After starting my first game, I spent about 15 minutes trying to get anywhere or pick up any powerup, and found that it was just too hard for me to have any fun. So I started over, enabling everything that would make me invincible to explore the world and see what was going on. But then the world felt extremely flat, not like "oh, I've been here before. I remember this place because I did x and y here". Maybe that's my fault, but with an invincibility cheat code baked right into the menu, it's kinda hard to resist. And there's no putting the genie back in the bottle once you've taken away every surprise-pit and sudden bossfight. Oh well.
Unfortunately even with total invincibility and most of the items, I couldn't find anything that made traversal feel much improved from how it felt at the start. Or if there was a good combined application of my items, the fact that I had to hunt-and-peck the items on the keyboard made it too hard to find it (the game devotes 20% of the screen to boxes labeled A-R for your item slots, which are activated with those keys). Every key after R (alphabetically) changes Sylvie into a lime which effectively turns off gravity, sending her flying.
It's a very experimental approach... but I can absolutely guarantee you I would have had more fun if this game had 1 action button than 19. It's just too many, and too randomly dispersed too fast. Ironically, I found this game because it was advertised as a sort of Animal-Well-like, a game that had you scroll through 6+ items using L1 and R1... but I digress.
There seemed to be some meta-dialog about the creation and creators of the game you are playing sprinkled throughout the world, but I just didn't care to read into it myself. It was a bit too long-winded, like picking up a book in Skyrim. I'm not a fan of the idea of platforming games with VN elements, I prefer story that is baked into the gameplay and the world. You can't spell Skyrim without Skim...
I like to try new things and I like when devs try new things, so I'm happy this game exists, but I think it needs some restructuring if the devs want this to be able to reach a larger audience.
Unfortunately even with total invincibility and most of the items, I couldn't find anything that made traversal feel much improved from how it felt at the start. Or if there was a good combined application of my items, the fact that I had to hunt-and-peck the items on the keyboard made it too hard to find it (the game devotes 20% of the screen to boxes labeled A-R for your item slots, which are activated with those keys). Every key after R (alphabetically) changes Sylvie into a lime which effectively turns off gravity, sending her flying.
It's a very experimental approach... but I can absolutely guarantee you I would have had more fun if this game had 1 action button than 19. It's just too many, and too randomly dispersed too fast. Ironically, I found this game because it was advertised as a sort of Animal-Well-like, a game that had you scroll through 6+ items using L1 and R1... but I digress.
There seemed to be some meta-dialog about the creation and creators of the game you are playing sprinkled throughout the world, but I just didn't care to read into it myself. It was a bit too long-winded, like picking up a book in Skyrim. I'm not a fan of the idea of platforming games with VN elements, I prefer story that is baked into the gameplay and the world. You can't spell Skyrim without Skim...
I like to try new things and I like when devs try new things, so I'm happy this game exists, but I think it needs some restructuring if the devs want this to be able to reach a larger audience.