Xenogen

This is a very, very cautious recommend from me at this point after playing 30 mins of the game. Be warned: this game plays nothing like Sylph's previous precision platformer Garlic and is a lot more momentum based with your movement and it controls a lot more finnicky than it as well. When you jump while running, your character will lose some momentum when landing, which I am sure is intentional, but it doesn't feel natural in a game like this, so you will have to retrain your brain in order to progress. The jumping seems very slightly off as well, which might not be intentional, and it caused me to miss my inputs when running close to an edge and trying to jump off of it a bunch of times already. Basically, everything feels slightly unnatural and you are going to really need to practice to understand how to get a grip on the movement. The water physics are also hard to control because the longer you hold the jump button, the higher you will go. Once you let go of the jump button, you are committed to your height, and there are some really tight squeezed between hazards to navigate. At least you can still steer left/right while falling, but the level layouts are brutal to say the least. It seems like the game was originally designed without checkpoints (I saw a post on the game page where it says they now include a "normal mode") because some of the checkpoints are put in weird places where you can't get enough momentum to get through obstacles without backtracking a little bit. Speaking of checkpoints, they are implemented in a very weird way too. If you die at the checkpoint more than twice, you go back to the previous checkpoint, and if you die twice again, you will be at the previous one... all the way until you are back at the beginning of the level. I end up back at the beginning of the level so often, and with them being some awkward places, I am seriously considering turning off the checkpoints all together. I will update this review once I put more time into the game. As of right now, I would classify this as a frustration platformer with short levels (instead of one big level like rage games have), so keep that in mind before buying this game. If you like pulling out your ♥♥♥♥ hairs because you died in the same spot 30 times in a row, then this might be your new favorite game.

This is one of the coolest and most frustrating games I've ever played. It's an extremely precise platformer with a very heavy character. You really commit to jumps unless there is some modifier like water. I completed this on the normal difficulty, which provides some checkpoints in rooms as you progress. I cannot imagine completing this on hardcore difficulty. The checkpointing is fair, though I ran into some bugs with it where the gravity would be the wrong direction; the gravity swap is an intended mechanic, but sometimes the checkpoint would give the wrong gravity for where you respawn. EDIT: the dev fixed this after it was reported! I enjoyed this enough to finish the game twice (for lore reasons, you want to go fast!). I do recommend it, but with a heavy caveat that I was both very entertained and equally enraged by the experience.

HE DON'T MISS

This game has the aesthetics and vibe of Metroid for sure, but it's definitely its own thing. The vibes are great, the music fits amazigly, the controls feel fair, and there's a good amount of polish! The mechanics are pretty in-depth and it can take quite a bit of time and attention to detail to master... even if only two buttons and the directional keys are used. The difficulty however, might not be for everyone. The fact that the 'normal mode' checkpoints were only added after the fact in an update says a lot about the intended difficulty. This game is most definitely hard core. I think it's an okay compromise, and it by no means makes it "normal" as it's still very much hard as hell, but the 'normal mode' checkpoint system does feel a bit gimmicky at times, not always creating checkpoints at the same locations, confusing when playing fast paced levels, and at times can be abused. Although some of those concerns might be fixed over time, this game most definitely is not designed to have a normal mode, I think it would be hard to add, but maybe expanding the already existing checkpoint system might be a better solution. Talking about the checkpoint system: I like the concept of unlocking checkpoints in hardcore mode, but the fact that I maybe should have saved one of my uses of that for later on, unless I missed one, was kind of a pain, and forced me to go into normal mode if I wanted to somewhat respect my own time. They are bit strict as they are, the last two especially so, I also could not backtrack to get one of them that was probably to the right of where we first see the moving laser walls follow us. A few bugs that I think could help polish things: - Sometimes in normal mode, when loading up a checkpoint, part of the level that normally shouldn't be there yet is loaded, which can create a few skips. - The issue where the character gets caught on the edge of slopes/walls and starts vibrating is pretty rough. It was funny initially, and you can get out of it by inputting a walljump, but it was not funny to see in the final section of the game, when my clock was at 30 seconds left. - There's a Dev debug hotkey it seems that was left on by accident and works on most levels. I found it by accident while trying to try out the keyboard while my gamepad was connected, pressing the closing bracket key "]" will break world blocks underneath the character, I have a suspicion it's only there to make somethings easier to test when developping it, but it can definitely be used to exploit a lot of areas Overall, I still really enjoyed the game, and definitely has a unique vibe to it, once again, it's not for the faint of heart, Even normal mode will be a huge challenge for a lot of people. The metroid aesthetic might make someone think this is a metroid-like game, but that's not the case at all. Highly recommend it to any other gaming masochists like myself. PS: My full, but edited down playthrough will be available on my channel a week or two from now, on my YouTube channel with my same name. I will update this review with the video link when it's available. Here it is: youtube.com/watch?v=VOWf7ar-SeQ&feature=youtu.be

A fun and challenging precision platformer with graphics and a presentation influenced by the NES Metroid. This will test your skill and patience. One false move and you'll have to redo the jumps where you left off, so watch your step and measure your jumps wisely. The game may be a bit of a CPU hog on low end computers that use Intel Core i3-i5, but you'll have a smoother experience if you have a more modern computer instead.