So tantalizingly close to being capital-G Good as a package but doesn't quite reach that height.
There's a lot of frustration to be had in how a game that is for all intents and purposes is 2D expects the player to react to situations it presents as if they were in 3D. Enemy spam becomes pretty annoyingly common in the later stages of the game, making it feel less and less like a puzzle or puzzle-adjacent experience at all and turning it far more into a reflex test with movement and controls that don't quite feel hand in hand with one another.
To elaborate, the way you move is an awkward in-between of omnidirectional and extremely limited; on paper the controls are intuitive, but in execution they feel almost unfitting for the game they're in. You can jump and walk in just about any direction but the game softly locks you to a grid, making it tough to commit fully to more precise jumps or square skips. I would imagine that the awkwardness probably by design to some extent, as emulating the sort of arcade-meets-Dreamcast feeling does involve bringing in some level of disparity there. I just find it doesn't really do a lot to elevate the game.
The aesthetic and sound are, as many have mentioned, quite adorable and liminal to an extent in a sort of 00s way. I found it a bit sad how limited the soundtrack was, and once I reached the final world I become retrospectively disappointed in how its particularly strong aesthetic and its more evocative music were totally absent from the game up until that point. Even the finale afterward didn't reach where it had just been. I find it bizarre, and it comes across as a result of either a rush or some break in development between the rest of the game and the last world. Other small things like the shop being a bit empty-feeling at times and the very limited designs on enemy creatures made the game feel like it could have used a little more time in the oven for balancing and pacing purposes, but I do think things work well enough in general in this title.
If you have any interest at all in it, Vividlope is absolutely worth a play on whichever difficulty level speaks to you personally. Don't feel like you need to complete it, either -- I did, and I felt like I would have been just as satisfied simply practicing the earlygame for max ranks to have a more puzzle-feeling experience. As sad as I was that it was not particularly puzzlelike after the first couple worlds were said and done, I think the game has plenty to offer that is unique, memorable, fun (for the most part), and refreshing.
There's a lot of frustration to be had in how a game that is for all intents and purposes is 2D expects the player to react to situations it presents as if they were in 3D. Enemy spam becomes pretty annoyingly common in the later stages of the game, making it feel less and less like a puzzle or puzzle-adjacent experience at all and turning it far more into a reflex test with movement and controls that don't quite feel hand in hand with one another.
To elaborate, the way you move is an awkward in-between of omnidirectional and extremely limited; on paper the controls are intuitive, but in execution they feel almost unfitting for the game they're in. You can jump and walk in just about any direction but the game softly locks you to a grid, making it tough to commit fully to more precise jumps or square skips. I would imagine that the awkwardness probably by design to some extent, as emulating the sort of arcade-meets-Dreamcast feeling does involve bringing in some level of disparity there. I just find it doesn't really do a lot to elevate the game.
The aesthetic and sound are, as many have mentioned, quite adorable and liminal to an extent in a sort of 00s way. I found it a bit sad how limited the soundtrack was, and once I reached the final world I become retrospectively disappointed in how its particularly strong aesthetic and its more evocative music were totally absent from the game up until that point. Even the finale afterward didn't reach where it had just been. I find it bizarre, and it comes across as a result of either a rush or some break in development between the rest of the game and the last world. Other small things like the shop being a bit empty-feeling at times and the very limited designs on enemy creatures made the game feel like it could have used a little more time in the oven for balancing and pacing purposes, but I do think things work well enough in general in this title.
If you have any interest at all in it, Vividlope is absolutely worth a play on whichever difficulty level speaks to you personally. Don't feel like you need to complete it, either -- I did, and I felt like I would have been just as satisfied simply practicing the earlygame for max ranks to have a more puzzle-feeling experience. As sad as I was that it was not particularly puzzlelike after the first couple worlds were said and done, I think the game has plenty to offer that is unique, memorable, fun (for the most part), and refreshing.