Let's start with the basics. The first thing you'll notice when you start playing is the music. I'm going to be blunt here: it ranges from mediocre to ear-piercing. Not once while playing this game did the music feel like anything more than mildly annoying background noise, and at many points it felt a lot worse than that.

The second thing you'll notice is the controls. They're not great. The jump has no arc, so you just shoot straight up and immediately start falling. This is odd, because most platformers I've played (even ones that are, in other ways, far worse than this) give the jump some kind of arc. It's the first thing I learned how to code in Scratch when I was seven. So, I really can't fathom why the jump in this game is the way it is, especially when it feels so much worse to use than your traditional jump. Moving left and right has momentum, unlike the jump, but the controls are too slippery and finnicky. As you'll soon see, the game has very bad "game feel".

I'm trying to be elegant about it, but man, this game just feels janky to play. There is no aspect of this game, and I mean not a single thing that this game does, that feels in any way smooth or well-executed. If a Mario game is the equivalent of a restaurant-quality pasta dish, this is a bowl of plain microwave rice. While playing, I range from feeling absolutely nothing to feeling frustrated at how the game is fundamentally constructed.

The sprite art ain't great, which is mind-boggling since I've seen non-pixel art from the dev and it looks great. I use pixel art to hide my lack of skill, but it seems WinglessPenny64 uses pixel art to hide his abundance of skill.

The game is also riddled with glitches, bad decisions, and with some of this stuff I can't even tell whether it was intentional or not. Every single level introduces a new annoyance. Hitboxes that make no sense. Falling platforms that don't properly reset to their original locations, so you have to intentionally die to reset them. Those same falling platforms being semisolids, yet starting to fall as you jump up through them, so by the time you're actually standing on it, it's fallen too low for you to make the next jump, and you've gotta wait for it to reset. Background graphics that look like solid ground but aren't. Blind jumps. A heart coin that's hidden behind a false wall, but you wouldn't even know that because false walls don't get introduced until later in the level, and as soon as they get introduced, you lose the ability to backtrack to the heart coin. Bosses that have barely any challenge at all. Bosses that would be unfairly difficult, but can be easily cheesed and made trivial. A death/game-over system that makes so little sense it makes me want to slam my head into a wall. Et cetera, et cetera.

It's easy to be angry at this game, but honestly, I'm just sad that the developer didn't get this kind of feedback sooner. If they had playtested the game more thoroughly, I feel like a lot of these issues could be easily solved. Despite the poor English, poor characterisation, and clunky dialogue of the in-game cutscenes, these characters have fun designs and live in a somewhat interesting world. I'd love to see more of it all, but in a game that feels more like a game and less like a chore. WinglessPenny64, if you read this, I'd like to sincerely wish you good luck on your next project, whatever it may be.