About 4 hrs playtime. Expected game to be good, was as impartial as possible.
PROS:
-Gorgeous artwork with a consistent design to keep the game world feeling alive and immersive.
-Violent and dangerous enemies make the player feel helpless as the bottom of the food totem. Combat exists but is mostly futile.
-Unique controls for Slugcat that make the player constantly adapt toAbout 4 hrs playtime. Expected game to be good, was as impartial as possible.
PROS:
-Gorgeous artwork with a consistent design to keep the game world feeling alive and immersive.
-Violent and dangerous enemies make the player feel helpless as the bottom of the food totem. Combat exists but is mostly futile.
-Unique controls for Slugcat that make the player constantly adapt to how his slinky little body moves in tandem with the environment he's navigating.
-Sprawling MetroidVania world that brings to life the challenge of the game, alongside a sense of being a small creature in a much larger post-apocalyptic world. The player has a map that fills itself out as they explore and discover, making navigating areas easier after making a second pass.
-Brilliant music. Understands tension and relaxation very well.
-Basically no railroading. The world is your oyster after finishing the tutorial.
-Time limits keep the running tense and an omnipresent threat over the player that if the fauna won't kill you, the rain will.
All in all, a beautifully crafted world that clearly took some heart and soul in crafting, and genuinely does its best to keep the player immersed. Interesting theme and design choices that always want to be in the limelight.
Unfortunately, this is where the fun stuff ends.
CONS:
-Despite my praise of the lack of railroading, there is such a thing as getting your player properly acquainted. The game does the bare minimum of tutorialization for the player and leaves them stranded with only half the information they need to survive. Information is obscure at best, unknowable at worst. The game confuses itself into thinking "show, don't tell" means "do nothing to teach."
-My appraisal of Slugcat's movements also have their negatives. More emphasis is put in the SLUG part of Slugcat, so he often moves around with this wiggly goopiness that makes the pixel perfect platforming in later areas an active nightmare to micro-manage. Coupled with his below average speed and a pitiful jump height, you'd be forgiven for being confused as to why this species has not gone the way of the dodo yet.
-Save points are few and far between. In a game as difficult as this where anything can happen, players will often feel themselves losing patience as they die repeatedly, not know wither they were inches from a save-point or close to finding one of the flowers to reset the clock.
-The rain's time limit coupled with the scarcity of save points means that instead of being a system to punish negligent players for staying outside too long, it is a harrowing race against time every day, making a brisk jog into a ragged and unenjoyable sprint to beat the buzzer.
-Save points have a required food cost, meaning the player will have to waste additional time gorging themselves on fruit and gnats (or whatever the flying creatures are), which are intensely hard to catch given Slugcat's aforementioned maneuverability issues. It always feels like things are actively stacked in trying to run the player out of time.
-Death comes with not only the pain of having your progress halted (reset food and maps to their status at the beginning of the day), but actively regresses the player's progress, with a horrid karma system arbitrarily locking the player out of new areas until they have survived X amount of days in a row. Karma is not only reset but depleted upon death, with the exception of finding and consuming a yellow flower.
-Swimming controls do not rise above the usual brand of horrible that they are in every other video game in existence.
-Certain enemies hide themselves in ways that are nearly invisible to the player.
-In my opinion, the worst design choice of all. Randomized enemy spawns each day, often making the game not a test of skill, but of luck. Many times the player will find themselves in a compromising situation in which the enemy not only impedes their progress, but makes it genuinely impossible for the player to progress. This of course means the player will die and will then have their progress taken away, and the player will come out with nothing to show, because randomized spawns mean the player has no chance to learn how to overcome since the thing that killed them will be somewhere else next time. Difficult games should be like obstacle courses, and should give the player the chance to learn and familiarize themselves with the best method for coming out on top. That opportunity is actively denied to the player. Sometimes enemies can even fall into view from offscreen (due to the lack of parrallax scrolling or view expansion) and kill the player mid-flight. Very poorly thought out.
All in all, a game with a lot going for it that comes away with too many annoyances to recommend. Perhaps if there were a patch I could give it my solid approval, but for now I'd say pick up HyperLight for a relatively similar experience.
5.5 / 10… Expand
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