*Noted inline where Negative issues have been addressed by the 1.01 patch (I still don't recommmend this, but it is improving. I will give it that.)
,,,if this is designed to be kid-friendly, it features some of the worst difficulty design of any game I've ever seen.
It plays like One Day For Ched for Kids with some incredibly awful weapon physics.
However, if the 'kid-friendly' was meant as a troll & it was meant to be either a hardcore shooter or a inobvious rage game then it worked.
If 'One Day For Ched for Kids' doesn't make sense, good, you may have wasted less of your life than I have; here is that sentiment but in list form.
Positives:
- The environments were fine.
- The sound was annoying but appropriately spoopy.
- The second weapon you get is a skull with spinal cord which fires cannonballs & alternate fires a cluster of jiggly ghost skulls, this is the biggest plus in the game. I was also managing to hit enemies on the other side of walls with this, don't know if that was by design.
Negatives (this one got updated after playing this for another hour...the positives did not):
[FEATURE REMOVED] - Tried to use the 'Watch Intro' button, the first 3 times it played the first 3 seconds & then went back to then menu; the 4th time it played the whole way through. The cutscene was fine, it made an attempt at threading a story although the "Egypt" world boss is shown on top of a castle which is a different level set; that is just me being nitpicky, it is mainly the 4 times to watch it once that makes it a negative.
[PATCHED] - Not that the games has Settings or Options from the ESC menu, but in-game, if you spawn into a level & press ESC (at least in the "Egypt" maze level) all of the skeleton & mummy enemies will get sucked through the walls of the level & mash up against the player. Oddly, not all the enemies get clipped through the level, the wobbly scarabs & the ghosts stayed in place.
This isn't really positive or negative, just never seen it before in any game ever.
[PATCHED] - Maze Mode will (maybe unintentionally) randomly generate a hedgemaze of the 5 times I loaded it, 3 times it didn't have an entrance & the other 2 times it was one corridor, an open field & the house with the candy dish which is the ending trigger. Dreadful.
- Pumpkin Patch (the Bonus Mode) is a sandbox with all the assets of the game scattered around the map & a hedge maze, so you can make your own map I guess.
- Enemies don't have useful audio cues, so you get snuck up on lots.
- You can't look all the way up (I'm assuming going by player shadows that this is because you are an outline of one of the ghosts in Pac-Man, so you can't look up because you don't have a neck) & this makes dealing with flying enemies & enemies firing through the floors above you, an annoying chore.
[PARTIAL FIX] - You get swarmed.
[PARTIAL FIX] - Some enemy types & bosses seem to have nonsense amounts of health & deal too much damage (if this is kid-friendly). I say partial fix because you're often swarmed so it is hard to tell how much damage one-on-one enemies deal, you either get mullered or you take 5-10 damage from an encounter, it is all quite strange, but not like spooky.
- The giant Egypt labyrinth where you collect at least four keys & then have to do first person platforming (where you stick to edges of platforms if you're too close) is an awful experience because labyrinth levels aren't very fun at all.
[UPDATED:
Figured out why I hated this so much the first time (I still hate it but this might help you fix why).
The level is a horrible-to-navigate maze in a game with no minimap, where you have to find keys to open the Scarab doors to progress, but when you touch the key, it automatically opens the Scarab Door, so unless you
A) find it before the key & then B) memorise the directions you take between the locked door & where you eventually find the key, it is then more aimless wandering until you get ambushed by the silent minions of this devious Witch.
If you insist on having players pick up keys; let them open the doors then at least they can stumble across that as a point of navigation.]
[PATCHED] - Weapons have nonsense physics (assuming a Candy Corn Blunderbuss should have conventional weapon physics).
- The level with the elevators up to what I assume is the final boss is actually not a bad design (in theory), in this game though (well, I annotated a bunch of screenshots for why) but it is a combination of the elevators are poorly designed, enemies shoot through the floor & while you can too, because you can't actually look all the way up then you can't actually hit them.
Many of the projectiles wizzing through the floor as you go up the ramps don't actually seem to hit you and do damage, it could be that they are just missing or the intention is that these are just meant as the illusion of traps but it just looks awful because it is ghost cannonballs whipping at you.
Also, this level is just more corridors where the flood of assets get wedged & try & walk all over one another because whatever the attempt at AI pathing, there are too many of them so it looks comical but not in a good way.
In summary, it isn't the worst thing I've played, but that is probably more a commentary on how I spend my time rather than the quality of this game. It suffers from confusing & poor design choice OR worked fine depending on if it's a troll or not. [I've now put in nearly 3 hours in this game & I'm still not sure; the Developers has said there is a patch coming for things brought up in early reviews; don't know if they're talking about me, but I guess I'll wait & see].
