Shadow King

BLUF: Strong 4, Weak 5. I want to like this game. Really nice retro aesthetic. I enjoy that the very first power you get is a Dash. Gotta go fast. But the platforming and general movement doesn't feel very good, which is kind of a kiss of death for this genre. The character when not dashing is sluggish and a bit stiff. Ice platforms feel like they eat my jump inputs. Simple unimportant jumps over pits feel too tight-- I casually died several times to the pit in the room before the Developer egg just because I wasn't putting max effort into the jump as I casually traveled through the room. And, playing on a controller, the Jump button is permanently mapped to what I'm most accustomed to being the Run/Action button, and vice versa, which also contributes to the general miasma of not-feeling-very-good-to-play. Edit: Finished it! Cute game. It feels okay, but I'd love a button re-maps and a lot more metroidvania. AFAIK there was only one secret and one major shortcut from getting a new item. It was really more of a linear platformer with a lot of backtracking. The second boss fight was kinda cool!

Neat little bite-sized metroidvania with good level design and cute art. The metroidvania upgrades are well-done and I remember it being surprisingly nonlinear given its length. There are also a good number of secrets to find. Took me about 40 minutes to finish, good for a quick night of fun.

I'm not going to lie, given that this is a Pico-8 game (which is a fictional 8-bit PC console used by some indie devs as a format for micro-games) and tops out at ~2 hours if you 100% it and don't play in much of a hurry, and that you're probably not going to want to replay it, $5 is kind of a big ask. If you buy this game, be aware going in that it is very much a microgame, a self-contained appetizer or snack of gameplay, not a full-size experience. With that in mind, and considering I got it on sale for $2, I had a grand old time with it and am perfectly happy. It's charmingly lo-fi and scuff, with a completely naive story and simple gameplay that is just barely original enough not to be every other microvania but not so original that you would've wanted a longer game to see it developed. If you want an evening's entertainment for the price of a coffee (either from a gas station or Starbucks, depending on whether it's on sale) and you're in the mood for something retro and simple, you could do far worse than this game. I spent about an hour and a half with it and enjoyed almost every single second, with the only bit of resistance being adapting to the control scheme in the first ten minutes or so (which is also limited by the Pico-8 format more than any fault of the designer, but be aware of that too, I guess).

I had a fun time! A very bite-sized ordeal but with nice bits of platforming and slight metroidvania-y action. I did see some bugs, though, but they were minor and mostly didn't affect the gameplay.

What a delightful, wonderful and short game. I've started really enjoying shorter metroidvanias where there is backtracking but not so much as to feel interminable, and where there's a distinct enough moveset that feels neat but not a ton of memorization. This game absolutely delivers. The save points are well placed, there are lots of little discoveries to make and the writing is top notch. Highly recommend!

What kind of mentalist maps the jump and action button this way round? With no option to remap, this is so frustrating. Don't ask me if it's a good game, I don't have the patience due to the inverted mapping and it makes me swear lots.

Good little metroidvania from someone who apparently knows what a metroidvania game consists of (the category has become really weird on Steam lately). It's a bite-sized piece of entertainment, but quite enjoyable. I did get softlocked a couple times on the fight with the [spoiler]mimic[/spoiler] as it's possible to knock it back through the wall, whether you're attacking or it's attacking you (and bounces back after). Not too big a deal though because the save point was right outside the room, so I just reset and continued. I also found myself wishing that there were separate buttons for dash and [spoiler]boomerang[/spoiler], but I don't know if that's even possible with the Pico-8, and it did force me to be careful about my inputs and just get better at the control scheme, so perfectly forgivable.

Excellent bite sized metroidvania.

It's a small yet charming little game that has ~30 minutes playtime. While I am giving it a positive review I would value this game at ~2 euro so unless it's on a 50% (or higher) sale it's likely not worth it.

Am i conceptually annoyed that the 'mini-vania' is a genre that people keep making games for? Yes. But did i have an alright half an hour or whatever getting through it? Yeah i did actually. And i'm charmed by it being a pico8 game. So like, i dunno. For the price? It was fun enough to make me happy. 31 reviews is brutal