I had a great time playing this. The game is a platformer with metroidvania elements not much unlike many others on the market, but what kept me very interested in it is how much attention is put into the combat aspect.

Under the guise of the cute artstyle hides what I can only describe as a mix of smash bros-inspired beat-em-up with visceral push-forward mechanics taken straight from doom, game encourages you being aggressive, it plays great, it is subversive, I'm all for those stuff.

Now there is definitelly some jank and I am sure refinement will come with time and feedback, for instance the lack of being able to jump or dash cancel out of any of your attacks means there is a degree of attack commitment, which might be good or bad depending on your tastes, and air attacks cancelling vertical momentum entirely leads to some off-putting controls in a game where air combos are highly encouraged. These were not particular deal breakers for me, and I admittedly got used to (most) of the quirks, but they might make the game feel a bit clunky for some.

Now one thing I would consider a strict negative however, as already mentioned, the momentum canceling on air attacks, which in a vacuum is not problematic due to most enemies not having passive hurtboxes and they have visual tells for when they're about to attack, HOWEVER, some enemies do have said hurtboxes and Pomu's straight-to-the-face hitboxes can be problematic. Thankfully all such enemies are grounded and can be dispatched by simply puching them into oblivion, except for the flying rockets. While they can be mostly ignored, they are strictly needed to be deflected into the boss of the first combat trial, which quickly showed to be rather difficult without a proper air option, as both air attacks have a startup and need to be perfectly timed with the already tiny hitbox made worse by the momentum cancelling. This is admittedly just one very specific case, but could prove more problematic down the line should more flying enemies be introduced.

All in all, despite that, the combat is very solid and searching for shards to unlock even more combat options to experiment with is extremely fun. The very free-form combat encourages player expression and that's all I strive for. Alternating melee with gunplay, or abusing guns to stagger enemies into combos, juggling enemies into the air with bullets, and so on. Guns being disposable might be a downside for some but I found it encourages me to be much more trigger happy than I otherwise would be so I welcome it. Despite bonking my head against the first combat trial, I still found myself breezing through it over and over to get another chance at the boss JUST because of how fun traversing and beating up enemies is. This reason alone is enough for me to recomment this game but there is much more to be found enjoyable between the expected platforming challenges, exploration aspect, and the charming lore.

To finish off, I'm gonna share some more nitpicky observations or wishes on my part. Having played on stream under the dev's bit of a guiding hand, I didn't run into issues of accidentally forgetting to save at unopportune moments, but I take it it's already a well known fact that some saving spots could be added (like in Pomu's room for example) or could be moved to more appropriate places (like the save next to the door used to exit the "tutorial", which could be moved somewhere before to make it less missable). I also found that while I love the execution mechanic, I wish I could immediately execute enemies who have their HP bars depleted as I found myself having to wait a couple seconds for their "staggered" animation to play, which I found to be a very minor loss of momentum in a game that's clearly trying to be very fast paced. On the fast pace note, I would love an air dash eventually but that might already be on the table.

And that's about it, I had a wonderful time and can't wait for more. Go play Princess Pomu and Pomu all over them. I was already excited seeing the devlogs, and even more so now that I got first hand experience with this pearl in the making.