Harlow

Such a fun game. Nice and chill. #LitoGang4Lyfe

Harlow is a game made by a person who loves games. A person who loves to torture players with this special little indie game that makes me cry. I’ll explain the crying later, but first let me tell you about Harlow. Although Harlow explores the old planet by collecting “party data” in order to throw a party for colonists, you, the player, get to explore this aesthetically pleasing world of color, layers, and depth that Harlow glides through each level. As you get in a trance from the lofi music, an impression sets in that this game is a cute..cozy..game…AND THEN THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW - YOU’RE ON LEVEL 12, WANTING TO THROW YOUR MOUSE OUT THE WINDOW because this game’s innovative level design keeps challenging you into insanity! Data points progressively become harder to reach. You get into a flow of lobbing Harlow around and then timing smacks you in the face. This game keeps making me gasp and sigh in relief when I barely make it safe after an impossible bounce clearing lava or atomic sewage by a millimeter. And I know I sound tortured in this review but please don’t get it confused. I’ve been having the most fun with this game. It’s a challenge that sucks you in and a rewarding game that keeps you wanting to play on. I love how this game has achievements and unlockable items in order to spiff up the HQ for said party. Who doesn’t want holographic couches and a sushi bar at a party? Plus Harlow’s digital face is too damn cute. A percentage of the revenue gets donated to Cancer For College and Black Girls Code. So on top of supporting independent gaming and design, your purchase helps the future of younger ones.

Excellent gameplay, narrative & atmosphere One of the sweetest, cutest, most relaxing, charming and tearjerking games you will play in 2022 Get it!!! :)

Lovely game with a lovely lo-fi vibe. It's the right mix of relaxing and challenging for me, and I'm miserable at platformers...but Harlow is so forgiving of me tossing them into acid and lava by accident. I just want the space party to happen. And Lito is my fav.

I love this game for so many reasons! Harlow’s beautiful art style, fun gameplay, and excellent soundtrack all come together to form a super polished, memorable experience. Each level is well designed and the challenges throughout keep you on your toes. I really enjoyed checking in with the characters and customizing the space ship between levels. I'll be recommending Harlow to friends for a long time!

Mellow game with a not-so mellow control scheme. Simply put: WHY have a mouse cursor with the drag-movement controls if all you're moving is moving your guy? On the ship, after moving into prompts, I understand. However, the mouse cursor being present always through the levels...it just doesn't need to be there. It more than frequently screws up movement.

While the art is charming, and music, very relaxing, those are unfortunately the only two positives I could give in the time it took for me to give up on this one. The achievements are completely broken (I got the one for beating stage 6 in a certain amount of jumps the moment I launched the game, and neither of the ones related to Lito even thought of triggering, even though I got the dialogue for the friend one and interacted with them so much, the lines started looping), controls wildly uncomfortable (One has to barely move the stick if you want any semblance of control whatsoever), no ability to use the mouse to actually control the character seemingly exists in game (“Drag and Fling” means “nothing you press or do on your mouse will cause anything to happen in-game”), and motion is way too random, all the while demanding precision that's not even thought to be granted to the player to beat levels. Also, Level 5 has some “Party Data” that's seemingly above the double-jump ceiling, making it either impossible to get, or way too finicky. Most of the game feels like blind luck, in other words. [b]Verdict:[/b] In dire need of updates as it's almost unplayable in its current state, both to address the achievements, unwieldy control, and other areas. [b]Placed In:[/b] 4: Dourly Dismissed.

Pretty good game. I didn't think there could be such a thing as a "zen" precision-platformer, yet here it is. The gameplay is original and works well, based on physics engines and the ability to recharge the double-jump each time we touch a surface - well almost all surfaces, and that's one of the many small issues the game has. Sometimes the double-jump should recharge and yet doesn't. For instance, if we bounce too quickly, it seems it doesn't have time to trigger it. Or sometimes even standing still on the ground doesn't recharge it for some reason. And since we can only move by jumping, we're stuck until the game suddenly decides to let us jump again. (I'm not sure why the devs didn't simply make it so that touching anything recharges the double-jump. That would make things not only clearer but less glitchy.) Other than that, the movements are pretty fluid, and it's fun to be able to bounce everywhere. The main issue is definitely the lack of checkpoints. Not that it makes the game particularly difficult, since we never lose any progress, but it's still tedious to restart from way too far, especially considering the time it takes to respawn, which is way too long for no apparent reason. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the levels were supposed to have a bit more checkpoints but were removed to extend the play time - it's a short game. The main appeal is the graphics and musics which are simply beautiful. There's also a sci-fi story which is surprisingly dense for this type of games, although it didn't really catch my attention. And the level design is well built overall. It can sometimes be a bit repetitive since there aren't many different mechanics, but the difficulty curve is pretty good. Anyway, I recommend.

This game doesn't feel great to play. I don't know why but something just feels tedious about this. I stopped playing it because I was not having fun and decided to give it another go now because I'm changing to Linux. There's no volume slider for music in the pause menu, and the music gets exhausting real fast. You can sometimes get stuck when respawning if you try to move too quickly and need to reboot the game. Some surfaces arbitrarily don't recharge your jump ability. SERIOUSLY THOUGH, THAT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MUSIC. The store model of having to first pay to see what you can buy and then buy it again feels almost hostile. And there are some little things about the level design that just feel poorly thought out. Worse yet, aside from all these faults, the game just has nothing I find interesting. Occasionally I'll barely escape death or die in a ridiculous way and that'll be mildly amusing, but I DIDN'T SPEND 4 HOURS LISTENING TO THAT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MUSIC FOR "MILDLY AMUSING". Lastly, this is important. This game has a Steam Next Fest demo but removed it. I played the demo so I'm not salty about missing out on that or anything. It's just that generally any game that does that ALWAYS turns out to be really disappointing when I buy and play it.