This is gonna be a long review so bear with me... OR: TL;DR: Great game, story, puzzles, gameplay. But very hard with lots of annoyingly designed things. Weird first thing is the menuing. I wanted to start the game in english, as all games and selected english in Steams settings for the game. It still launched in german. After that I had to search for the button to change that option, because it doesn't just outright give you an optionsmenu, it just wants to throw you into the game. So I skip the entire intro, because I want to change settings, just to notice that it doesn't exist there either. So I had to check the forum. This is why instead of pictures, you need written text. I wanted to pick the cogwheel, which didn't open anything at all? It does now, after I've created a savefile, but did nothing at first. Because it didn't do anything, I didn't bother trying other buttons, I figured I would maybe need to have a savefile first. I also needed to immediately change the buttonlayout for my controller, because for god knows what reason, the default setting needs you to hit "X" (the left button), instead of "A" (the bottom one) to accept? What game does that? If anything, both buttons should work, or keep it like it is in all other games. Had to change that too, luckily that works in the options. Last thing right from the beginning. The game is incredibly loud! I Put it on 5% in the system and 20% ingame! In other games I can do 50%/50% or 20%/100% etc. Okay thats it for all the problems before the game even starts, now onto the actual game! It has a cute pixelstyle and plays mostly in 2d, but you move from place to place on a 3d map. After a short while, I noticed why the game has accept/talk on the left button, because if you put jump + accept/talk on the same button, you end up constantly talking to the npcs instead of jumping. Which could have been easily solved by not making accept and talk the same button. Usually 2d games use "dpad up" or "Y" (the top button) to talk. Thats really annoying sometimes, but still better than having to press X to confirm in menus. I must say, I reaaaally love the puzzles and how they utilize the environment, platforming, items and enemies! There are so many small little things to find and collect, but as it has metroidvania elements, you'll need to backtrack for about half of them.. maybe even multiple times, as you'll notice that there are still things you can't do once you decide to backtrack... The map itself isn't that big, but the way its built and how there aren't that many fast travel options, it feels huge! The game on its intended 5 star difficulty is actually unnecessarily difficult. Especially during boss battles. I remember the second boss already wants you to jump over his most basic attack, but your jumpheight is just barely enough to cover that. I had no choice but to heal my way through that one, as I only was able to time it right twice in a single fight. What annoys me about this, is that I do want to keep playing on 5star difficulty, but the game asks you after every single death, if you want to make it easier. No I do not. Stop being annoying and let me continue. It truly is a great challenge though and because of that it is good that the option exists. The player could change that anytime themselves if they wanted. So it could do without being reminded every single time. It also would have been great to simply get a "retry" option for bossfights, especially if these bossfights have a cutscene in front of them. That is way too much wasted time before you can go back into action. They are already incredibly tough and require you to sometimes move perfectly around them, don't make me lose my muscle memory from that, by stalling time from reloading, asking the question to make it easier, making me walk back and showing me the cutscene again. The game in general loads incredibly quickly. You can just spam the same button after opening the game, or going into the main menu by spamming the confirm button 5 times or something and you'll be back almost instantly. Why not keep that going inside the game? It feels awesome, give me more of that speed! In summary, this game on its intended difficulty is just so unnecessarily hard. Things always happen just a tiny bit too quickly. If the game gives you half a second to react, 1 second would be plenty and still feel like a challenge. It always feels like the game was meant to be much easier, but during testing the developer(?) got bored or too good at his own game and kept pushing the difficulty? Something like that. It feels like it would have been such an enjoyable experience if it weren't for everything being pushed so far. Granted, there ARE the options to make everything easier, but I like playing my games on the intended difficulty and it all feels very good. Its just that tiny bit too much, that pixel of a hitbox too big, that one point of too much damage, one projectile too much, that one enemy too much, that one jump too much, that one piece of a puzzle too far and the fact that you do not gain invincibility frames upon getting hit by lots of things... It ends up making things annoying instead of challenging fun. And it could really use a map. The game is much bigger than it seems, it has TONS of secrets scattered, even with guides, custom made maps and the wiki, it seems impossible to find everything. I did all the sidequests and things worthy to see, but I am not gonna run around a map that I can't check to try and find the last moonstones, hearts or energy crystals. Pretty late into the game, you can discover someone who can tell you where missing collectibles are to be found. If you had a map, it could just put a marker on the map for you to search that area, but as you have none, she speaks in a way that you might not even understand where to look. There is also another boss for collecting everything. It won't let you through to him if you don't have all hearts or energy crystals... and I just can't be asked to bother. I already went through the entire map multiple times, I will not do so even more times, it gets tedious. I will still rate it positively. I love the characters and how the world is built, how the dialogues change, how the story unfolds, the puzzles and secrets and just how much there is to explore and to collect! But because of all of these other things, I can not recommend this game for the masses, but if you can see past all those little annoyances, there is still a great experience and a nice game to be had! I definitely had fun, even though it has been annoying me a bunch of times!
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