THIS NEEDS A PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING.
Barelly seconds after starting the game i got attacked by a very hard square grid that was honestly a little bit too much painful to my eyes, it was so grating that it soured my overall experience.
The new game button doesn’t really start you at the beggining, the progress was still saved when i closed the game to look at the options and clicked new game.
The character design is quite great, I greatly enjoy the looks of the protagonist, quite a memorable stylish form reminiscent of the Megaman games, I would however have preferred if the pixelation wasn’t as aggressive, combined with the square grid it gave me a little bit of mixel vibes.
The combat is really enjoyable, the character moves exactly the way i expected, i really had fun wacking at the enemies, of which there was enough variety to not bore me at any moment of my playthrough.
However at some points the enemies energy balls started going at me through walls, which felt a little off.
Which reminds me that my only complaint with the combat is the complete lack of feedback when getting hit, i only knew i was damaged because i was looking at my HP bar to see if it was lowering, otherwise it just felt like i was going through colored air spheres.
Addendum: After reaching the town zone with the trucks, some enemy attacks started dealing damage to me on a way i could notice, so im not sure if the start of the game was bugged or the earlier enemies just didn’t have feedback on their attacks.
In the first map change, i accidentally went back to the previous map and couldn’t continue back so i just fell to the void, after testing it a couple of more times, it seems the spawn point was accidentally put on the wrong side, so every time i went to save and heal myself, i just ended up having to fall into the eternal void.
The maps feel a little too big and long, im not sure if the intention was to make the character feel smaller compared to everything around, because sometimes i felt like i was walking and the map was expanding, giving me a sensation of not advancing at all, like when you are moving towards the big painting in Tiny Big Island of Mario 64. At this point i saw enough maps to notice that some where textured instead of having that square grid that kept watering my eyes, so i can only assume the square grid was there as some sort of “WIP untextured wall”, if that is the case i really REALLY recommend the use of a different one that doesn’t trigger a photosensitive warning.
The wallkick upgrade felt was the first moment in the game where i felt like i lost control of the character because it just felt inconsistent, sometimes when i tried to wallkick on a wall, instead of sending me forward it pushed me backwards, and when i tried doing multiple wallkicks in a row to reach some places, it made me bounce falling instead of jumping, which at first i thought there was a max number of wallkicks i could do in a row, but sometimes it happened after 2 kicks, and sometimes after 5. There is also a delay between dashes sometimes that had me just scrape against a wall unable to do a wallkick for like a second, resetting the climbing progress, it was a little of a bummer.
At this moment is when i left what i assumed is an ice cream shop (Which took me a while, because the zone change to leave outside leaves you very close to the zone change to enter, so i accidentally left and entered 3 times in a row, until i decided to be VERY careful and not touch the controller when i was moving zones)
That is also a negative point of the game, every time i went to a new zone, the new zone always had the camera pointing backwards, so a couple of times i got in a new place, just to walk forward immediately to where i was before.
At this point is when i couldn’t find where to go, so i just started roaming around the map, collecting all the the Atterials i could find, unable to find where to go, so i just decided to backtrack all the back to the start of the game, where i did find a zone that i didn’t see before, a giant room with platforming and a wall of electricity that zapped me every time i went through.
This zone is the greatest example of every part i disliked about the game, the square grid on the platforms (That was still hurting my eyes) made really hard to discern where the platforms ended, so more than once i just… accidentally walked until i fell. The times i managed to do that part, i found myself against a red pillar of which i had to do multiple wall jumps to reach a bridge with an Atterial on it, which was the biggest struggle i ever faced, since sometimes after 2 wall jumps the character just wall jumped DOWN instead of up, or sometimes after trying to wall jump instead of dashing forward i pressed dash too fast and the character decided to dash backwards instead.
I was certain at this point that i missed a Double Jump powerup and i was hitting my face against a wall trying to skip progress, so i ended up exploring the rest of the map again, spoilers: no, that was the last thing left to do.
After around an hour of trying to do kaizo mario level platforming, i managed to reach the bridge, and continue progress, wall jumping something relatively easier (Which still almost made me fall, which i would have been the end of my play if it happened)
After that, i found myself into another platforming zone, which looked way easier to than the first zone, not that it didn’t made me fall anyways, although soon i learnt that it was an intended failure, because while trying to go back up, i saw there was a power up bellow, which was… a double jump.
At that point i almost screamed in anger at seeing this AFTER a zone that very much needed this double jump, this was the most baffling decision of the whole game, and something i can only attribute to masochism on the developer’s part. Ending things through, i managed to do the platforming the second time (which was not even a challenge now that i obtained the double jump, and thus i obtained the Boost, which… i assumed was the ending on everything on this game, since there was nowhere else to go.
I have nothing to say against the music on the game, every song was really nice, they captured the funny tech vibes i assume the game was going for.
The writing also was cool, the little bit of logs and dialog in the game was charming, i did not find any part of it annoying, and made me want to learn more about the setting.
Personal Score: 6/10, 7/10 before the platforming that i spent 1 hour suffering, which gave me light migraines and pain in my eyes.