[h1] A solid precision platformer that unfortunately comes with some annoyances [/h1]
[h3] Played on Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon, via Proton 8.0-5. Proton 9.0-2 crashes on startup. [/h3]
Before I say anything about this game, if you like Celeste and how that plays, you will (probably) like this game. Solus Machina clearly takes inspiration from Celeste and games similar to that (which isn't a bad thing, of course). You got a dash ability, you can climb on walls and jump off them, there's even an equivalent to Celeste's strawberry collectibles in the form of batteries(?) that you can collect. So if this is your thing, or you even speedrun Celeste, then you will most definitely have a fun time here (and I did have fun for quite a while).
But... just to preface here, it's not a carbon copy of Celeste with a coat of paint on it. It's really it's own thing here, and you can see that the passion oozing from this developer. It does some things different than Celeste, for better or for worse (we'll talk about that later).
But for now, I'll talk about my main criticism of this game, which is it's too "precision-y." It's like each jump you make is near pixel perfect, which is incredibly frustrating. This is caused by the obstacles (spikes, wires(?), blades, etc) hitboxes being literally perfect, and not in the good way. It's hitbox is huge. There are times that I jump over a spike and not even come close to grazing the spike texture, yet I die. There is no leeway with these hitboxes.
It gets especially bad when you have to jump into one-gap wide holes. You tap barely--and I mean barely--left or right, you die. It's an incredibly frustrating experience because there are times where I think a section is borderline impossible because the precision required is so massive. It just doesn't feel like I should be dying there. It gets even worse when you realize that this game has you jump blind-jumps.
There are times in the game where you cannot see where you are jumping because of the level switching/page switching mechanic. For context, this game takes up your entire screen real estate, which makes sense. When you get to the end of the page, the game transitions to the next "level" by doing a sweeping motion to it, so there are no load screens here (the entire game is interconnected with each other, aka each level is connected to each other seamlessly).
Great.
But what's not great, is in the latter half of the game, there is a city you enter where there are these robot-like enemies walking about on the roofs of the buildings. You have to jump from building-to-building, descending and ascending these buildings while dodging these enemies. There's a problem though, because there are points where you are on the top of a building--which is on a completely different page than the lower building you're expected to jump to--which leads to the player just "hoping for the best" and praying that they land somewhere safe. It leads to a game of guessing, which is not something I'd imagine fits a precision platformer well.
One of the big differences movement wise between the robot you play as and Madeline from Celeste, is that you cannot dash diagonally; only in cardinal directions. This doesn't seem bad at first glance, but this seemingly arbitrary limitation leads to a bunch of levels to be even more precision-y. There are jumps you make in this game that make you wish you had diagonal dashes, and definitely makes it harder than it needs to be.
Another major difference in this game is that the robot you play as has a "falling animation" so to speak. If you dropped from a high height, your character will face plant on the ground, taking a second or two to get back up. This does no damage to the player.
So what's the point of this?
That's what I thought during my session with this game. All it did was pose to be an annoyance, since your dash ability can cause you to fall over all the time since you can go pretty high with it. It seemed like a gimmick, until I reached a part of the game where there are these aircrafts that shine light and are looking for you.
These aircrafts pan across the screen periodically, and if you step into the light, they catch you and you die. This (and the boss fight at the end of the game) made this mechanic make sense, since if you face plant in these levels, you will most certainly die. It leads to the player having to not have harsh falls and to play diligently, which I thought was cool and well thought out. But that's it. For two levels this mechanic makes sense, the rest it just becomes an annoyance.
The same can be said for the stamina mechanic. Yes, there is stamina in this game. Stamina only affects how long you are able to hang on a wall. Once your stamina bar runs out, you fall. This really didn't pose much of a challenge throughout the entire game; it moreso posed a huge annoyance.
With this stamina mechanic, you can't just climb on a wall and scope out the area. There are times where you go onto the next page (and there is no checkpoint available) and just want to scope out the place. But it's very difficult to because there are blades, obstacles and enemies about, which naturally lead you to hang on the wall because if you hop up, you might die and would have to repeat a whole section again.
But this stamina mechanic punishes this, and forces you to just "go with it" and speedrun through it, which is frightening because these jumps are practically pixel perfect, meaning if I miss it, I'll have to go back to the previous checkpoint which can be far away. Basically, I'd like to catch-up on my breath and scope out the place before jutting my way in there. This unironically caused me to find an exploit to not lose stamina so I could catch up my breath and scope the place out (the exploit is to spam climb while tapping up very fast; you don't lose stamina this way).
Again, like how I was saying, the stamina mechanic didn't really pose much of a threat (especially after my stamina exploit) but there were times where sections of the game looked like they were made for stamina, and I really appreciated that. It was actually really fun. One section that I really loved was the girder section. That used the stamina mechanic really well, and I really appreciated the design philosophy for that. But like the faceplant mechanic, it was only really used to the best of its ability in a handful of levels, which I thought was a bit of a waste.
Lastly, the last main criticism I have for this game is the variance jumping (idk the name of it). Basically, the longer you hold the jump button, the higher you jump. Sounds cool, right? It's pretty common amongst platformers, but here it feels terrible. This 'variance jumping' leads the levels to be designed for absolute *perfect* jumps. For example, there are times where you need to dash through a line of spikes above and below you, but the jump required needs like a half jump, or even less than that. Any higher or lower you die. I mean, I get why this is a thing. It makes the levels harder, and allows you to design more deep, rich levels. But it's soooo hard to gauge whether or not your jump is high or low enough. You will die multiple times to this, and I can't shake the feeling off that this game would be much better without it.
Even after all of this criticism, I still enjoyed & had fun with this game and can recommend it (if you can handle dying a lot!). It's a good game--with great aesthetics & art--just a little bumpy. 7.5/10.
