Master Key

A wonderful little zelda-like. Puzzles are fun. They aren't brain-breaking, but they're not all trivial. Combat is pretty decent for gameboy-zelda-like - you need to watch enemies, react to them, not be careless with your attacks, but it's not obnoxiously hard. Music's great, atmospherically appropriate. Game's able to give you the vibe of playing Link's Awakening for the first time. My only complaint so far is that the 2 color pallets sometimes suffer in conveyance; not always able to tell water from land, or what "level" things are at. But this might just come with the territory. If you like nonograms (picross, etc) there's like 150 for you too. Also running as a fox feels great for some reason.

Mostly neutral review, leaning towards negative. I was going to let the game off the hook since it's not very pricey, but most of my thoughts on it turned out to be negative when I put them on the proverbial paper.  Master Key is a basic, casual zeldalike. Its biggest positive is that playing it doesn't involve constantly going into the menu to adjust your equipment like too many other zeldalikes have you do. The simple bicolour graphics are easy to look at and can be set to a number of different nostalgic palettes. The map is big enough to take over 20 hours to fully explore.  The list of negatives is gonna be much lengthier.   A big one is how clunky the combat is. I hated how easy it is to inadvertently queue up actions after attacking -- you'll often end up moving forward after swinging your sword when you really didn't want to. I hated that you can't run without dashing first. I hated how enemies would sometimes (but not always) ignore consecutive swings, as if they had RNG iframes. By default, you even swing your weapon on releasing the attack button, not on pressing it -- an utterly bizarre design decision that can, thankfully, be disabled in the settings. You can move the difficulty slider all the way down and trivialise the combat, but then you're not going to be left with much -- combat is meant to be a core aspect and the main challenge of the game. I've seen some reviews comparing the game to Tunic, but that turned out to be completely misleading. Sure, you play as a fox in Master Key too, but Master Key's puzzles can't hold a candle to the ones in Tunic. There was just a single puzzle that I had to sit down and work out; the rest were either "have the right item", "dig in the right spot", "hit the right wall", "solve a simple block-pushing problem while having an unreasonably slow block-pushing animation", or "use information outside of the game". I'm not exaggerating that last one -- as it turned out, at least one of the collectibles can only be found using information from [spoiler]the game's Kickstarter trailer[/spoiler], making it impossible to 100% the game without outside help. The biggest of the puzzle sins. The game also comes with a bunch of nonogram puzzles, for some reason. I suspect they're tied to 100% completion of the main game too. Another strange decision -- if you want to solve nonograms, you'd get a nonogram game, not a zeldalike. Definitely not recommended for completionists.

This is a really rough recommend. Master Key excels in being a very hands-off classic Zelda style game that lets you find your own way to the end. The game falls victim to some truly miserable combat, annoying area design, and some puzzle hints just feel just a bit too cryptic. This review is after reaching the credits and exploring the 'postgame' for a couple hours. Pros: - Looks and sounds great - The game doesn't hold your hand at all - The overworld and dungeons are very dense with countless treasures and secrets to uncover - Dungeon progression is just as satisfying as any good 2D Zelda game - Every dungeon has its own unique set of gimmicks and mechanics to play with - Every screen feels distinct. I found navigating without heavily relying on my map to be very easy - There is plenty of optional content to explore - There is an entire picross game included with 150 puzzles. You never have to interact with these, but I happily spent a few hours with them - Difficulty is fully adjustable. I set mine to the easiest setting around halfway through the game since I was not enjoying the combat mechanics - You can change the color palette if black and white isn't doing it for you. Neutral: - There are some very cryptic puzzles similar to something like Tunic or Blue Prince, but they are poorly hinted at and far less fun than what similar games have done - There is a brief slowdown whenever you hit an enemy without killing it. It really slowed down the pace of the game. It isn't a necessarily bad thing, but I did not enjoy it. - There is no dialogue at all. Everything is conveyed through symbols and icons. I really liked this, but several people find it annoying - The items you find are nothing you haven't seen before. They are all functional and enjoyable to use, but nothing here is going to wow you. - The visuals can be unclear at points, but this may just be a 'me' thing. - There is basically no story Cons: - Combat feels really awkward and clunky, even compared to classic Zelda games - Every annoying enemy archetype is here. Bats that zip around the screen, guys who pelt you with projectiles from practically offscreen, and complete damage sponges - There are tons of areas where you have limited visibility. There is an item that makes these more tolerable, but they are a constant throughout the game. - The map scrolls at a glacial pace, even when zoomed out fully. If you want a game entirely for exploration and puzzle solving, Master Key will absolutely scratch that itch. If you need fun and engaging combat, look elsewhere.

A truly incredible game, an absolute hidden gem. Beautiful, nostalgic and brilliantly complex. One of the best indie games I've ever played. Warning, you'll not get any hand-holding and you'll need a lot of determination to overcome the puzzles and challenges, but they're all really worth it. I can't wait for the sequel!

