The Sacred Acorn

I was really looking forward to this because the art style looked very cute and it seemed like a short fun exploration game with combat. The combat is unbearably bad. Too slow, bad hit detection, bad windup on enemies, no input on health beside the small bar, very little magic reward for killing enemies which makes it so you can't heal. I tried to get past the first boss buts it such frustrating mechanics it's not worth it to go further. Also the hit boxes on these thorns are much wider than they should be and passing through them is also always frustrating. Cute characters and an okay story can't get me past the lack of balanced combat in a 'souls-like' i came back, played a bit more and got only slightly farther before the game lost all intrest in telling me where to go, how to get there, what the quest objective was. this game has very little direction the more you play it, so you're just running around doing NOTHING and back tracking trying to unlock more routes. it's not very good, it needs more clear objectives on top of everything else i said

I want to like this as there's obvious effort and thought into the game design and art style, but there's too many cons as compared to pros in my experience for the gameplay. The map isn't accurate and sometimes buggy with the companion, the combat is really slow and hitboxes are off. The bosses don't have much too them, just a set of attacks that are looped. The dialogue is minimal so any pointers on what you're supposed to be doing to progress is hard to understand, especially with the maze-like design for the entire map. The lesser-enemies feel useless to defeat as they don't really drop currency and some of the abilities cost an absurd amount, though I'm willing to bet they are overpowered. And near the end of the game my save file wouldn't load causing an error, I thought it was corrupted but it ended up loading after 10 tries. I spent easily about 4 hours of my 6 hour run spam dashing around the entire map to find out what I'm missing or what I'm supposed to do next, finding areas that hold absolutely no purpose. I would only recommend this to you if you have time to spare and are willing to take a game slowly, but due to how un-polished this game feels with the bugs and the smallish amount of content it has I wouldn't say it's worth $20.

Very slow gameplay. I have no idea how hard this game is supposed to be, as I appear to have been invincible throughout the time I had with it, but based on the ui, I think I only had 3 hp. There was only 1 attack that I had, so the combat was rather a chore to get through, even if it was extremely easy for me.

What a terrible ending, I was hoping for a better one.

The combat was stupid and boring and there was no good aspect to this.

I decide to give it up at least temporarily, because the map is so big and empty and there's no map overview that can be checked whenever I need. At first, I met the turtle who can follow me and show a small map when I use the companion ability, but after I freed the little blue mushroom, the turtle just disappeared, and I did not find a way to switch the ability back to the turtle's. That's truly confusing and frustrating.

What a sudden outburst of squirrel games! Previously I couldn't find anything but the "squirrel with a gun" thing that doesn't look appealing to me, but the previous year gave us The Sacred Acorn, and this year has Squirreled Away and Leafing Home. I didn't play these last two yet, but finally found some time to finish TSA. Upsides: - Squirrels!!! - There's a LOT of them. - They all have big bushy tails. - They all are cute and huggable. - They can say something and have funny voices. - They are actually pretty big, so you don't have to feel yourself small and vulnerable. - You are playing as one of the most adorable squirrels named Ima. - You can fight fearsome beasts with your tiny claws and even save the world! - You can cast Squirrel Magic that will remind you a lot of Hollow Knight. - Overall graphics and music are OK, too. - Story Mode (basically Infinite HP Cheat but official) for those who, like me, are SO bad at dodging. - More than one ending. Downsides: - Small bugs and glitches all over the place, like, you can go through objects, walk underneath floor layers (and these layers sometimes lay above trees or just abruptly end with a black void), seeds falling from pots may stuck inside walls, maps showing your position incorrectly, Ima becomes visually bigger while sprinting, and if you hold the button, she will still sprint while standing and during dialogues, etc. - The levels are too vast and pretty empty, a lot of times you'll find a dead end with nothing there, especially with the floating teleportation platforms that lead you to nowhere, making you lose HP. - No sidequests or even proper dialogues, you only get one-two lines from an NPC and go your way. The monuments and tombstones scattered everywhere are the same, giving you a random quote that doesn't make much sense to you. - Main objectives are so few that most of the time you'll have to figure out what to do by yourself. - Obsidian Cliffs boss - not only it's very hard, but each time you die, you'll have to run for 5 minutes back to it just to die in a few seconds again. And while the battle is actually optional, the game never says to you that it's optional, so I had to abandon the game for a whole year because I didn't know I could skip this boss. Only thanks to the new Story Mode update I could actually return and finish what I started a year ago. - The game is pretty short, and if you know where to go, you can beat it under a hour. - The endings are just a few sentences over a white screen, and after credits the game bugs and I can't do anything in the menu, have to close it with Alt+F4. Sooo, I'll be honest with y'all - the main reason I write the positive review is because I'm obsessed with squirrels, and this game gives me a whole bunch of them, more than any other game in the world. If it would be any other animals here instead of them, I'd be a little bit disappointed with the experience I had here. But these loveable rodents will make anything better despite any flaws, so now, after having the second, more successful journey with Ima, I know that I don't regret playing The Sacred Acorn one bit. Please let me know if there are more squirrel games somewhere, I just must Catch 'Em All!