Music highlight. Tim Follin, you can't save this. I can promise though, I sunk a good few hours in because the OST is great.
Really telling that this is sitting at a cool 6/10 despite most people likely never figuring out what the potions did (essential) or how to jump-grab or drop-jump. Not a single mention of the nearly frame-perfect waiting sections with oscillating spike-balls, the spawn-in death traps, or the borderline item softlock (I elaborate on this one in the description)
I'm a Zelda II defender (4/10) and I love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (8/10) for its masterfully tight design and satisfyingly brutal difficulty, but every other chamber in Solstice by comparison is full of "gotchas" and absurdly tight windows that are made worse by the isometric view obfuscating their actual location. You can infer a lot of locational stuff, but only so much; there's a reason platformers nearly entirely avoided this perspective even back in the day, opting for either top-down or side-view.
I can't help but feel like you're better off playing one of the adventure games of the 80s and 90s instead if you want a "vibes-based exercise in trial and error."
Really telling that this is sitting at a cool 6/10 despite most people likely never figuring out what the potions did (essential) or how to jump-grab or drop-jump. Not a single mention of the nearly frame-perfect waiting sections with oscillating spike-balls, the spawn-in death traps, or the borderline item softlock (I elaborate on this one in the description)
I'm a Zelda II defender (4/10) and I love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (8/10) for its masterfully tight design and satisfyingly brutal difficulty, but every other chamber in Solstice by comparison is full of "gotchas" and absurdly tight windows that are made worse by the isometric view obfuscating their actual location. You can infer a lot of locational stuff, but only so much; there's a reason platformers nearly entirely avoided this perspective even back in the day, opting for either top-down or side-view.
I can't help but feel like you're better off playing one of the adventure games of the 80s and 90s instead if you want a "vibes-based exercise in trial and error."