Valkyrie Saga

Despite this being a "Not Recommended" review, I would say overall this a good game, just with a bunch of cracks the closer you look. As the game's description says, it's a psx styled platformer with a surprisingly expansive open world. You'll start the game with limited movement, being restricted by how many crystals you've got - each crystal representing one action you can take before touching the ground. Overtime you'll gain more and more crystals, expanding the amount of places you can explore. Gain as many crystals as you to can to reach the top of the tower and that's the game! A simple formula that's works well, uh, for the most part. Unfortunately, the first crystal you're supposed to get (past the tutorial area) I missed since there's a statue you need to pray in front of in order to gain access to the crystal. When I prayed, nothing happened and figured it was just a save point and left. (For the record, I had the prompt to pray on my screen when doing so) That sort of unpolished stuff is strung throughout the entire game be it the repetitive music, getting stuck in the ground when dashing, the best way of gaining height (without teleporting to a higher locating and slowly gliding all the way back to where you were) being a button mash of press X, press A, press X, press A on and on, all of the NPCs having practically the same exact model, and the map being wholly unhelpful when this is an open world with many collectibles to find. Also, I have to mention that the fastest way of getting around is by doing a combination of attacking with your weapon and immediately gliding after. It's sends you flying forward with an awesome amount of speed, but you slow down VERY quickly and have to repeat that motion over and over to keep any sort of good speed. You can upgrade your gliding speed to keep the momentum from the combo longer, but I never saw any true noticeable difference. Hoo, with all that said, I still had fun. At some point I stopped playing for 100% and just focused on getting to the top. With that mindset, the game became much better - I liked the challenge the last area/ ring of the game gave and still quite enjoyed the style of everything. So yeah, I recommend a quick playthrough, getting a reasonable amount of collectibles, and finishing it off. Remaining Thoughts: There's a supposed full story in the game but I just couldn't bother to interact with it since all of the NPCs are so plain and look alike. Also, some of the story/ lore is hidden behind certain statues which I must say is a pain since some statues give lore, some open up seemingly random walls, and some just don't do anything - very inconsistent. The inventory is messy - some are teleports that are mixed in usefulness, some are the items signifying that you can perform certain abilities, and some are items that you give to NPCs. I'll guess and say there's a less than half chance that those items will even say which specific NPC you need to give it to - you just gotta remember which one and *where* they are 'cause the game sure as hell ain't telling you that off the map. The combo for a lot of speed and the best of way of gaining height use the same button combination so be prepared - my hand was beatup by the end d: Just use the regular dash, the time save ain't worth it

I would love to enjoy this game since it reminds me pseudoregalia and other similar platformers alot but i just can't because of lack of polishness. Main issues are: 1. Poor optimization. Fps is flactuating and constant microfreezes for like ~0.1-0.2s happens every couple seconds even on minimum possible settings. AND funniest thing is - it doesn't even load my GPU on max, only on 50% (which itself is TOO HIGH for a ps1 styled game). I mean, how is it even possible for a game to freeze like that despite not taking full power of computer?? And no, there is no usage limiters i would use or game itself gives me control of, it's just like this. 2. Poor navigation system and lack of explanation. Some actions are straight on not told to you despite others are, like i figured out you can "run" on r2 myself accidentially, before that i just spammed dash/attack button to traverse faster. Map is given at some point but you can't put it on screen, no way of telling which NPC are important and which are just yappers, no way of telling if you can clear puzzles bosses and platforming in this area or not. So you just kinda stumble upon everything until SOMETHING will work. Especially because most of things to progress you do by talking with NPC's, and who want to talk to them if you can easily ignore them and go on your little adventure? Just to came back with empty hands and understand that game doesn't work like that, but no one stopped you. And again. Even after you understood that you have to talk to them - you have to interact with EVERY single one of them, cuz there is no indication if they have quest or not. Other issues include crude ui design (which you could write off as stylization but nehh. for my eye, it's more like author rushed release and planned (or not) to finish it later), lack of consistency in textures (like don't tell me this crystal is suppose to look like that, it's look like it was just ripped from sketchfab and places here as placeholder) and collision issues (in my 30 minutes of gameplay I got stuck 3 times in 2 places which forced me to respawn quite far from destination). I'll come back in 3-6 months and see if it's got any better, but right not i just can't recommend an unfinished product.

Unfortunately lacks too much polish in every area of the game. Graphically, the font and most part of the UI look rather bad and out of place in a psx game. Dialogues are rather dull and useless. Gameplay wise, it feels clunky in some parts (grabbing ledges is awkward, the boost jump timing is odd), sometimes just because they lack proper sound design and effects, sometimes because there is a deeper design flaw. While the core of the game is full of good ideas, until those flaws are fixed the game still feels like an unfinished product.

short, fun, weird and charming. OST is honestly the star of the show. game is kind of janky, especially early on, but the more you explore and progress through the story, the better it feels to just zoom around and glide through this low-poly world.

