ReSetna

This game starts off STRONG. The movement was great, the combat system was cool, the tetris upgrade system was sweet. And then it all falls apart. Let's talk about the warp. It's one of the jankiest, non-working-est powerups I've seen in a MV in a long, Long, LONG time. You want to go up and right? TOO BAD! You're going into a pit. Need height? YOU GOT IT! But, you know, negative height. INTO THE PIT YOU GO. Oh hey, it worked right. Oh, it ate all of my momentum. INTO THE SPIKES, ♥♥♥♥♥. Did you misalign yourself? Be prepared for WACKY PINBALL HIJINKS as you go back and forth in 17 different directions at MACH SPEED. This is required in a ton of places to progress. You have to do several blind jumps in a row. It works properly maybe 10% of the time. It made my hair fall out. I have a widow's peak now, and it's all the warp's fault. Speaking of which, why are there SO MANY BLIND JUMPS?! There are too many sections where you have to jump and pray. Hopefully, you have at least two gods to pray to: one to make sure your warp will work, and another to make sure you've blind angled yourself correctly to hit the next warp, or to not just fall into a pit/spikes. The combat became irrelevant pretty quickly. Spam specials, you win. Tetris upgrades also became irrelevant pretty quickly as well. Fit out your healing, fit out your specials, you win. The shield was almost as hit-or-miss as the warp. Will this protect me? Oh, I'm dead, never mind. Oh, this boss requires perfect use of the shield? Nice to know, an hour in. Complete lack of consistency here. The final boss and really, the final half of the game was a disappointment. It fell apart quickly, and it all felt extremely rushed. Sponges as difficulty, blind jumps and "haha you messed up, back to the start" as difficulty ain't it. This ain't a kaizo hack, it's a dang metroidvania! I don't know if they devs ran out of money or time (or both), but something is definitely missing. In spite of this, I give the game a C-. You can skip this. It doesn't do any one thing well enough to be a must-play. But if you really need to scratch a MV itch, give it a try (but prepare for disappointment).

First-off, I do not recommend this game. It is deeply unpolished, clunky, janky, and unsatisfying in combat and story (from what I've experienced of it). Let me address the unpolished nature first with a glaring example: The very first basic enemy you fight has a codex entry that's straight up placeholder text. That should give you an idea of how little this developer bothered to ensure proper polish was applied. The combat lacks satisfying feedback, the movesets for weapons feel purpose built to ensure you hit as few of your attacks as possible, fighting flying enemies is a massive chore, and enemy movesets and hit boxes are terribly telegraphed (especially for a game that has a parry mechanic). Supposedly there was a huge upgrade (the Ruby Armor update) that fixed these problems, but having played both versions of the game, I cannot for the life of me tell that anything changed at all. The environment sparks zero wonder, though there are touches here and there that stand out, which makes exploration more tedious than it should be, and general movement around these environments feels off. As if this were a prototype without the final movement system employed. Overall, I'd much rather play another Metroidvania. There are dozens out there with more care and polish put into them.

If you prefer games to be difficult from tedium and unintuitive gameplay, this is the game for you. Visuals were uninspiring. - Level flow was bad. There's one boss "fight" that requires you to run through an area. You might as well play Shobon no Action (Cat Mario) because you cannot tell where you need to go. You can't tell where the hazards are because they blend in. You don't know where to go because the next platform is not on the screen or some warp point is covered up by the foreground. Messed up a jump? If the spike doesn't kill you because it applied its damage twice, the death time wall that magically catches up to you will. Gameplay is not well-thought-out. - A locked door is red, fine. An open door is green or grey, fine. A door that used to be locked but now you can open is yellow... why not green but okay. An open door you can't get to yet is ... grey, okay.. A door that wasn't locked but you can open is ... red? I had to resort to asking for help in the discord because I did not find the one door that was locked but actually wasn't locked. - Did you miss something on a level? Good luck, there's no UI element to indicate where stuff is, let alone if it even exists. - Finished a path or ran into a dead end and you need to travel somewhere else? It's faster to just run off the edge or into an enemy so you can respawn and fast travel instead of having to run to a checkpoint and then fast traveling. Combat ended up being just place down damage field, dodge, apply shield, repeat. There was no skillful expression beyond memorizing boss patterns. - The parry had so little feedback on a successful parry versus a failed parry that it was never worth using it compared to the dodge. - The shield was just a "block 1 hit every 2 seconds" button as long as you remember to reapply it every time you dash. Overall, this game increases its playtime by wasting your time.

