Initial impressions of this game were excellent - something like "A Very Yahtzee Cave Story".
As the difficulty grew, the game seemed to exhibit a strange dichotomy... The dialogue and characters were very inviting, but the brutally high difficulty felt exactly like the game was just giving me the middle finger whenever I died. It's like some strange hybrid of I Wanna Be the Guy or Super Meat Boy and the aforementioned Cave Story, and my brain is still trying to figure out how I should process that combination.
Overall, the game provided some solid entertainment, and some solid yelling at my monitor. It's a great game with a lot of character, but I feel it could have used more time in beta for bug testing and smoothing out the not-uncommon insane difficulty spikes. For some reason, I keep finding myself coming back to the game even despite how much it seems to hate my ass.
Bugs so far (45%):
- You can get your Spirit Grenade counter in the negative. This is especially a pain in the ass during the water boss. You're expected to keep track of so many things during the battle (air, health, fish location, boss location, boss animation); how far your "Missile" counter has gone into the negative shouldn't be one of them.
- Underwater, the time until your next air gauge unit depletion resets when you change screens, meaning you can just flip back and forth between screens indefinitely and never run out of air.
- Using the wall jump, it's possible to get places you shouldn't be. The game generally handles it well and still puts you where you need to be on the next screen (well done, Yahtzee), but if you wall jump in the Save room as you're falling from the top of the screen, you can get on top of the room. Then, depending on what you do, it can mess up which save file the game thinks you're using, and on your next death, it might load the wrong game. I had to quit to title and reload manually.
- This isn't really a bug, but in my opinion, the act of killing all directional input between screens is really a pain in the ass sometimes, and I think it would be worth the effort to fix.