My favorite game, but probably the worst version I've played. It's not bad by any means, but despite some nice QoL adjustments, there are some things about it that I find lacking or annoying.

Regarding QoL adjustments -- I love only needing one arrow to use a bow. I also appreciate that the Trap Door monsters in the Sealed Cave have enough of a delay on them now that you can respond to their targeting.

Strangely, the design for the same areas as usual ended up a little weird at times, with the areas that should normally scroll from off-screen not doing so until you reached them in larger rooms. This might not sound like a big deal, but it's really awkward in smaller rooms with hidden secrets. The house in Mist is a good example of this, with the room above the front room not actually visible because of a secret off to the right via an entrance through the fireplace. The end result is that you have to move far enough north to see something that should be visible without any effort, while a blank area is the point of fixation in the room. It's extra strange because the map doesn't display this well either in some scenarios, as if they were trying to eliminate the scrolling aspect of the map and cut borders of the map a little too short.

The inconsistency with hidden walls is also weird, as FF3 had highlighted areas whenever you walked into a hidden passage to show your pathing. Unlike the vanilla version of FF4 that obscures passages completely or gives them a slight dark-blue tint (depending on your version), this one elects to display the paths in tile form when you're on them inside buildings and other structures that aren't considered dungeons, while paths in the towns themselves or dungeons are completely clear and indiscernible while traversing them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just another weird inconsistency that doesn't make a lot of sense.

Finally, I am inclined to agree with people that aren't fond of the pixel art -- this version didn't really feel like an improvement to me, other than glossing up of cutscenes, which wasn't pixel art as much as just use of modern effects and design to elicit something you couldn't get from a regular 16-bit experience at the time.

The game is still grand, I had a fun time in spite of these little things that nagged at me, but I'd rather play any other version again. And I will.

This is a tough one to write about.

Short answer: It's probably a really good game at its core and if you like puzzle-centric Metroidvanias that encourage exploring, this is probably your cup of tea.

Longer answer: For me at least, it's too puzzle-centric. There's an amazing amount of exploration to be done with secrets hidden in practically every room you enter (and if they're not hidden, it's because you stumbled into a secret room and the chests are there, waiting for you if you can solve a puzzle to reach them).

Fast travel is a little unintuitive at times because some campfires you travel from don't reach areas you think they would when heading back from them. That being said, the caves you explore are labyrinthine in nature and it kinda fits the mold of the game, so it's hard to gripe about that.

The soundtrack is solid. Not much else to say about that because it's an enjoyable listen, but nothing I'm adding to my music collection.

Enemy diversity is a mixed bag, in that there are some interesting enemy choices that have distinct behaviors, but some enemies really are just basic palette swaps with nothing else going for them beyond dealing more damage/taking more damage before dying.

Bosses are a great time, though for all the traveling I did in the game, they feel few and far between. That may just be a perception issue on my part because of getting lost a few times and having to backtrack a bit to figure out where to go next, but I figure it's worth noting.

Bosses (outside of maybe the first) require patience and paying attention to the layout of the room and whatever resources might be there to maximize your chances for survival. Although a barbarian's instinct might be to Hulk-Smash! your way through them, the player better bring a heaping of awareness to the match because you don't get any kinds of items to heal or boost stats or anything of the sort when going into these fights -- it's adapting to the situation or getting wrecked.

I think I enjoyed every boss fight I encountered outside of maybe the boss of the Eternal Palace area, which just felt like a chore to deal with, despite probably being the easiest boss to figure out.

I should give a brief mention to combat in general -- it's extremely basic and consists of you slashy-slashing and occasionally using your bat to manipulate resources around you to deal with enemies. Sometimes you might throw a stone to hit an enemy and elicit a particular behavior from them (be it knocking them off a ceiling or a ledge), but it's mostly just about slashing (or charge-slashing) while not being in the way of whatever the enemy might have in store for you.

I want to mention the map system because I said earlier that the place is very labyrinthine and it is, but it's also worth noting that the map system comes with a variety of markers to allow you to make notes-of-sorts for each room in case you need/want to come back there to deal with something specific. Wish you could have an easier way to pick the icon you want instead of just scrolling through all of them, but I appreciate the sheer number of options available.

Some puzzles are mandatory and I think at least for me, I'm just not that fond of the puzzle mechanics for this game. You (barbarian) send your bat (Pip) out to light up certain stones that can cause effects (temporarily or permanently based on each room) that allow you to traverse said rooms. You use the right-analog stick to aim a fruit that sends the bat in that direction. You can also throw stones this way (of which you have limited supplies) or special fruits (of which you also have limited supplies) to either hit switches from a distance or use your bat to do some specific tactics to help make puzzle progression a thing.

The puzzles are oftentimes clever, but sometimes just frustrating because they rely on the player's ability to hit angles properly with a limited supply of items. As an example, there's a very simple puzzle in a secret room that involves a ball and chain swinging back and forth over a pit of spikes. The chest is on the other side of the room behind a locked portcullis. The switch is on a ledge up and to the right of where the ball swings back and forth in a pendulum fashion.

What do you do? Simple, you try and angle and time your stone throw so that it bounces off the ball/chain on the way back to the right, causing it to ricochet onto the ledge with the switch to hit it. I understood exactly what it wanted after the first throw, but with 25 stones in my inventory, I couldn't manage it and had to just abandon the chest to come back later if I wanted to (I didn't). There were no nearby resources to recover my stones, so I couldn't go back and try again quickly. Not all puzzles are like this, but enough are that it can get frustrating (at least for me).

