Valkyrie Saga

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!

Nails the open-ended 3D movement in a way that games with much grander bona fides could only hope for. It's all about seeing something and saying to yourself "I'm going to get on top of that thing" then doing it.

Open world 3d platformer where you get rewarded heavily for exploring. Movement starts off slow but it quickly picks up and you can zoom across the map. Ended 100%'ing it and was a blast to play. :) My only critique is the textures. They could def use work. Other than that, excited to see what other games this dev makes.

yay

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.

This feels like Psuedoregalia but just worse. Idk, that's all I can say about it.

a bit rough around the edges, but overall enjoyable. the platforming & exploration is fun, and the game controls well.

Great 3d movement and exploration