I've given this game quite a bit of fair tries (as seen by my above playtime), and gone through at least one patch (that seemingly made things worse, as will get discussed later), so I gotta say that while it does pack a few good ideas, it's sadly on the negative side of things. There's some pros, which I'll talk about near the end of the review.
To start, let's talk about how basic the core gameplay loop is: you move, you jump, you have one attack: a rather short range shot with a decent fire rate. That's literally all you'll be playing with all the game. While limited move pools aren't inherently bad, I want it to be clear that what you do throughout the game is never all that complicated. There are no puzzles, no unlockable shortcuts, no unlockable abilities which make some obstacles easier, nada; all areas are about getting from point A to point B. Or rather Points B or C, as we'll see when discussing one of the game's selling points:
[quote=Bad Coffee Games] Choose your way through the game [/quote]
Hey, remember how in Shadow the Hedgehog all campaigns were a set of six levels, where completing missions determined what happened in the next one? This game is that, except unlike that game, you never unlock levels to play separately, and rather than missions, it's just separate exits, with most areas having branching paths at some point.
This means you'll be playing the starting level in every run of the game, and while you do get a handful of next possible levels, they too will end up getting played more times than you'd ever want to have played. There's a bit of choice here in which one you pick, since various of the earlier levels have exits which lead to the same level (the branches are not entirely exclusive), but that's more out of convenience than anything else in the long run. Oh, and the above "at some point" sometimes means at the tail end of the areas, so most of your journey will remain the same. None of this would be so bad if it weren't for:
[quote=Bad Coffee Games] Difficulty like in the classic plataform games [/quote]
Yeah, that is true... in a less than great way. What's particularly frustrating about this is that the game has [i]some[/i] thought put into it that a lot of time you can eventually learn to avoid damage and go safely though the levels, but a lot of this requires you to go very slowly. There's a few opportunities where you can try to outpace the level hazards, but more often than not you'll be semi-methodically dodging enemy attacks (or hiding from them from a convenient part of the level geometry) while you wittle away at the often larger than necessary health pools. The game is thankfully not too heavy in terms of trial and error (there's a few "surprises", but it's not like the game is constantly throwing undodgeable stuff at you like many bad old and "retro" platformers do), though getting experience is what will make levels more manageable on future runs.
To make matters worse, there's both a life system and your health within each live only ever decreases (no HP pickups, no healing between areas). Dying always boots you back to the start of an area, and generally this will end up being a death from a thousand cuts (a few late game areas do feature bottomless/lava pits, but [b]most[/b] of those falls are your fault). There's a few RNG-dependent enemies and a few others which have horrible positioning, so it's always possible that you make it a new area with almost no HP and you get killed by something minor before you've properly acclimated. The game used to have a (somewhat glitchy) difficulty selector which let you play with more lives, but at some point that got ditched and now you're stuck with two retries.
And to exend the game's lifetime, and to exarberate all of its problems, we have:
[quote=Bad Coffee Games] Easter eggs [/quote]
I honestly don't know if these are just available in the post-game or if I didn't play around enough on my initial playthrough, but the game does feature a few extra collectibles scattered in the levels. All of those I could/bothered to find were basically tucked away in secret passages you could only find by running/jumping at them. While a couple of them you could make a case that the area around them was suspiciously large, these crevices are never in places where it feels like you were actually clever for finding them. I dunno if they unlock something cool if you find them all, because due to the above structure getting to the late areas is a chore, and one of them is particularly precarious in terms of platforming in its lower path so I am not even sure if I properly explored it and there was indeed nothing, or if I missed the correct section because I was bad/unlucky. This was all a while ago, and given how the game shows no indication of which area had its collectible collected, trying to % the game would require me to re-explore the entire map. Which I don't plan to do.
[b]It's not all bad, there were some good ideas here[/b]
The four bosses at the end of each successful run were actually cool enough concepts and competent executions. They suffer from an overly large health pool, yet a couple of them I beat in my first try, and the other two I felt were fair challenges were deaths were my fault (even if for one that meant I had to restart the whole run since I'd lost my retries earlier). Sadly once they're dead you cannot rematch them.
Some of the late game enemies do have patterns which feel legitimately rewarding when you beat them, and these therefore feel less like they overstay their welcome, as opposed to previous ones which were pure damage sponges.
There's also a nice mechanic where the world has a "completion percentage" and more of your starting town (a short section before the first level) has more of its citizens become freed from their petrification. There's also a few background details which change, which may or may not have been tied to the specific bosses which got defeated (the game has only one save slot, and I am [b]not[/b] planning to undo the progress I've done even if I don't plan to replay it unless I'm feeling desperate). A nice bit of this is that part of that completion is tied to defeating enemies of each type, which "encourages" combat to a degree (a bestiary would have been nice), so that's a bit of a bonus to the experience. I don't know if the percentage is bugged or not, as it didn't go to 100% after finishing the game for me, and the easter eggs don't seem to increase it (again, I may be misremembering).
Look, the game is now just a dollar and perhaps even less on a sale. It's far, far from the worst thing I've played, and if there was a neutral option on Steam I'd debate on whether to give it that or the thumbs down, in spite of all its flaws. But the sad truth is that while the game did provide some minor enjoyment to me, the experience became less and less fun as time went on. Even as I "mastered" some parts each area, the game felt more like a slog each as I pushed myself to play further rather than a triumphant run through previously punishing challenges.