Less than 35% of players have beaten the first boss. That's enough of a summary for why I wouldn't recommend anyone buy this game. One third of the people who have played this game have actually liked it enough to keep playing long enough to a) get to the first boss, and b) figure out how to beat it. If you want further details... - The combat - I am a staunch Hollow Knight disliker for a lot of reasons - the grueling walks back to where you died, the overly grindy currency mechanics to get upgrades, the way that all bosses have several phases that introduce new attacks and you have to git gud enough/be patient enough to actually learn all of the mechanics just to beat the boss - it's just not my definition of fun. But you know what I can never bag on Hollow Knight about? If I died, be it to a random enemy or a boss, it was always my fault. I had enough control over the character that I could pinpoint the mistake I'd made and work to correct it. Not ReSetna. ReSetna puts OBJECTS IN THE FOREGROUND THAT BLOCK YOUR VIEW OF THE COMBAT. I'm going to pause in disbelief that I've typed that for a moment. OK. I'm back. Yeah. It puts objects that you cannot see through in the foreground where there are enemies. So you have no idea where they are relative to you. They're not overly large, but it's a symptom of a larger lack of thought. But I'll come back to that in a minute. The combat feels sluggish, and you move like you're wading through mud. The combo of the two makes it feel generally unresponsive. Especially when the enemies are pretty nimble. You slash a ton of air when you try to attack flying enemies that just move out of the way. And the parry window is inconsistent. Most games that feature a parry window have a consistent button push window - Jedi Fallen Order, 9 Sols, and the like - when you see the parry alert, if you hit the button, you parry. ReSetna will flash the parry alert, and then an indeterminate amount of time later, the enemy might attack you. Or they might not. But if you hit the parry button when you see the parry alert, sometimes you'll parry the attack, and sometimes you'll stand still and the enemy will then hit you once your parry animation that isn't cancelable and locks you in place completes. - The UI - Your tasked to collect Synapticas (or some such). And when you get a group of 4, you can turn them in. Would you like to know how to go see how many you have? Me too. Menu navigation is weirdly twitchy. I continually felt like I would push the stick to move to the next item and instead move 14 or 15 down the line. You're given a task to disable 4 thingamajigs. And when you do, the person who gave you the quest updates you that you can now get the 1st security key. It spawns on the screen, but so unnoticeably that I didn't even clock that it had spawned. When I finally got frustrated enough to google what I'd missed, I discovered that a good few other people have lodged the same complaint. Which brings me to the map. - The map - (see?) The map is poorly implemented. The same security key that I didn't notice on the screen was also not shown on the map as a pickup. The quest marker had moved to beyond the locked door though. It all comes back to a lot of ideas that start off kind of cool but do not get implemented well. It makes the game incredibly frustrating to play.

Dull, generic, unpolished. Nothings appealing here.

Pretty quick and solid metroidvania besides a few things. Some minor gripes: 1. You can take damage while the screen is black and loading. 2. Air dash should be available sooner than where its currently placed in the game. 3. wall jump feels kinda jank.

Played on OG 512 Steam Deck without issues. Fantastic game that seems to get a bad rap online but the devs are devoted and this game is very much fun! Highly recommended

I would definitely recommend this game for you metro-vania players. The movement is awesome, combat is great, the mechanics are great, enemies can be annoying but there were good, and bosses all around were pretty fun. The only issue i found with the game would be the jumping mechanics later in the game due to speed of pressing the button consecutively would not register correctly (Skill issue and timing lol). Here's the Playlist of playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8aFN6XtCq-hGnlQEDKYOZCoPJ8DARY-X

Definition of "ok". Theres nothing inherently terrible about the game. The visuals are kind of ugly, environments are boring, the animations are janky, and the platforming is stiff. But you do unlock moves, including double jump early, and you can teleport between waypoints right away which is appreciated. Combat works well enough, and theres 3 weapons to unlock. Combat does get repetitive as each weapon only really has 1 special ability, you unlock three total drone abilities all game and the last one comes in the last 10%. The upgrade chip system is ok, yes its novel using the tetris format but its basically just some stat boosts, nothing that changes the way you play. Enemies are all just different robots which keeps things more repetitive. Bosses are tough, although the last one is just a lazy enemy wave based boss, the worst kind of boss design. You get the basic moves like dodge and parry, and then attack, but it would have been fun to unlock new abilities outside of the traversal. Platforming is ok, wall jumps/sliding is a bit sticky and finnicky, and the warp system is the worst designed feature in the entire game. Its unintuitive and because its positional your dodges can screw you. In later levels also they make you do a bunch of finnicky platforming without checkpoints and with few platforms to save your progress. Once again the game isn't bad, and it checks most of the boxes, but there was nothing exciting or remarkable about it. 7/10.

After completing the game. I can only say that the game is not well polished, is very short and there are bugs, the game seems to have been made by amateurs because many of the game's mechanics are just for decoration, being someone who supports indie video games sadly I have to say that I don't recommend this game.