Kalevania

The game is linear tight stages but with a layer of RPG fun with getting money and buying equipment, and the equipment is satisfying because it appears on your sprite. Very fast paced and rich content that's always throwing new stuff at you while you're rapidly obtaining new equipment. There is a great amount of spectacle as well with incredible boss set pieces that go totally out of control during the last couple of stages of the game. The only negative would be the fact that it's quite unbalanced and easy-ish even on hard mode once you get the first weapon and some upgrades. You can easily get lots of lives and mash through some of the bosses without having to learn them too much. Some people might not mind this, but the more arcade minded people mind find the action a little less meaningful because of that. Ultimately though the fun and spectacle of the very focused and rich experience is great to play through and I can only recommend to the developer to make a more difficult mode for replayability so that the incredible content can be enjoyed in more detail with having to more precisely learn boss fights and such.

Edit: Nevermind, after trying to beat the skeleton boss for another hour, i realized that the lives do frustrate me too much to keep playing. I get that the lives are there to mimic a classic nes game, but they honestly just cause me way too much frustration and stress for it to remain a good experience. I also know that I am an idiot. Seems great so far, but keep in mind that i am only in the third actual level. The very beginning felt pretty slow and i was starting to think that maybe this isn't my kind of game, but after getting the sword the game got way better. The graphics are extremely good so far at least, and the music is really good too. The rest of this is more of a message to the developer, than a review. I personally don't like the inclusion of a life system, since we are not in the coin-op era anymore, but that is just personal preference. I think it would be better to make the lives system on by default and give players the ability to toggle it on or off, maybe behind an accessibility menu like in celeste?

Tää on hyvä peli.

The framework is solid and there are lot of things that invite you to play. However, over-reliance on delivering old-school experience does more harm than good. Your character begins in the main town, where you may find your first magic ability and a store where you can use the game's currency, copper, to buy stuff. Because there is not much else to see in the village, this shop is the main reason for coming back. Some items significantly alter the game. The upgrades that don't cost much include things like glide, better attack, and double-jump. However, as this is not a metroidvania, you can also totally ignore them. The hero is quite capable of handling everything with its sword and runes that are your standard elemental powers. Additionally, you may need to use them to create a path or destroy something. The issue is that runes need to be restored by collecting mana. Even though the game tries to address this by respawning everything every time you move screens, you typically run out just when you need it most. Stages are visited from a map and completed in a linear order. All are filled with enemies and pits that want to make your life miserable. The hard difficulty might be too much for the first playthrough because enemies have more health and add a ranged attack to their arsenal. If you want to avoid situations where an enemy hits you right over a hole that causes you to fall in and die, go with normal. Stages end with a boss fight. There's no strategy involved because good old button-mashing does a fine job. By the way, the entire stage can be beaten by just moving forward and attacking, especially with the new weapons you receive after beating a boss. Since the game works on lives system, those insta-kill pits were a deal-breaker. Lives don't reset, so if you finish a stage with only one left, you'll have to be extra careful, search for lives around the stage, or buy it in a shop. The game’s mechanics do not make the experience any easier. You also need to worry about hooks you can grab onto, underwater parts with air bubbles, and wider pits that can only be crossed by building your attack power and turning your sword into a pogo stick.

Short (less than 2hrs) but fun game in a spirit of shovelknight and others alike.

[h1] This isn't the next witcher. The book was better. [/h1] This is very rough game, and I can't really find any positives from the mist of mediocrity and sins towards the genre: [h1] True colors: [/h1] You might look at the trailers and see a classic pixel-perfect adventure. An art style focused on limited space and palette, no single pixel representing anything in particular, perfect compromise between abstract and representational art. However, you quickly see that the game isn't bound by a shared palette, as each piece of art has different colors, blurring the difference between one object and another. Beard of the main character is a blob of grey where each pixel has it's own unique color. This isn't really pixel art, it's just art, pixelated. [h1] Fake pixel art: [/h1] But the quality and lack of palette aside, the pixel art is a facade, everything seems to be handled through forces and sub-pixel movements, so you get weird unity-feeling object and player physics in a pixel art game. The smoothing on the camera is awful and unnecessarily strong. It fails to convey any momentum and constantly lags behind the player. So much wasted effort into a smooth camera when a simple follow with leeway based on screen direction, similar to megaman or mario, would've been enough. There is in fact no leeway, so the camera jerks back and forth when running back and forth, so the smoothing doesn't even do anything. [h1] Gameplay: [/h1] The combat can be described with a single word: Ugh. The movement of every object is janky, as their full motion is pixelated instead of being based in the pixels themselves. These physics puzzles do not fit with the game at all. There's invisible walls everywhere, which coupled with the incredibly bad art direction make it impossible to have fun exploring the levels. You will constantly be stopped by boxes that use same colors as the background, or run past walls that were apparently in the background. You cannot know what can be destroyed by a punch until you do, so you will find yourself hitting everything, but this will in turn softlock many rooms so you must run to the start and back to reset it. This isn't fun or interesting. [h1] Buttons and zippers: [/h1] There is no tutorial on what buttons to press. I pressed literally every button before I found the magic attack. Menus use words like "jump-button" instead of referring to it by the key input. Jump and attack are mapped opposite of the most common keyboard platformer layout, and you can't change that from anywhere. Want to leave the game? Test every button on your keyboard, or do as I did and ctrl+f4'd out. Closing a program should always be easy and clear, that's number 1 of making software: It doesn't matter how bad it is because at least you can close it. But this just feels like trying to frustrate the player for 2 hours so they can't refund. Why else would it lack basic functionality like closing the program and changing button mappings?

Amazing Vania game with good music, rock solid gameplay mechanics and finnish humor perkele!

Perkele!

An amazing Finnish designed NES era retro game. I feel like it needs a true Hardcore mode though with no continues. Still an amazing little game nonetheless. :)

Entertaining little game with that looks pretty good and plays well. It took about two hours to complete so it's bit short for 10€. Definitely worth a price when its on sale (last time it was 2.50€).