This game is fucking hard. But fair. Enemy placement is set in stone throughout each run, your jump movement is stiff but manageable, and there's actually power-ups galore if you're adept enough to find them. Same philosophy holds true for the bosses, tough as hell at first glance but completely manageable once you learn their patterns. Just pure old-school goodness right here, so freaking rewarding when you win.
The game's difficulty comes mainly from: A) old style jump controls (ie. you can't change trajectory once in the air, except with the double jump), B) somewhat newbie-hostile level design that results in plenty of trial-and-error gameplay, C) unforgiving health system where you lose gear when you take damage, and D) long distances between checkpoints.
And yet... this isn't as rage-inducing as I would've expected.
It kind of reminds me of Celeste, in the way that you first need to figure out a sequence of actions, and then execute it with little room for improvization or mistakes. Also in the way that you will die a lot. The difference is that Celeste has waaay more checkpoints, an interesting story, and actually enjoyable fluid movement.
While I've never beaten this and have uninstalled it several times, it has never made me go "I'm never playing this again".
And yet... this isn't as rage-inducing as I would've expected.
It kind of reminds me of Celeste, in the way that you first need to figure out a sequence of actions, and then execute it with little room for improvization or mistakes. Also in the way that you will die a lot. The difference is that Celeste has waaay more checkpoints, an interesting story, and actually enjoyable fluid movement.
While I've never beaten this and have uninstalled it several times, it has never made me go "I'm never playing this again".
This game is really REALLY good, the platforming is tight, the jumping and combat animations are perfect, the graphics are good (for 2013), the enemies are hard as fuck but also fair; I die constantly but it feels like I suck and I can do better. It incentivises you to speedrun levels and to git gud, as you die over and over but discover new ways to interact with the environment to go faster, skip sections, kill your enemies before they have a chance to react, and it feels very rewarding when you manage to complete a level.
I don't understand why Volgarr has such a low score here, it's a really good game.
I don't understand why Volgarr has such a low score here, it's a really good game.
Simple gameplay kept engaging throughout with satisfying difficulty & level design. I'm a big fan of the very deliberate design choice where most actions are commitments that need to be thought out beforehand & Volgarr does this extremely well. Plenty of cool little details to discover & the soundtrack kicks ass.