Earlier this year, Patrick Gill at Polygon wrote an article about "cousin games" - you know, ones that are slightly "off" from what everyone else plays - like licensed games, for instance. He also proposed, but did not elaborate on, the term "uncle game" - and this, this is what I believe to be a true uncle game. You know, the uncle who barely plays games, and usually picks up something cheap that looks like it tickles his fancy to play every now and then. The uncle who still lives in a bachelor pad apartment in his mid-40s that always stinks of weed and thinks that music hasn't evolved since the few first Iron Maiden albums.
I'm going to be very upfront here - this game is [i]not[/i] good, more on that in a bit. But is it an [i]interesting[/i] one? Most definitely. (Also, side note here: interesting and good are not mutually exclusive terms for games - see Angeline Era for an example of a game that is both interesting [i]and[/i] good.) The level design is a mess, the difficulty is all over the place, movement abilities are given out at random in chests, the digitized sprites barely match up with their surroundings in terms of animation frames, the graphic design is on the "this is my passion" level, etc. etc. etc. In fact, it's harder to find things that this game does *right* than it does *wrong*. If anything, this game feels like something you'd randomly grab off of TUCOWS or Softpedia or download.com in the late 90s/early 00s (much like I mentioned in my Monsters of Mican review.) It [i]very[/i] much carries the spirit of that era of shareware forward in terms of quality, design and... well, *everything* about it.
So why the hell am I recommending it? Because of the aforementioned interesting bit. I have a game dev friend who encourages people to make games - she's very much in the realm of thought of "there is no 'right' time to make a game - go out and [i]make[/i] it, regardless of quality, you can always make it better afterwards." This game very much encapsulates that - it's very obvious that this is a passion project that the developers [i]wanted[/i] to get out, regardless of whether it met with the standards of "good" or not. There's a weird authenticity surrounding it - a very much a devil may care quality - "we wanted to make this, so we made this." That isn't to say that other, more popular games aren't authentic, but this definitely doesn't have the flair of "we focus tested this game to death" that far more polished games do.
For an actual review - well, as I said earlier, this game does a lot of things wrong, very wrong in fact. The movement feels sluggish - at least until you randomly get the slide ability, then you can start zooming around levels - and jumping feels "off". This is to say that you never really feel like you're gaining enough height - and some of the platforming exemplifies that, because there's situations where you think you can make a jump, but you're off by 1-2 pixels and you miss it, even though you swore you jumped high enough to clear it. This is only exacerbated by the wonky digitized sprites' walking and jumping animations. This extends to attacking as well, since you're never really sure if the weapon swing is going to actually hit an enemy (and more often than not, if you're slightly higher than an enemy, you won't).
These wonky animations only serve to be a hindrance when trying to combat the numerous enemies in each stage. As mentioned earlier, the difficulty in this is very uneven, with each new stage providing much stronger enemies than the previous stage. Now, I know that's how games work, but at the same time, when most of your power progression is tied to gear that is found randomly in chests, it starts to feel like a chore chipping away at each level slowly, hoping that the next chest you find gives you a piece of gear that extends your survivability out just a bit more. Sure, there is leveling up, and leveling up increases your base stats, but... they never *feel* like you're actually gaining power just through those minute stat increases.
One of the other major problems I found with the game is the fact that movement abilities are also randomly doled out in chests. Now, most of the levels (or at least the ones I have played) are designed in such a way that movement abilities aren't needed for the critical path, but at the same time, without said abilities, it's far more tedious to get through levels than if you had them. Plus, there's more than a handful of chests that are tucked into places that require abilities to get to, and if you get incredibly unlucky, well, then you may not be able to reach those chests until far later than you're really supposed to, and by that point, whatever you get from them will be outclassed.
Also, there's no settings menu - so no graphical options (not that you really need them), no rebinding keys, no volume controls. On the topic of graphics, the enemy sprite variety, while large, very much feels like they're from 6 different games. You have a few that look like they're from late-era NES, some that are from late-era SNES, some that are from early-era PS1 - it's definitely a mixed bag.
All-in-all, while this game is flawed, I've had had a fun time with it during my scant playtime. However, this is not a game I'd pay full price for (as I picked up for $1.49 during the winter sale) - and you can't go wrong with a very janky game for that price.
