[h1]This is a caveat-heavy recommendation.[/h1]
TL;DR: I recommend this if you:
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[*]Are looking for something short but sweet
[*]Don't care about getting 100%
[*]Want a good speedrun game
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I do [b]not[/b] recommend it if you:
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[*]Want to get 100% and all endings
[*]Are mainly interested in the horror angle or lore
[*]Like playing games on a harder difficulties
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[h2]Gameplay[/h2]
I discovered this game through a Tumblr post from one of the devs talking about the game's movement and the high amount of effort put into polishing it, and it shows: The game feels extremely good to control. Walking, jumping, dashing and running all feel highly responsive and fluid. I never once felt that a death was because of controls rather than being my fault.
Unlike other precision platformers, this game has enemies! Every level has some kind of enemy that can be defeated with a jump or dash, alongside invincible ones. They do a good job of complementing the platforming, although there are some that feel inconsistent about when they spawn and a few are placed too close to checkpoints and will cheap shot you.
There are a couple of bosses too. They're mostly just ones where you dodge a sequence of attacks until you're allowed to damage it and move on to the next phase. They're serviceable, but can get too long-winded since if you die you start the fight from the beginning.
The final boss is a bit more interesting. It can be damaged at almost any time, but in order to actually hit it's weak point you have to do some precarious bouncing or dash while it's using an attack that brings it's hitbox lower. It doesn't fight like a typical platformer boss; it feels like battling against a giant fighting game character. It's a tough fight and while there's some clarity issues with the attacks and has a bit too much HP, it's really satisfying to beat and worth reaching the end of the game for.
As for the game's difficulty, I played on normal and found it difficult, but manageable... because I found the game's sole HP upgrade. I think if I didn't, I would have really struggled or run out of patience in the lategame. (Hint on finding it: be sure to talk to everyone in the village after trading with them.) I don't see myself having any patience for the game's harder difficulties that just give you 1HP/remove checkpoints.
[h2]Characters, Story and Atmosphere[/h2]
Hailey herself is incredibly cute and charming. Her (non-ambidextrous) sprites are very expressive for their small size and have a ton of small details, such as her "crouch" being a cute sit-down and great contextual animations like having to climb up benches to sit on them. She's believable as a 6 year-old, but sometimes references things I wouldn't expect such a child to know about. Generally she has the right level of innocence and simple worldview.
When I first saw the store page for this game I assumed it would lean towards horror, but the horror elements are very light. They mostly boil down to one of the items causing random, irrelevant creepy visuals to appear when you collect them, and (ugh) jumpscares. There's only really two of them, but one of them was so bad it made we completely rethink this review, which was going to be more positive. See the last section.
I'd argue the game isn't really a horror game and more of a game that tries to capture the feeling of a child being stuck in a highly unfamiliar situation they're unprepared for with no-one to fall back on. The plot complements this; there's a lot of cryptic references to background lore, but not enough to figure out any backstory. It exists to make Hailey and the player feel out-of-depth. If you go into this game as a "lore nut", you'll either be underwhelmed or end up going in circles trying to figure out anything.
[h2]100% Completion[/h2]
I can almost guarantee you won't get all the items in any chapter on your first playthrough, and the game appears designed around that. Why? Because gathering a full set of items gets you a gameplay-changing powerup!
Getting the first set unlocks a limited-use high-jump. It’s not just for making the platforming easier; it allows you to get to brand new areas containing tougher challenges with gimmicks from later levels. There's even a secret level in the city you can access with it!
I was really excited to replay the levels because of this, since it gives them new movement options and brand-new level design to play. Problem is that this first powerup is the only one that does this. The rest of them neither make anywhere near as interesting of changes, nor have extra level design to take advantage of them:
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[*]A ground-pound, with a slight bounce on hitting the floor. All it really does in practise is open up certain floors in one level, making it a glorified key.
[*]A projectile attack that kills you if you fire it too fast. It's very situational for the most part, due to the knockback making it very easy to accidentally knock yourself backwards into a hazard/pit. It does at least make one bosses much quicker to beat.
[*]A shield that makes you temporarily invulnerable to damage... and it's nigh-useless! It makes you completely incapable of moving, and can't be cancelled out of. If you use it in midair or with a dash, nothing happens, but the cooldown still activates! It takes really long to deactivate, and doesn't kill a majority of enemies it touches, meaning they’ll just wait on top of you and hurt you when it deactivates, since you don't get any i-frames when it runs out.
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[h2]The Final Level (spoilers)[/h2]
Using one of the powerups on the final boss (if you have the last set of items? Haven't double-checked) causes you to obliterate it in a very cool animated sequence... while also breaking the fabric of reality. Cue true final level: A highly glitched world with 5 paths containing shards of The Reality Orb™.
It's a very mixed bag. Each of the routes challenge you on a certain powerup or combines enemies/gimmicks from different chapters together. Some of these are clever and fun, others feel messy and overly precise, which isn't helped by the confusing layout. Weirdly there are some brand-new gimmicks introduced exclusively for this level, and it really feels like they were unused ideas just dumped here.
I don't care for the glitched tileset aesthetic as I think it's a cliche way to portray broken reality, but more of an issue is that the level feels highly out-of-place tonally. The game wants it to be Hailey's darkest hour, but the background filled with extremely dadaist sprites and the only NPC being casual and nonchalant about the situation makes the atmosphere feel mildly weird at worst.
Once you "repair" the orb the ending you get is the same as the regular ending, expect where the first scene change normally happens there's an [b][i]extremely[/i][/b] cheap "Turned black and started bleeding HYPER REALISTIC blood" jumpscare. I am talking so cheap I was constantly bracing for it to happen in the regular ending, only to be pleasantly surprised when it didn't happen and I got something heartwarming instead. And then the game just writes "Bad" in big red text and the game ends.
I'm not against the idea of a game's bad ending taking more effort to get than it's good one, and you’re very heavily warned about it, but this one felt so cheap and uninspired it left a bad taste in my mouth. You could do something really interesting/f-ed up with the idea of "reality gets repaired incorrectly" but the game takes the laziest route possible and it made getting 100% feel like a complete waste of time.
[h2]Final Thoughts[/h2]
If you just want to beat the game and don't care for 100%, you'll have a good time. Going for 100% may make the game wear on you and leave a bad last impression.
If the devs are reading this: If you adjusted the powerups to be more useful and gave the final level/bad ending some revision I'd give this game a much more solid recommendation.
