In Between

This game's story is semi decent, and the artstyle is fine. But the gameplay keeps changing with obstacles that aren't really properly taught to the player and just add issues to an already frustrating game. The controls don't respond well enough to properly move the character - in many situations this latency caused the character to die because I pushed the stick - while the character was on the surface - and it decided to not move properly in that direction multiple times for multiple deaths. The first obstacle encountered was literally a wall of death. That was so annoying because the levels already restrict your field of view artificially, so it's hard enough trying to figure out a path to navigate. Then they add the anger ball - which just hunts you down, sometimes. I in particular had an issue with "anger" level 4 - where the game does not convey, at all, what you should do in order to properly maneuver the boxes in both sections. I had to look up a video on how to do it, and it still took me several tries to convince the game the boxes should move in this fashion. This was the first time the boxes were moved like that, there was no preamble. The game's tutorial does not teach you this, nor does anything convey this movement beforehand. Another issue is the spike hitboxes seem completely wrong many times. I often just collide into them while walking when I shouldn't be. And they're so tiny that even when I do see them I cannot register that I'll be hitting them and then the sudden jarring death animation occurs. Furthermore, while there's checkpoints in the game, for some stupid reason instead of hitting the checkpoint - which is what most games do - you have to stand there for about five seconds for no reason other than to waste everyone's time while the checkpoint decides to checkpoint. After I got to the level after "anger", I realized I was "angry" at the game and I quit. It's not worth the time. It's not clever, it's frustrating. It tries to do things it's not capable of doing. Perhaps reordering the levels would have helped, or more playtesting, but the gameplay just devolves into frustration and the typical five step grieving process storyline is not worth that to continue. I likely could beat the game - despite probably looking up video tutorials on how to do so - but it doesn't provide me a real reason to continue to just be frustrated with the gameplay. The level I quit on (I think it was anger 5) has a timing based switch thing that I know how to move on - but the controls frustrate my actions to do so, so while I know I need to get the block to the left, then to the right, as my character also goes to the left on the top and then to the right and then down, the controls don't help the case - and so I quit. The biggest thing that could have been done is to add the ability to see the entire map at once, which you sort of do have at the pause screen if you go to the level select, but it's not detailed enough - it should have a map that lets you zoom so you can plot a path. But they seem to delight in curtailing your vision so you can die on spikes that you wouldn't have been able to see until you died to them. I don't have anything really nice to say about this game, it's just frustration wrapped in a decent art style.