properly, but I would have preferred if the game stuck to the manual save bench system, or at least made it more obvious when the game was saving. If you play in long, uninterrupted sessions you might not even notice this stuff, but I tend to take a lot of breaks, so it stood out. Either way, Grey Area is great, and very much worth your time even with those small issues. Looking forward to playing as Adult Hailey with a big ass gun in the sequel.

Very good little indie platformer! Lots of charm and strikes a great balance tonally, and gameplay-wise it's very fun and plenty challenging. My only real criticisms are that it's a bit short for $20 (although the amount of secret stuff to find and mess around with helps), and that the enemies sometimes feel out-of-place relative to the rest of the gameplay. Overall though I certainly recommend this game if you like platformers and want to try one with some fun unique ideas!

It's a nice game, reminds me of Celeste.

少女が次元の狭間の不思議な世界を冒険する2Dプラットフォーマー。 洞窟物語のような操作性で、細かくチェックポイントがあり面クリア型のような精密アクションに、 奇妙な生き物たちと話して回るADVパートが挟まる作りでとても嬉しい。 クリアまで6時間程度。テキスト読まないといけない謎解きがあるので要注意。

Nice platformer with cool controls and a cool aesthethics. Nice to play. A bit hard and has some issues (like in the titural grey areas a lot of things are hard to see, like spikes and checkpoints, because of the grey on grey; a puzzle there that I resorted to brute force), but several others I noticed got patched in the mean time so they might get fixed in the future (or have already been fixed and since I didn't play the early levels again I didn't notice). Took me about 3h to reach and beat the second boss, no idea how far in the game that is. Not sure I'll finish the game yet, as it gets a bit difficult, though I haven't tried the easy mode (that gives you an extra hit point and a double jump) which might get me to see the end if I'm close. If I do finish it I'll update this with how long that took me.

A very fun and challenging platformer that clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into its design and mechanics

Grey Area est un jeu très charmant, même s'il n'est pas dépourvu de défauts! C'est un jeu de plateformes exigeant où l'on contrôle une petite fille pouvant sauter et dasher sur une trajectoire horizontale. Dasher dans un mur fera rebondir notre personnage, une technique essentielle à maîtriser pour pouvoir progresser. Tout le jeu tourne autour de ces techniques, avec en plus quelques capacités spéciales qui peuvent être débloquées en collectant des objets disséminés à travers les niveaux. Après avoir changé une option dans les paramètres, le personnage se manie assez bien et la marge de progression avec la précision du dash est très satisfaisante. Tout n'est pas rose toutefois, car si la maniabilité est tout à fait correcte, l'environnement que nous traversons est beaucoup plus hasardeux, notamment à cause d'un level design qui ne progresse pas vraiment au fil des niveaux. C'est à mon avis le plus gros point faible du jeu, et c'est bien dommage car le niveau final secret introduit des mécaniques qui montrent toute la profondeur qui aurait pu être apportée plus tôt au level design. Mis à part ceci, le jeu fait le choix intéressant et peu commun de proposer plusieurs difficultés, offrant au joueur la possibilité de jouer avec un point de vie comme la majorité des [i]precision platformers[/i], ou de s'en donner plus, jusqu'à 4 points de vie. Un double-saut est également proposé dans la difficulté la plus facile. C'est simple, mais c'est efficace pour adapter le jeu à toutes les audiences! Côté histoire, le jeu ne se prend pas particulièrement au sérieux et l'écriture en souffre un peu, mais il a tout de même le mérite d'offrir un scénario engageant, complémenté par une esthétique pixel-art aux petits oignons! Bref, Grey Area n'est certainement pas parfait, mais c'est un jeu qui prend des risques et n'a pas peur de montrer sa vision des choses, et rien que pour ça il mérite d'être essayé!