Just to make sure there's no confusion, this is a review, and it is for the game Last Stitch Goodnight. It takes the form of a 2.5D side-scrolling Metroidvania with a greater focus on the Metroid part (more on the exploration, less about the numerical upgrades). There's combat and puzzles and talking, oh my!
Straight up, I enjoyed the game and I think it's worth the purchase. There's not a lot else to say without going into the pros and cons of it.
Pros:
- The writing is quite humorous. The sassy main character is particularly fun to see their reactions. I especially liked trying each weapon that I knew wouldn't work on the interact points just to see all the different things my character would say about it. That cleaver truly has a fantastic blade, and I too would hate to see it dulled if I tried to use it to build my very own robot frenemy! Aside from the generic comments, you also get clues to what tool you actually do need for the job (sometimes it's not a tool at all).
- You can't just beat down any bosses. You have to figure out how to weaken them before you can hurt them.
- Weapons get upgraded through quests to make them more powerful later in the game. However, it's almost always best just to use the weapon that does the most damage rather than trying to keep using old favorites. What you aren't using will still have use as tools for puzzles, at least.
- So much lore! Each enemy has its own medical file that explains why or how it was created. Quests often lead to notes that talk about other experiments or the philosophies behind life and death that each of the major characters have. The characters involved in quests will provide more back story from another perspective.
- The game has a decent length to it, and it's also fairly large. I had about 11 hours of gametime by the time I finished the game, with 95% completion. I missed a quest and some notes, which the ending was kind of enough to let me know about, even including the area I should be searching in.
- Every enemy has its own unique attack routine, and in the early game you need to stop and pay attention to how everything attacks and how you can safely attack back.
- There's a good amount of back-tracking, which I enjoy particularly because it tells me I'm playing an actual Metroidvania and not some bargain-basement level-based platformer. I swear I have standards for this sort of thing!
Cons:
- Art style is always a personal preference. Watch the preview videos above and decide for yourself how much you care about the graphics. I will just say that the animations are stiff and don't really get any better throughout the game.
- Enemies, including bosses, always attack in the same way every time. The only variability is when a few of them try to run away from you to create distance or follow you. Also, **** those doctors and their stupid needles that they leave lying around everywhere. >_<
- In the late game, when you have a stupidly huge HP bar and strong weapons, you can just cleave through everything without a care in the world, including those ****ing doctors and their stupid needles.
- Room layouts are half new and varied from end to end, and half palindromic. The furnishings in most sections of a given room can occasionally distract from it, but the furnishings themselves repeat too often and in seemingly random ways.
- Story-wise (minor spoiler): [spoiler]there is a point in the middle where you immediately go from a light-hearted escape attempt to a dark and spooky quest to fix the problems in the mansion, but there is no real context for what happened in between.[/spoiler] Bigger spoiler: [spoiler] After the explosion, you wake up again, same as usual, but everything seems to have moved forward a few decades of time while you were out. By the end, I still couldn't tell how much time had passed, or if really any time had passed at all in that moment. [/spoiler] I tried taking it as a change that was meant to be uncovered through the story, but the story treats you as if you already know what happened. It was a pretty jarring change in tone that I never recovered from.
- WHO IS STOCKING THE VENDING MACHINES!? And why did they set the cost of a pair of shoes so high!?
- Once you have the right tool for the job, puzzle points are typically just press the same button three or four times without doing anything else. It's nice that your brain is getting better at the task with each button press, but I'm preeetty sure I had the right tool after the first press. It would have been nice to have at least a few puzzles interact with other areas further afield in order to unblock your progress.
- A few of the quests end on a disappointing note by just finding a note. The notes explain what happened lore-wise, but your only indication that the quest has ended is that it's no longer in your active quest list.
