This is a game I found when the dev advertised it on the /r/metroidvania sub, and the best thing I can say about is that it was only $3. But this might be the worst Metroidvania I've ever played to completion. It feels a lot like it was taken straight off of the NES, and not in a particularly good way. Highlights include an actually fairly good chiptune soundtrack and decent level design with a labyrinthine layout of branching passages. The first few upgrades are also fairly promising, with unique and fairly thematic things like transforming into a snake, summoning a chariot (that can... eat carrot doors??? among other uses), and a gaze that turns enemies to stone. But the fifth upgrade being just... a jetpack, with no explanation, is fairly weak (we couldn't get Hermes' flying sandals or Icarus's Wings instead?). Still, there's some clever usages of abilities to solve problems, like one reward that requires you to summon several enemies, turn them to stone, stack them on top of one another in a totem pole, and then scale them as a snake to get into a crevice near the ceiling. And the bad is almost everything else. In contrast to the good music, the sound effects are jarring bleeps and squawks, some of which outright ignore the sound slider in the options menu. The control layout is bad, with only two abilities being able to be equipped at a time, and the inventory/map keys being bound to shoulder buttons (with triggers going completely unused). This means for some puzzles having to swap abilities around multiple times within the same room, which is charming on a Gameboy Zelda and decidedly not so on an ostensibly modern Metroidvania. The graphics are a low-fi/early-8-bit-style pixel art that falls just on the wrong side of charming, made worse by exceptionally limited animation. The story is effectively nonexistent, with a single blurb about a MacGuffin at the start and a similarly short "you found it" line at the end. Combat is frustrating in a poorly-balanced-NES game kind of way. Your attack only hits the center tile of your three-tile-high character, or the bottom tile while crouching, or directly under your while attacking downward in midair. Many enemies will leap at you in a way where they cannot be hit by your attack without moving around awkwardly. Ranged enemies fire slow-moving projectiles that zone control large swaths of the screen at a time, and fire off with enough regularity that there's little window to approach safely. Flying enemies hover just outside your range of attack, forcing you to back them into a corner to be able to hit them. There are no bosses at all, which is honestly kind of a blessing given the annoyances of combat. At a medium-short 10 hours to 100%, the game definitely overstayed its welcome, and I can't particularly recommend it.
