Oriana: Delvehollow (Dev request: Don’t be gentle)
First Impressions:
Classic Platformer. Beautiful Pixel Art. Budding Narrative. Great Sountrack. Wonderful SFX. Buttery but Poorly Explained Controls. Moderate to High Skill Requirement (unmet by me)
Mini Essay:
The title screen is lovely but very small. Font readability is middling. The story starts extremely vague with a small hint of an introduction to the concept in the early levels that double as a tutorial. The pacing is fantastic for people who are good at platformers. Whereas I pretty much died at every possible pitfall due to my, frankly, hilariously bad skill at the genre. For what it’s worth, what I did manage to play was intriguing and built smoothly on the previous narrative bites after passing levels. No saves other than autosave on a new map might be a common part of platformers but it also sets a hard minimum for skill requirements that apparently I don’t meet TT.
The SE is terribly balanced and nearly blew out my eardrums pre mmanual volume adjustment to 20%.
Having the Menu key between the Jump and Dash controls was cruel. I can attribute at least 10 deaths to this kind of miss-click. The double jump might have been unlocked automatically but if not for my flawed grasp of essential platformer controls I would have been stuck much earlier in my attempted playthrough.
The dash function is not really explained and took some button mashing to understand how to vertically climb ( I became really good at that part at least TT).
Sadly after the Mom’s story from the library narrative blurb I was skill locked from progressing. After the first 10 or so deaths I set a 15 minute timer to try to beat that level before giving up and moving to the next game. I reached the second of the green orbs perhaps twice... the death count on that screen in the time I attempted to beat the level comes to a grand total of around 93 so you can’t say I didn’t try. And yes, Skill Issue. Sweaty palms and acheing fingers aside, this genre of game is one I am truly not built to play.
Great Game, reccomended for fans of platformers and people with healthy joints.