When you see an art style like this, it immediately feels like there's so much potential to the game. This game clearly seems inspired by Mother/Undertale/Zelda with a dash of Celeste. It looks great and has a cool vibe… but gosh, these games need to cool it on not giving you a real enemy encounter for an hour+ into playing it. The game promises turn-based rpg battles but it appears to only be for boss battles and the two that you experience in the first hour are both scripted for you to lose/not do anything effective. It gave a very bad first impression. Once I got to a real boss battle, lo and behold they aren't turn based battles at all, they're Undertaleish battles where the screen gets very small and you have to dodge enemies like you do in the overworld for 5 seconds. It's not really turn based, though it has you 'miss' attacks a lot making these battles last a long time. It also has you repeating the same overworld puzzles the only difference is that it shrinks everything down to a postage-stamp sized square. If you're steam linking onto your phone like I was, it's not really playable at that screen size. I had to switch devices to finish the game which is not the best user experience.

There are zeldish battles and puzzles in the overworld which are not bad but you are funneled into them quite linearly and you have to finish their very specific tasks to progress, which kinda that messes a bit with the game’s pacing if you miss something minor. The puzzles aren't bad, but it doesn't really go beyond anything too basic. Still not the worst part of the game.

I’ve been in the mood for what this game promises, but it’s running into the same the pitfalls that something like Eastward or Sea of Stars ran into. It’s not bad, but it feels very incomplete and more like an imitation than a game trying to do its own thing. Learning that it’s basically early access without saying it’s early access and it’s “part 1 of an episodic series” has me a little extra cynical about it. This game feels like it needs to find its own voice and focus more on making a system that works internally rather than just being a pastiche of things it likes from other games.