Quetzal's Call

Hate to negatively review a game like this, especially this quick, but in my defense the list of design issues just piled up so fast that I found myself lacking any desire to continue past a point. What should be a fun pogo-based platformer with, for once in the genre, an HP system, becomes a slog because that HP doesn't really matter - most of your deaths are going to be to instakill lava and checkpointing is SPARSE (a minute apart or more in most cases). Which, okay, I guess that'd be fine if the game controlled tightly enough but, for whatever baffling reason, the sword is 8-directional which leads to lots of mis-angled attacks (especially when trying to attack downward, ie, the thing that keeps you from falling into lava). I don't know why it isn't just 4-directional. I did not spot a single scenario where I'd want 8 directions. The game also loves hiding its secret collectibles behind barely distinguishable breakable walls, and you lose them on death so you have to redo the platforming challenge you've already succeeded at to get them every time you die. And there's just lots of spots where cycles don't line up in cases where everything is life-or-death (lots of platforms that disappear once you land/pogo on them here) so you just, die. And get sent back, again, a minute. And have to recollect the secrets. I dunno man, this should be fun and it isn't one single issue that ruins the game but it's the combination of all these small problems that lead to it just not being fun for me. It's not even that hard - at least, in what I played, which was to the middle of world 2, maybe it gets harder later - but it doesn't demand needle-threading like a lot of bad precision platformers. It just is also burdened with making you redo WAY too much for any of it to stay fun for long, and it makes me feel like my time is being wasted anyways. Won't refund it 'cause I don't like refunding on indie devs but it's rare I find a promising game I dislike this thoroughly quickly enough that I even could. Bleh. EDIT: Played a bit more, the game doesn't ever really improve on this front, though I will say that stage 2-5 seems to be an anomaly in terms of difficulty compared to most every other level surrounding it and the game doesn't really get that hard again until 4-9 and 4-10, which are fairly ridiculous in a bad way. Got to the final boss, which has instakills everywhere, beat it after a few attempts only to see it had a second phase and by that point I decided "yeah no I've seen enough." Not like the bosses are the highlight of this game, anyways. I don't think it's the worst platformer I've ever played and tbh with better checkpointing I'd be leaving a positive review even despite my other gripes, but, this game delights in wasting your time and I just can't gel with that.