An unpleasant and amateurish attempt at a stripped-down Ghosts 'n Goblins / Makaimura clone that, unlike its forebears, feels like total shit to play and looks worse. I could maybe forgive the cheap-shot level design, obnoxious checkpointing, and bland combat if the basics of jumping and switching direction didn't feel like you're controlling Swamp Thing. Movement and combat that is this clunky is normally restrained to masochistic ironic GDQ speedruns of forgotten NES shovelware, not indies vying for a seat at the hardcore table. Compared to its pixel art contemporaries like Shovel Knight or Fez, the animation and visuals are blocky and disjointed. The music sucks too. I can see why it's popular with speedrunners, but if you're just casually looking for a difficult platformer you can do so much better.

Kept an extra half star because the adaptive difficulty idea is neat. Wish it were in a less crappy game.

The marketing is pretty pretentious ("huhr duhr remember when vidya was HARD?"...failing to realize that not every game made before 1998 was an exercise in frustration) and there are simply better games that accomplish what it set out to do.

Cursed Castilla came out a year prior, actually looked like an arcade or Genesis game and had far better level design based around strict jump arcs and the need to think one step ahead since you didn't have the free-flowing movement of something like Super Mario. If you need a more modern example, Curse of the Moon went for the same thing with great results. Neither game needed to tell you it was "so hard" or "so retro", either.

Seems like this has its fans though. To be fair, it did release before the whole retro revival really blew up...but it just didn't feel any better to play now than it did upon release for me.