Underappreciated lil' metroidvania. Immediatley stands out from the rest with it's movement mechanics where you won't be using your legs to walk but instead to leap, as wall jumping is the only way you can move around the world. It's more than just a gimmick though, moving around can feel great and overall it adds a fast and kinetic feel to the game purely from basic movement and exploring. Later on the game starts to add some real bullet hell rooms/bosses where you're forced to use your movement skills and eyeballs efficiently and it's a keen challenge! Some of them can get a little too much but overall the game does a good job of making use of your movement options and making it feel satisfying!

Game also has a real look to it as well. Due to there being no "floor" to the game, it likes to play tricks with orientation and the geometry of the rooms with camera changes when entering and visual detail to the environments with some abstract looks, one of the earlier examples being a forest where trees are growing up from both sides of the screen. It really adds a cool visual look to the game and makes sure that it sticks out in your mind when it comes to metroidvania worlds, it's neat! The pixel art on characters and bosses are well done and give them an almost higher quality Sega Genesis kinda look? I can't exactly pin point it but a bunch of designs feel like they were inspired from select classic games. There's a character early on who's proportions feel off that reminds me of 80s games where character's sizes didn't mean too much and in the end you had these dudes who were unintentionally way larger or looked different in perspective, I also might be talking out my butt but I feel it!

It's got power ups although I think they made too many attack based ones that feel kinda situational, especially since selecting a specific one can be difficult by the end of the game since you have to constantly scroll through a list and in a frantic battle that can be pretty hard. There's a cool teleportation one that changes the game a bit but it's not used enough and in the end I just spammed rockets to kill everything lol.

ALSO one little thing that really impressed me was the game's use of HD Rumble in a perticular moment. There's a place where you're standing under a character that's known for singing and the controller starts to make a mechanical chirping noise using the rumble inside the controller and it's done so well that it took me off guard. A game using controller rumble as instrument with pitch changes? That's fucking cool! Honestly, games need to do more with this. Pls.

But yeah, good game! If you want a solid, not too long metroidvania that's a little bit different then by all means try this! You'll probably have a good time.

Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition é um jogo que realmente traz uma identidade artística única diante dos demais "Metroidvania's" que temos por ai por ser feito inteiramente por brasileiros as tantas referências as nossas culturas como a arte da Tarsila do Amaral (Abaporu) e toda a ideia da protagonista ser baseada na Dandara dos Palmares que lutou até o fim pela sua liberdade diante da época da Escravidão no período colonial do Brasil é perfeita e funciona muito bem em um jogo como esse, uma pena que para mim esse jogo só fica ai já que a desenvolvedora tentou arriscar em uma identidade a mais até em sua gameplay com uma idéia de saltar em áreas brancas determinadas no mapa que para mim com o tempo acaba entediando o jogador demais e trazendo aquela terrível sensação de exaustão do jogo, além disso, temos um mapa enorme com nenhum tipo de ajuda diante de qual direção devemos ir para prosseguir com o game que faz com que você se perca facilmente e acabe ficando sem rumo no jogo, por isso, infelizmente pela minha experiência eu não recomendaria jogá-lo pois realmente ele cansa muito rápido e não traz tanto o que é mais importante para mim que é entreter o jogador mas tenho certeza que a Long Hat House (desenvolvedora do jogo) tem competência e um futuro promissor com seus títulos seguintes...

02/09/2024 update:
After a while, I sat down to play this game again. Did my opinion change from last time? A little. Most of my criticisms remain the same, with a few more nitpicks, although now I find myself liking Dandara a bit more.

The music, the art, they elevate the game despite its glaring flaws, and I cannot say I hated the game as a whole, but I was frustrated by the lack of direction. Other Metroidvanias are more intuitive, with a general idea with where you should go, but here, the direction starts lacking once you reach the Hidden Kingdoms, and the lack of savepoints in that area still frustrates me.

However, after I better learned the jumping and movement, I could finally play this game better, and what I got at the end, despite all the frustrations, was truthfully worth it. I really like this game's setting and story, through and through, and that was the thing that got me to keep going to the end.

Would I still recommend it? Yeah, I would. It's certainly an unique experience, and I'm glad I played it.