Holy crap guys, this is a *fantastic* MV. No reservations. It's really, really great. I just beat the final boss, not 100% yet but I think I'm fairly close, and I can easily say that this is one of the best MV's that I've played. Don't let the minimalist colors fool you; it's incredibly well-done, the music is great, and man, there's SO MUCH EXPLORATION. The map itself isn't that big, except that, oh, it really is. It's dense with stuff to do, with upgrades, with secrets, with everything. This game *has* secrets, and it has tons of puzzles, mostly of the form of "how do I get from here to there", but there are many others as well. Let's start with what it is: a Zelda-like with some heavy inspiration from Tunic and other Zelda-likes. But unlike those games, there's no text except for the credits (and some numbers). When characters talk or when there are signs, they're pictorial. Instead of text, the game is basically *all* exploration, generally requiring you to find abilities to progress, and oh, are there abilities. There are MANY upgrades, and you will be finding them even late into the game. And the progression is not always obvious. This game does not hold your hand. Secrets are actually secret and you need to work to find them. They *are* there to be found! One small point of contention is just how much Zelda is in Master Key, because, well, it's a lot. Several of the upgrades are essentially Zelda upgrades. But the mechanics turn out to be pretty unique. I don't want to spoil anything because being surprised at how the upgrades work is partly the point, and they are indeed surprising. While in the first hour or so of the game you might be thinking, OK, this is a Zelda ripoff, it's really, really not. Zelda wishes it could do what this game does. A, uh, somewhat larger point of contention, and it's the explanation for a good chunk of my hours of playtime, is that the game has, for some reason I haven't understood yet, a bunch of nonograms to solve. You know nonograms? That's the puzzle on a square grid, where there are numbers on the sides telling you how the shaded squares are grouped in that row or column. So a row with 3 4 2, say, will have one group of 3 shaded squares, one group of 4, and one group of 2. Well, there are 150 of those puzzles, accessible from the title screen, and I don't know why they're there. I got an achievement for doing them all, and it was a relatively fun use of a weekend, but I don't think they're mandatory, so you can just ignore them, and I'm guessing a lot of people won't even notice that they're there. If you like this kind of puzzle, well, consider it a bonus. The nonograms all make pictures of stuff from the game, and it's fun to try to guess what it's going to be before it's done. If the idea of doing 150 nonograms doesn't appeal to you, they don't appear to matter at all to the actual game. Anyway, go play this. Even after beating the final boss, there's actually at least one pretty big thing left to do. I don't know what it will result in, since I haven't done it yet. I suppose I could have done it before beating said boss. But I'm looking forward to exploring more of this game, and hey, the dev is working on a sequel! I'm definitely excited for that! Go play it. All right, I've 100%'ed the game, except for the achievement that requires dying many times. The one thing I don't like is that the last couple of discs are not clued (one's not even clued in the game itself), and finding the last handful of collectibles is definitely something you'll want to use a guide for since the game itself doesn't give you any clues about what you're missing. So if you're trying to get 100%, well, you'll need a guide, and I'm not a huge fan of that? I like hard puzzles, but not puzzles where I need to look up the solution. So that's a little annoying. However, the other 99% of the game is all completely doable if you're thorough about exploration. I thought that was great. And I'm now, finally, done with Master Key! Can't wait for the sequel!

It's weird that "Zelda-like where you play as a fox" is its own genre now, but I'm not complaining. Jokes aside, this is a really neat action-adventure game that obviously draws a lot of inspiration from the classic 2D Zelda games. There's a lot of clever puzzles, items to find that are both familiar and quite creative, and tons of secrets. It's also got a really cute graphical style and a catchy soundtrack, so it's an easy recommendation if that sounds like your kind of thing. Edit: I [i]did[/i] have a long complaint here about how the controls were often stiff and unresponsive... but my problems all went away when I switched to a different controller. When I was using an 8BitDo Ultimate 2C, I often had issues with dropped inputs; but after using my 8BitDo Pro 2, all my problems went away and the controls seem perfectly smooth now. Not sure what the issue is, but if you have input problems, try a different controller.

This was a game that I needed to take a couple of breaks from before I completed it. Don't feel any shame in keeping the difficulty setting low, the combat isn't the fun part of this game and high difficulty just makes the combat more of a pain to deal with; the combat is not where the appeal of this game lies. It's a nice little game that's got some fun dungeon design, the puzzles were nice and it gives you a whole bunch of map to explore. You're almost always rewarded when trying to do something to see if there's a secret.

Enorme coup de coeur pour cet hommage aux vieux Zelda vu du dessus. La map est géniale, l'exploration toujours récompensée, les dongeons malins, les boss interessants sans être frustrants. Avertissement cependant : les 1ères heures sont duuuuures avec la difficulté de base. Mais après quelques upgrades et s'être fait au temps de latence des actions, ça devient vraiment un kif. Et au pire vous pouvez toujours baisser la difficulté dans les options. J'attends avec impatience le prochain jeu du dev !

見下ろし型2Dゲームなのだが、至る所に謎が隠れている。 それを解くも解かぬも自由。 そしてその謎のギミックがまあよくできている。 新しく進めるところがないかとウロウロするのが楽しい作品。 ただし、残念なところもいくつかある。 まずかなり頑張って探索しないと、そもそもどこに進めばいいのかわからない状態になること。 次にアイテムのチュートリアルが雑で、使い方がわからないまま詰みそうになること。 そして最後、マップの使い心地が悪いこと。 全体的に楽しいのに、この不親切さで減点もされる作品。