Yep, just played the first 20 minutes. Seems v good.

Have played it a reasonably amount. Graphically quite nice, but more because of the effects and animation laid over the pixel art which in itself is a bit meh. I’m a bit split. I love the general approach - exploration, lack of hand holding, leaving the player to discover, puzzle elements. I found some of the elements go against that though, like insta-deaths where there isn’t enough leeway to understand what’s going on or how to vary your approach next time.

Save points are never particularly far back but you need to manually save rather that it helpfully checkpointing you in these instances. So you get to a room 7 mins since your last save and get insta-killed, or if you want to be on the safe side need to trek back to the nearest save point to manually save before trekking back to the room. Just had a couple of those sort of instances in a row and it stifled my instincts to explore a bit.

I found the lose a heart and respawn on the same screen dazed for a second or two very annoying on tricky platforming sections - particularly those which go across screens - you fall into water, get respawned on the last ledge and the daze stops you moving just long enough that you then fail the next jump because you were trying to move right away.

I’ll give it another go because it’s obviously doing a lot right with some intriguing puzzles and narrative despite how negative I may be coming across above.

    DrDamn I’m enjoying the weirdness and atmosphere of it. Agreed about some of the slightly irritating design choices. I’m hoping to get a chance to really dig into it this weekend.

        Gordon just found one of the game changing abilities and had good fun with it. Lots of nice interesting puzzles. Then wander into dark insta-death WTF room and chucked back to a telephone miles away. Rage quit.

        I think there is still some element of auto progress without the manual save, but chucking back to a telephone when the journey to where you were is complex and not obviously straight forward is frustrating.

          Now have a couple of the toys to play with, yo-yo , bubble wand & flute, just these open things up a significant amount with puzzles and traversal using them in nice creative ways. So I’ve swung back to really enjoying it. It is quite testing though in places and I will admit to one rage quit and delete incident (albeit safe in the knowledge that it only takes seconds to reinstall at 101MB).

          There are some brilliant mechanics and things you discover as you progress though.

          Now collected all 4 flames and more or less covered the map. Last flame was something of a ball ache, but it helps to have a decent set of tools and a good plan. Egg wise I’ve done quite well, three of the four locked doors opened in the collection room - which means I think I have over half. Ability wise I’ve also picked up a couple of new ones disc, slinky, spinning top, remote and now the lantern.

          I think I’ve effectively got the final “boss” opened up but still quite a lot of hidden/additional things to finish off too.

          Overall it does have some cracking design and it’s really well put together, with a good balance of stuff you find and stuff which is better hidden or requires a more community approach to sharing of knowledge.

          There are a couple of design/control missteps. Specifically the insta-deaths and towards the end the need to switch about between items which is poor from a control perspective. Some sort of selection wheel whilst the game is paused would have made more sense than the L1/R1 switching.

          It’s still firmly on my current top 5 games of the year list though.