(For extra context: I'm Brazilian, and this game was made in my native language and contains several references to Brazilian culture, History and folklore, which I understood.)

I have played this game for 15.5 hours.

First thing's first, there are many things I like in this game.

The music: It's fantastic, whether it's the ethereal ambience or the dramatic score for fights, it's a great feature the game has.

The graphics: I'm a lover of pixel art, and this game looks gorgeous. The backgrounds and the environment look sublime. The characters' designs look great, and they're pretty creative.

The story: It's compelling, and I like that you can piece it together through character dialogue and clues spread all around. It's a staple of Metroidvanias that I will like no matter the game.

Now, at first, on the first few hours, I really like the game, and I would have given it a higher grade if it weren't for a series of factors that piled on as the game progressed.

The gameplay. It's not bad in of itself, but then things get unbearably harsh once the enemies start popping around the clock.

You CANNOT attack while jumping. You have to stand still and then shoot, making you an easy target for enemies if you don't watch yourself. On top of this, you have to charge your attack in one second. Now this, IN OF ITSELF, isn't bad. It encourages you to think and plan your trajectory as you dodge the enemies and environmental hazards at your leisure. But then the game starts throwing fast enemies at you, and they come by the numbers. You don't have time to stop and think; you HAVE to move faster than you can think, and to the combat's detriment: You CAN'T shoot while jumping, AND you're forced to sit still for at least one second to be able to attack at all.

You can use other alternative, faster attacks, but they will drain your MP, and while you're able to replenish it, there's only an amount of times you can do so before needing to go to a save point. And the game, later on, has many difficult gauntlets and enemy-infested areas that punish you if you stop to think for one moment. You are forced to pre-plan every move you make and you still have to improvise midway through, because of several hazards and enemies the game throws at you.

The aiming system is weird. I'm not sure if it's just me, but when I'm aiming, the jumping trajectory line (highlighted in a green color) sometimes will stop if you're trying to move it from several smaller platforms, and many times I had to move my mouse back and forth to get it to move, and many times I got hurt or died because of this.

And, while the game overall has fairly even distributed save points, this one area, the Hidden Kingdoms, is way, WAY too big compared to the other areas, and it gets really tedious to navigate through it because there are very few save points. In this one massive area, on the lower part of the Hidden Kingdoms' map, there are but two solitary save points, and getting to them takes way too long. If you die in this area, you have to traverse a really far distance to reach the place you last died, making a tedious experience frustrating, especially in the Trials' area, where you have to walk a long distance to get to any of said Trials.

I found out later that you can enable "respawn at the door", which makes things much more convenient, but it's a cheat. Why is it a cheat? This wouldn't be much of a problem if this IMMENSE area had more save points. Even harder games like Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, and the Souls games have evenly distributed save points where you can rest and respawn without having to backtrack too much.

This huge difficulty spike is at best unwarranted, and comes across as an artificial way to increase difficulty, and it's the biggest detractor of this game. It doesn't feel challenging: It feels unfair, and unearned, and also frustrates me.

I have to say, however: I haven't finished this game. These are my thoughts after playing well over 15 hours, and most of these hours were dotted with frustration and lots of backtracking.

I may change my thoughts and thus my score later, but so far, this is my experience with the game. If you still want to play it, go ahead, I could maybe even recommend it, but be wary of these flaws; it might be more frustrating to you than it was for me.

The game started very well, I liked the first parts but as some mechanics were presented to me in frustrating ways and in my point of view the level design that started well was horrible, having to go through parts that in my view I shouldn't have at the time to continuing with the story clearly messed up my gameplay and deviated from what I expected from a good metroidvania.
Apart from that the fighting mechanics are either simple and a little cool or very frustrating, not having a map that shows the chests already seen is also something I didn't like.
I finished the game without having fully explored the map, which makes me wonder if exploring like I did was really necessary. And it seems to me I also ended up finishing the game without getting all the items and powers.
The story can captivate some people, the references are also nice, the rest is a very simple game, with systems that could be introduced in a more didactic and legal way.
I expected to have more fun since the jumping mechanic is such a creative thing.