Listen. This game has some serious fundamental flaws.
There's a window where your attacks will just outright NOT come out if you press the attack button just after you stop moving forward. This happens a bunch as you use movement to position yourself (hopefully).
Jumping adjacent to walls will shorten your jump height. You always get the same height jump no matter whether you tap or hold the jump button. But if done next to a wall you'll only go up halfway and if you're holding into the wall you'll remain hovering there and not come back down until moving away. This is a valid issue as there's one tile wide vertical paths you need to jump through and spikes come out one side of the wall. But then your jump gets halved because you were too close to the wall and you've moved into spikes as a result.
Even though it's a square tile based environment you'll find the reality is the corners of the tiles are curved which results in your character unintentionally slipping off edges. It looks goofy, it feels terrible.
Bosses are trivial. Even though you're max HP is 3 you can pretty much just walk up to 5 of the 7 bosses and just mash until they're dead, because you've got incredibly generous i-frames on hit and bosses have so few they'll be hit by your follow-up even if you're mashing. It's a shame because doing Shadow Knight 'the right way' was incredibly satisfying, jumping over and scoring strikes while avoiding the slow moving projectiles raining down. Until I discovered (I ran the game a few times) that you can literally stand right in front of his feet and beat him without being hit as only the tip of his sword has a hitbox.
One boss drops a shield, which then gives you an extra hit to tank your way through bosses mindlessly.
Lingering hitboxes on retractable spikes. You've experienced it before. The spikes look like they're gone, but you still get hit. Combined with one particular room where these spikes are paired up, but their timing aren't synchronised, so you might get a nice time when both spikes retract at the same time or you could get a horrible time where they're the exact opposite, you see one pair retract and try to make it across but oh, you either moved too soon and got hit by spikes that aren't visible anymore or you got hit by spikes that aren't visible yet on the second pair coming out.
Auto saves: Sometimes the game autos saves when you pick up a gem, other times is won't do this until you've exited the current room. Even then you'll have to sit and wait for the save icon to take roughly 4 seconds to do it's thing to be CERTAIN it's actually saved before quitting out.
No alternate saves and easy to accidentally wipe your own progress: Typically a main menu would prioritise Continue over New Game but PF08's main menu doesn't have a cursor, you just press the corresponding button prompts. New Game is Start, X, Start. Quitting out to the Main Menu is Start, Back, X. Put it this way, I don't believe I've ever wiped my progress in a game until I played PF08.
Personal quibbles:
The map: Some rooms will be represented as 3 way junctions, but only 2 of the exists connect and the third is a dead end (with a gem of course) entered from a long detour. I hate this, it makes the map look more interconnnected than it actually is.
Interacting with boxes is too precise. Most are triggered by headbutting from underneath by jumping, but you'll need to be centralised, hitting the edges won't work. Why?
Identical enemies with wildly differing HP: The same enemies will have the same HP without the same room, but anywhere else it might change drastically. I believe the bigger example is the white parsnips. On one screen (0901) there's 3 of them with 5 HP each, then in other instance they'll have 1 or 2HP. When you play the game alot you'll get to know, but this threw me a lot during the casual playthrough.
Re-entering a room = Have to kill all enemies again: There's room with multiples exits, some will lead to cul de sacs, probably with a gem, then you'll immediately return and have to clear out the junction room again. The aforementioned room with the triple parsnips at 5HP each is an agonizing pace killer. I'm not asking for them to be empty, but could the exits stay open, we've already earned it.
Is it a Metroidvania? Not particularly. There's no room in the game you can't reach with the the starting abilities. Every enemy can be handled with the face-tank method. There's only 2 pickups than give extra movement abilities (double jump and hover) and in combination these allow you to reach 5/6 gems you couldn't get to other wise.
Despite all this I really like the game's aesthetic, the enemies fit well and there's a multitude of tiny objects that give it a detailed feel and foreground objects help with the atmosphere.
The rooms, individually, were very good though provoking combat scenarios. The occasional use of numbered box puzzles even had me racking my head for memories of what I've already seen elsewhere or what clue I could be missing in the current room.
I've played a few games where ultimately I had a lot of reservations about what I played, but I ended up looking forward to a better sequel. The Surge and Innocence: A Plague Tale are good examples. Pathfinder-08 is another. The potential is here.
