Trash Quest

I knew about Thrash quest's one respawn point mechanic before buying it so the first thing i checked is if i could cheat invincibility with cheat engine. I could, so i played the whole game with it which obviously gives me a skewed perspective on this game. But i can confidently say that if i had played it the intended way i would have absolutely hated the experience. Some of the optional platforming sections are brutal, and the postgame stuff would be nigh impossible. There's checkpoints for the bosses, which would be very helpfull since they're pretty challenging if you were only able to tank but a few hits. However the real difficulty is definately found in the (precision) platforming gauntlets. These were actually devilishly cruel at times, especially in the postgame content. Even with invincibility i got sent back to the entrance of each room when i hit a spike which made it much more manageable but still challenging. I think that with the cheat the game was actually pretty fun, it basically had a celeste structure this way to allow many instant repeats. Obviously without the depth of movement mechanics that celeste had but still enough to keep it interesting. The platforming feels responsive and level design is actually pretty solid with decent exploration based progression. It offers a good bite sized microvania experience with harder platforming than usual for this sub-subgenre. There's also some difficulty to be found in combat, mostly in the aforementioned hard bosses but not so much in the regular enemies. These are obstacles more than anything and since they don't really reward you with anything they can be skipped. There's even achievements tied to this for the real massochists as some of these are in really obnoxious spots. The regular enemy variety is rather low but there's a suprising amount of bosses to be fought which are all uniquely challenging. In general combat isn't the focus here, this is definately a platforming first combat second kind of mv which is fun, especially in a microvania format. Story is pretty much not a focus either with just an opening cutscene only. Visuals are very basic pixel art but pretty stylized although readability was sometimes a bit rough. At times the platforms were hard to distinguish from the backgrounds which could be frustrating at times in a tougher gauntlet. Music is great if you like these sorta arcadey/retro style songs but they're not my jam. Performance was great but that's almost a given with pixel art microvania's however the experienc was bug free (not always a given). So why after all that the negative review? Well the game was only fun for me because i cheated, and i know i bought it knowing that but imo the dev should add accesibility features to basically allow in room respawns. With that in mind it's very worth it, especially at this price.