It took me most of the night to finally beat the game and I think I can safely say it's the first entry in this jam that I both loved and hated, haha.
First things first, if I was reviewing only the first 60% or so of the game, I think it'd be a near-perfect score. The art style was gorgeous and captured the retro sci-fi aesthetic perfectly in a manner that reminded me of Starbound, and the combination of pixel art with dynamic lighting was quite effective. Despite the overall cheerful color scheme, some parts like the dark zone or some of the empty-looking rooms (perhaps unfinished) around the outskirts of the map made for a genuinely spooky and unsettling tonal shift. The map was overall a lot of fun to explore and blended puzzles with the environment very well.
The main gravity mechanic is brilliant and well-implemented. Most of the puzzles were quite creative and encouraged multiple solutions, and I really liked how collecting additional block colors encouraged you to see previous rooms in a new light. The other player abilities were pretty straightforward for a Metroidvania, but they complemented the gravity manipulation very well. I think my only major issue for that part is that the game doesn’t really feel very “minimal,” as it has a very substantial amount of content and quite fleshed-out graphics and gameplay.
Now, I’m pretty sure I had even more good things to say, but I honestly struggled to hold on to those positive feelings during the final segments of the game… The frustration began to kick in as I was trying to hunt down the last of the four giant buttons. I spent upwards of an hour stumbling blindly around the entire map looking for any doors or movable blocks I might have missed, somehow repeatedly missing the giant orange room directly right of the vortex. Now, that one is probably mostly on me, but I'd have loved if the world map gave some kind of visual indication of which rooms have been fully explored.
After I finally found the last button and destroyed the big vortex, I stepped into the door fully expecting to see the credits. However, nothing up until that point could even compare to the hell that the final room put me through. Needless to say, I was already tired and frustrated from the button hunt, and completely unprepared for a difficulty spike that felt like something straight out of a Mario romhack.
There were two major offenders here, the first being the wall-jumping section just below the entrance. At first, it was extremely unclear what the game even expected me to attempt to do here. On most of my attempts (that I didn’t die on the initial spike tunnel drop), I died due to stopping the moving wall a smidgen too late or too early. If I did manage to get past that initial hurdle, and managed not to overshoot or undershoot either of the following jumps, I would still end up completely stumped by the last part of that section. I think I was supposed to slide down and wall jump into a double jump backwards onto the suspended section of the wall, except it felt like the game would take away my second jump if I bumped my head against the ceiling, or spent too much time sliding against the wall? In the end, I somehow managed to finagle my way close enough to the last ledge that I guess the game decided to give me the next checkpoint out of pity.
(Worse yet, I actually had to do that section twice due to getting softlocked later, in the section where you ride a white platform through spiky gates. I respawned inside the platform and got pushed out of bounds, forcing me to replay the whole room from the beginning.)
The other big offender was the penultimate section with the multiple turrets shooting you and having to open and close doors while zigzagging your way upwards. Not a bad challenge by itself, but at that point the framerate was suffering severely for me, presumably due to playing on the web build and the entire room and all the enemies being rendered. While I understand the appeal of having one final giant room, I think cutting the room into smaller rooms might have helped the game perform better in the browser, while also saving you from having to replay the whole thing if you get softlocked.
The other parts of the room were tough and a bit jank or confusing at times, but nothing on the same hair-pulling level as the two sections I mentioned above, and overall I did find some masochistic enjoyment in pressing on. I nearly got softlocked again in the part where you’re supposed to build a little cage for yourself to pass through lasers. Two of the pieces got stuck together in the corridor, but fortunately I was able to push them apart with the third one. The part just after the many diagonal enemies and before the turret gauntlet introduced what I think was a previously unseen mechanic, where you had to use the momentum from the trapped platform to jump higher. Definitely a cool “gotcha” moment, but it’s something I feel should have probably been taught to the player earlier.
Overall, I think it took me over two hours to beat the last room alone, and it was certainly a big relief to finally see the credits. Now if it wasn’t clear enough, while the game did leave me quite exhausted, my declared hatred of the last part was only half-serious - after all, the reason why I was able to push through to the end is because I enjoyed the game a lot in the first place!