Picked this game up bc i wanted another Pseudoregalia experience. This game has some interesting movement and it's nice to zoom around, but there's just so much jank that really diminishes the experience. The amount of times I clip into something and have to respawn is too much. Setting your respawn to your last checkpoint instead of the nearest place you can stand was certainly a choice. Clip into a wall 1000 ft in the air? Have fun climbing all the way back up there along with backtracking back to the start due to the sparse amount of checkpoints. Interesting game with lots of potential, but it is way too buggy. The game's cheap so pick it up if you can look past the flaws.

it was alright, kinda rough around the edges but overall still fun thanks mostly to its emphasis on movement.

Heavily unpolished. Lots of backtracking due to getting stuck in geometry. The Unstuck ("Restore") option teleports you back to the last synced POI, rather than closest POI. Truly holds back an otherwise great game. I wouldn't mind it occasionally, but I had to escape the tutorial area literally 4 times while playing the first area, due to getting stuck in the flattest geometry of the game while moving. Can't imagine how annoying that would be later in the game. Also seems to require manual saving at certain POIs in 2026, when I returned to the game to give it a second shot, I had lost all of my progress and abilities.

Let's take the most important thing out of the way before talking about all the problems I have with this game: the game is fun, very fun, I do recommend it even at full price (which is still very, very cheap in my opinion). But, and here comes the wall of text, this game lacks a lot of polish in a lot of important things: -Music and SFX: the majority of the music is just not it, I'm sorry. It is fine, don't get me wrong, but it's just not the fit for this game I believe. It is repetitive in the wrong ways, and many tracks feel like they don't really belong to what you are seeing. Some of them are on spot, but many are not, especially the track of the first area. The SFX are really janky, some of them do not interact at all with the sound volume in the menu and happen to be really really loud ( looking at you, [spoiler]final dragon boss[/spoiler] ). -The run/ground gliding: this mechanic is so full of jank and is so frustrating to use that once I found out better ways to traverse the map, I would just not use it anymore. The amount of times I got randomly stuck into things while gliding into perfectly flat surfaces is crazy. I don't know if it is a problem with the character controller's hitbox or just the game geometry but, yeah, I did not find it very usable, but still, it really is not that big of a deal, just a thing that frustrated me a bit too much lol. - The approach to the World Design, enemies and power ups: The gameplay is fun, really really fun, the developer really nailed the air movement and the idea of making it based around the crystals is very fun, especially from a game design prospective, it really incentivises the player to explore. But that's the thing, exploring the world is such a chore for how it is designed, it is just too empty, the NPCs are all the same and very uninspiring, and this leads to just not talking to many of them at around half the game, obviously making the game feel empty. I get the fact that a stage-based approach would not fit in this type of platformer, but seeing how other games in the genre did it, like The Big Catch; where the world is big, but the traversal is fun and dynamic and the map is full of tiny and big structures with meaningful things to do. And this leads me to the next thing, the game world really does not have anything remarkable to find, except for crystals. Scaling a structure just to find a tiny collectable at the top really feels...not fun. Same thing for when you find those really, really sad upgrades that gives you 0.1x to a certain stat that really does not feel impactful at all. I like a sprinkle of collectathon in the gameplay, don't get me wrong, but this really does not feel like the right way to do it. Same thing applies to the enemies, they really feel more of like a thing that was put there at the last minute, without putting too much thought into them. Despite finding the gravity-based projectiles of the flying enemies extremely funny, the enemies overall were more of a hustle that you would need to skip past rather than an interesting thing to interact with. They could have been used for some funny platforming mechanics like Hollow Knight did, for example, but that's just an idea to make them more "interactable". Using them for quests where you have to kill X of them gets annoying really fast. Another thing regarding the world are the moving platforms, they tremble a lot when you stay onto them. It probably is a problem regarding the timing of update of both the platform and the camera. A problem I found to fix this is making the player a child of the moving platform, but this comes with it's own set of challenges. I wanted to point it out because sometimes it really is distracting. I hope the dev all the best, the game is overall good, very rough around the edges, but good, it gave me 5 good hours of fun and runs very well on my setup. Looking forward to the next projects, keep up the good work!

Sure, I expected some nice sfx but I wasn't ready for the soundtrack to be so warm, vibey, and truly beautiful. Honestly, I just left the game running while I was making tea just to have this music playing in the background. The game is just a pleasure for both eyes and ears. Even though I am not a big fan of platformer games, I found this game really engaging and fun to play. As usual, the Dev clearly gets the whole PSX era vibe which resulted in an exceptionally well-made niche project. Very warm and cozy.

Very fun & cool platformer. If you don't mind a bit of ugliness & jank, this game is amazing.