It got to the point where I wasn't really having fun slogging through some puzzles and it kinda took me out of the game. At one point, I found this puzzle that was simply moving around the perimeter of a room quickly while getting a monster inside a maze in the middle of the room to follow you through said maze. There are hazards in the maze that will kill the creature and you need to get it to a certain place in the maze in order to solve the puzzle, but between teleporters in the maze that would fling the creature back the way it came because it sat in a spot for too long and the hazards, I gave up despite knowing what to do after having it die on me about a dozen times or so.

I mention this because it was in the last area I got to before I quit and when I went back to explore the rest of the area, I found my way to a room that had notes that said that the puzzle I gave up on was one of three trials I had to overcome to make progress. Yeah, that was it for me. I wasn't dying to ruthlessly hard platforming (there is some hard platforming in the game), I wasn't missing vital resources when I needed them for an area -- I just couldn't get a stupid creature to follow me through a maze where it was crystal clear where it should go, but I simply couldn't get it to behave the way I needed it to in order to get it there. When progress is beyond my control and in the hands of enemy AI behaving properly, I'm kinda over it.

I'd encourage anyone who wants to play a Metroidvania with deep exploration to it and doesn't mind sometimes-frustrating puzzles to give it a shot. The game has a lot of good things going for it and if you can get past bashing your head against the brick wall that is handling those puzzles, you might have a grand time with this game.

Not sure how to feel about this yet. Only played it for an hour, but I'm mildly frustrated with a couple of things that feel like bad design decisions.

1. The idea that you can build up combos by using melee and get free healing out of it is nice, but maybe don't make the command for healing the same as the interact command? The number of times I healed instead of interacting with something/someone or interacted with something instead of healing was significantly more than zero thus far.

2. There's a huge lack of consistency for when it's okay to drop off a ledge. Scripted falls that are long, I get it. But when you have a passage that ends with what looks like a chute and I can drop down it fine to continue my path, but also have another passage that has a drop at the end of the screen that counts as an instadeath, that's rather annoying -- especially when I carefully cleared my way through a boatload of enemies only to find myself killed because the rules for exploration aren't explicitly spelled out.

Seriously, how hard is it to give some kind of indication as to when it's either VERY SAFE or NOT SAFE to drop in an area? Doesn't even have to be both -- pick one and the other one is the natural opposite answer. Killing me because you let me drop down into several areas before but changed your mind this time doesn't fly with me.

I'll probably come back to this eventually, but I'm salty at the moment, so I'm in no rush to currently jump back into it. Also, the combat feels really dullsville, but that might just be the first hour speaking.

Not sure how to feel about this. I died a bunch and that doesn't necessarily make the game a bad one, but the movement is a mixed bag because the jump feels awful, swinging your weapon feels awful, combat in general feels awful.

...and yet the dodge roll feels absolutely magnificent and covers so much ground and requires no stamina, so it's MOSTLY a better way to cover ground than actually walking or jumping.

The game is a lot of dying, learning where shortcuts back to your current checkpoint are, opening them up, and then moving forward again (at least for what I've played) and the enemies sound, and music are just so uninspiring that I don't feel motivated to chase it further to see if it gets better.

Maybe another time. But that dodge roll does feel wonderful.

Some of the power-up ideas in this game are brilliant and the Ikaruga-esque combat style of element-swapping to absorb damage and gain back MP is fun and makes for some excellent boss designs.

The arrow puzzles are a little off-putting, though -- not because they're particularly bad (other than one section late in the game that's mandatory), but because they kinda detract from the action-centric feel of the game. I appreciate trying to find a way to incorporate Deedlit's archery skills, but maybe have the bows do more with their arrows based on the bow type (a few bows fire more arrows or use homing arrows as examples). Players should be encouraged to use the bow, but aside from the mandatory puzzles or optional ones, there's no real need to use the bow.

The game's a little on the short side and enemies are a mixed bag, ranging from complete pushovers to absolutely obnoxious depending on their placement in rooms (looking at you, Mummy Masters alongside those flying gargoyles with both of you immune to opposite elements). For the most part though, enemies are just a very poor-paying XP obstacle on your way to bosses.

I won't speak on the boss design, other than to say that the difficulty range is all over the place, but I still approve of them for the most part. There's some really fun ideas at play in there and I would liked to have seen a bit more gameplay length to maybe offer a few more creative boss ideas on top of what was already there. Some moves are shared between bosses, but that didn't really bother me.

Overall, the game is fun but very short -- I clocked about 7.5 hours with nearly all rooms explored. Definitely worth checking out at least once but if Metroidvanias aren't your thing, consider waiting for a sale -- it's a solid one, but it's not a must-buy for your average gamer who just wants to check out a random given game.

I think this game just didn't know how to logically capitalize on the goodness of the previous games. The idea of superpowers is awesome, but an hour into the game, you've got to wonder how awkward things are -- you're used to hijacking cars and driving around the city while doing crazy stuff, but now it's beneath you to waste your time but there's still hundreds of cars driving around the "streets" anyway.

I can understand why they're there, but it's like incorporating a feature into a game, showcasing it, then telling the player to never mess with it because it's not even a worthwhile feature.

The rest of the game kinda gives me this vibe, too.

I didn't realize this was another game from The Chinese Room and as someone else said, a "spiritual sequel" to Dear Esther. Although I thought Dear Esther was terrible, I played it to completion.

In the case of this game, I struggled to motivate myself to explore new areas because in many ways, it is very reminiscent of Dear Esther -- although there's significantly more branching and exploration available for hearing stories and even some resolutions to make by seeking out pieces of stories, I couldn't get past how boring the game felt.

In essence, it's better than Dear Esther, but to me, is undeserving of a rating any higher than Dear Esther.