Boy, this is a game I have very complicated feelings about. I played for about 3 hours, and was not able to beat it.
I have a bunch of good things to say. I love the unique control scheme, it actually feels really fun to master. The graphics and music are quite nicely minimalist. The character is so cute with her little faces, and the double halo when she dies, it’s adorable. The game is very polished, everything works nicely and nothing really stands out as unfinished or rough around the edges. And there’s a ton of content in this game. I don’t even know how much, because I clearly couldn’t beat it.
But it’s SO hard. Even by gamejam standards. Like obscenely, insanely, “how did this ever get playtested hard”. To the point where part of me feels like I’m missing something, because surely this can’t be intentional? For some context, I’m level 22, 66 offense, 58 defense, 182 HP. That’s 3 hours of play, finding a ton of secrets, health upgrades, etc. But all the enemies where I haven’t explored yet still kill me in no time flat. All the attacks are so fast, and constant, which, combined with your own somewhat sluggish controls makes fighting a clean fight almost impossible. And if you fail, you have to walk back from the start again and walk past those fuckin randomly moving flies that hide in walls. This can easily take like 5 minutes.
So this makes it really tempting to cheese things by going AFK and letting your drones do the work… Which is often really easy, and so, so, so boring. Sure, it’s slow, but it’s still faster than dying and walking all the way back. Why take the risk when you could sit in a dead zone corner and let your drones sloooowwly snipe that dragon that’s gotten stuck in a loop? I beat several of the eyeball rooms by just finding a safe spot, throwing on a YouTube video, and not touching my keyboard for 10 (!!) minutes. The enemies are so tanky that doing it any other way feels completely unreasonable, especially before getting the charge attack, which admittedly does help a lot.
Currently the only unexplored points I’ve found are 3 knight guys with shockwave attacks (whom I’ve never even been able to get close to, and who no doubt would take me several minutes of attacking to beat while they can kill me in 5 seconds) and an arena with several of the trident guys, diagonals bouncing, and timed laser beams. I spent 15 minutes AFK do my drones would kill the bouncers, but there was no blind spot for the trident guys, so I tried fighting them straight on, and died quickly. That’s another 5 minute runback + 15 minutes of AFK. This surely can’t be the way this game is intended to be played…
Despite it all, I felt compelled to play through this game for probably longer than any other game this jam, and lord knows I’ve given actually beating it a fair shake, but I just… can’t? I am very curious to see a dev playthrough of this, because I’m not sure if this game is really just incredibly hard, or if I’m completely missing some kind of core mechanic that’d turn the game on its head.