Valkyrie Saga

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.

Loved the demo, if you like it the full game is worth it, looks retro but plays as smooth as a modern game.

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

Maybe a little premature to leave a review as I only have four crystals but I think the majority of the game is going to be the loop I'm in now. At the beginning of the game it feels incredibly unwieldy to the point of being offputting, from the control scheme to the distortion of the camera when looking upward, but as you use the systems more it feels better and better as time goes on, with a few exceptions that I can't tell are features or bugs. The moveset is also fairly unique as far as platformers go, and the level design is also very odd in a good way. If I had to make a shot in the dark comparison it feels like when you're specifically trying to make jumps to unintended ledges in the 3D marios, except instead of just being the odd diversion it's the entire game. The majority of the game is purely platforming, but the open nature of the game means you have a pretty wide array of approaches to the platforming. You can do the intended mix of high jumps, wall climbs, floats and magic, but the development of the character means if you're truly stuck on a tricky jump, you can always come back later with a much wider range of movement, or you can glide back from a much higher layer of the island and ignore the intended platforming entirely. When you get in the groove the movement is pretty good feeling with a few exceptions. Some of the magic takes a couple inputs to actually happen, and with something like the gale where it's mixed into the platforming, a few milliseconds difference can mean a whiffed jump. Also if you're holding R1 to glide, it will cancel your previous action to do so, even if you're in the middle of gaining height. You can also hold jump to glide but if you're switching from gale to the jump glide it will cause you to do a small midair hop and waste a crystal, so you have to hold r1, then hold a, let go of r1 and then perform the magic, it's all unnecessarily complex and I don't think it's intentional. one fix for this might be to give upward movement priority and only trigger the r1 glide when vertical movement has stopped, but I don't know how easy that is to implement. Also when doing the glide on the ground I got stuck in level seams like 5 or 6 times which led to a forced checkpoint restore, sometimes losing several minutes of progress. The game visually is fairly unique, I don't really care for the texturing work personally but I like the character designs and models. The game is mostly made up of simple polygons and primitives, which was probably to make the scope doable. One benefit to this method is it lets you set the draw distance pretty far without needing a super beefy computer. Some of the problems I have with the texture work can potentially be hidden by the default toggles, but I'm not a fan of the default resolution scale or color crunch and I don't really want to look at aliased polygons all day. The texture shimmer seems unmodifiable and part of the rendering. I listen to a playlist when I play games like this so I can't comment on the music but the little I heard was uninvasive. The story is interesting enough but I feel like it's going to require me talking to a lot of npcs to get the big picture. Some of the framing for explanations are a little unnatural and awkward but I appreciate the insistence on worldbuilding in a genre where that's not really standard, and if you want to ignore it entirely you can because learning about the world isn't your goal. Over all a pretty cool game with pretty good feeling movement minus some genuine bugs and a weird learning curve.

awesome low-poly exploration platformer. more open ended and not as tech-heavy as something like pseudoregalia, as you explore you collect more charges for your movement actions eventually letting you flap and dash all over the place with ease, which i enjoy. i really loved it, easy recommend.

Really fun movement system, and level design that means there is always multiple ways of getting past an obstacle. Would really recommend

Movement-based retro metroidvania type of game where the more crystals you find, the more actions you can perform in the air, meaning the more times you can double jump/wall jump/etc. Since your goal is to get up the tower at the center of the island, this is a neat idea. Very fun to explore, look for items, zoom around the map (even moreso once you get some run upgrades), try to climb things you maybe aren't "supposed" to climb yet, etc. There are some things holding it back however - the writing is a bit thin, the enemies are fairly boring and easy to fight save the last one, and it is WAY too easy to get stuck in geometry for no apparent reason. There's thankfully a "restore" button that just zaps you to your last save point for when this happens, but I should not have been getting trapped literally just running across random bits of floor — in fact, that's ultimately that's what kept me from exploring the whole map the way I initially wanted to. Smaller nitpicks include that the controls are also seemingly not remappable (despite the game claiming otherwise), and the race room is totally busted (your time gets set to 999.99 seconds no matter how fast you are). Still worth a play, but don't go in expecting any real level of polish.