prodigal more than ur usual zelda-like
+lots of good designed dungeons and boss fights
+well written dialogues and characters
+full of collectibles and side quests
+end game content
+npc romance options
and more

rodigal is amazing! The arts are gorgeous, eye-pleasing and pretty unique as well. Let me put it this way. The game has two parts:

PART ONE: Zelda inspired gameplay
- A true homage to the classic
- Short and sweet
- Interesting bosses
- Combats, puzzles, exploration and world building are well-balanced and fun.
- It gives a true sense of achievement.

PART TWO: post-game content (and it's massive!)
- there’s a lot of post-game content. The dev can literally take it out, give it a different name, and sell it as a new title entirely.
- focused on world building, life/dating sim (Stardew Valley vibe), and challenges
- Environmental clues are subtle so it's hard find hidden/secret areas. Unless you use a guide or LITERALLY hit all blocks, it’s impossible to get ALL collectibles.
- Dungeons are a bit platformy and test your precision and reflexes. I guess they are designed for those players who seek challenges not balanced gameplay.

I liked this game a lot, had that gameboy zelda charm with a lot of its own spin on it. I only have a couple of major notes

-There were times that I wish there were more items because of its zelda-like nature but at the same time they add enough interesting ways to use what they give you that kept me going like "oh this is neat" and not need something new. I can see people being bothered by lack of something new or content with what they did. I kinda felt a mix of both.

- I LOVED the characters and each of their own stories and background that give you a lot of history of the setting and the plot. They lend into each other a lot and it was a real treat. I also think the characters were just super charming in their own right as well.

-Ending segment was a lot of fun and a very pleasant suprise

-My biggest gripe is how little progression is guided in anyway. You often times stumble on ways forward on both main story or Side stories, and I wish their was a better way to keep track in game of like main story quest and side quest. Like a bombers notebook or something.

Overall I think the game is super fun and I'm looking forward to spending time with the endgame and playing again for some of the other characters personal routes or alternate quest ends like marriages and what not.

Beat the game in about 2 days, but I enjoyed it. A lot of classic Gameboy puzzle solving and while I enjoyed it I felt it lacked a lot of depth.
Gameplay could have been fleshed out more and I feel like the artstyle kind of limited it in gameplay at times. The portraits are amazing and I adore the all the art for them.
The story felt a bit lackluster, basically felt dragged around and I had no real agency or decisions in the plot, but I see where it could have been fixed so that's good at least.

I decided to marry Tess (oh yeah this game has dating sim stuff kinda), but i feel like just completing a dungeon then talking to her 5 times is kind of boring for forming an actual relationship even if her story is genuinely interesting and cute.

I'm probably not going to do all the postgame stuff, but I enjoyed my time with the game and its a nice game I can recommend to others when on sale.
I recommend it!

I don't like top down zelda and I don't like dating sim elements. Surprisingly then, I did end up liking Prodigal. It avoids being self-indulgent with its minimalist approach to design. The overworld is refreshingly small and intimate, favouring ease of traversal over lock and key design. Likewise, the array of tools is stripped down to the bare essentials and granted in full after half an hour of play. Its perspective too is refreshingly grounded (until it isn't) with a simple focus on returning to your roots and coming to terms with the island community you abandoned in your youth. This gives context and meaning to the dating sim elements as besides the abrupt 'marry me' question, conversations have the friction and awkwardness of rekindling old friendships with people you thought you'd left behind for good. The writing and tone shares more in common with the older harvest moon games with its sedentary worldview where standing still and noticing the coming of seasons and individual nuances of an npc's life is just as valuable as exploring uncharted lands. The sheer generosity of post-game content (it really feels like a sequel to itself at times) which continually escalates in scope and complexity in surprising ways does not disrupt this tranquility but only energises it ever so slightly, the equivalent of a crisp winter walk that you undertake at your own pace before enjoying a cup of coffee at home. Definitely better than the sum of its parts.

I wish I liked this game more.

The Game Boy Color is my favorite gaming device and the 2D Zelda games are massively important to me.

Sadly, the game is a lot less like Zelda than I expected. The game gives you all 3 items very quickly (like in Breath of the Wild) and then everything after that is just about making the puzzles more annoying and littered with distractions and enemies and traps, rather than building on top of things or challenging you to solve new types of puzzles.

The combat is nothing special, but that's par for the course with a topdown Zelda-like.

Weirdly this game has a marriage mechanic. I married the bunny girl, but it all felt very sudden. It's not a visual novel, so there's not a lot of time to develop characters. That being said, it does way better at that than you'd expect given that it looks like a GBC Zelda game.

Difficulty was really weird. It's mostly not that hard, but the game never lets you heal inside of dungeons. Not potions or heart pickups or anything. You can buy an item that resurrects you once, for 100g. Money is plentiful since nothing else drops in this game, but it's tedious having to go back and buy that constantly, or use the teleporter to go home and get your HP back before a boss.

I managed to get the credits to roll, but the post-credits game is very uh, "self directed". The game appears to be full to the brim with secrets and bonus dungeons and stuff, but it's all a bit obtuse for me and I was losing steam on the puzzle/dungoen design, so I decided to skip most of the post credits stuff.

cute little game, I love the GBC Zelda games and this hits that really well both in art style and in dungeon design. A bit short but that would be mostly fine except I know for a fact I missed a LOT of the game. It feels really bad considering that there's very little guidance and I was playing the game how I'd normally play these.

I wish there were any sort of rails here. I know I missed plenty of the game because I ended with only 8/40 achievments on Steam and a good portion of the inventory filled with question marks. Looking at the wiki I've now seen that there's quite a few side quests. Why make them side at all? or at least guide me to them better. I talked to NPCs consistently so I could see what was going on and hardly got anything. I'm sure its tied to the in-game time system and I have to go to certain parts at certain times of day but man. I would've loved to get to know some more people. I didn't even get marriage done.