My 2024 bucket list, and my reviews of them

“This seems like a really fun game. I say seems, because an hour in I found a way to soft lock myself, glitch my way free, only to soft lock myself again. Will play again, but not QT'd much yet"

I was enjoying it, genuinely. It's a little slower than what I was expecting from the previews on the steam page and other Metroid-like games I've played before, but it wasn't bad pacing by any means.

It has a story I think, I wasn't really paying any attention to it. Not because it was boring, but because I just get easily distracted. I've never been too much of a story person in the games I play, maybe that's why I'm not a JRPG guy...

The art style is a cute 32 bit pixel design, and I like it. Some areas start to feel very samey, but most games that this one is clearly trying to emulate also suffer from the same problem, so I can forgive it for that.

Now... I was only able to play around an hour of the actual game because this game is very much not Quality Tested yet. There are a few bugs here and there, nothing really game breaking... But there is very clearly a path that the developers want you to take to progress. The problem is that you don't always have to listen to the path they want you to take, even if you really shouldn't be able not to.

There are 9? total power ups/equipment items for you to pick up in the game, and one of those is called "Dash". Dash is a very important mechanic in the game, I found out. Unfortunately for the developers, they gave me a jetpack before they gave me dash, and I had an idea that I could possibly cheese my way through a section I wasn't supposed to be able to get to just yet. So I took a 15 minute detour of back tracking to get back to the first example of where you're supposed to use Dash, and behold! After a few tries, I was able to jetpack my way over and successfully ignore the developers wishes.

Problem: You actually do need Dash. I was soft locked almost immediately after, and due to not having OTHER abilities that I'm assuming you get before you get the Dash ability (which I think is dumb for completely different reasons) I was unable to back track, move forward, or die and reset to a previous checkpoint.

I was able to find a completely separate glitch/bug/exploit while ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around thinking all hope was lost, but even after spending 5 minutes spamming Animal Captures at a faster rate than you were ever supposed to be able to fire them and finally getting past the obstacle, I just ended up going to yet another section that I was literally unable to get any farther in because I lacked at least 5 needed abilities.

Moral of the story:
If you play the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game like you're supposed to, you'll have a good time. If your name is SectionVR, you're going to have a bad time.

Also, I want that big ghost mommy lady, or whatever she is, to step on me and treat me like ♥♥♥♥ <3

I was given a copy of this game by the developer. This in no way influences my opinion of the game, but I need to disclose this fact regardless

Go wishlist Genopanic here. No idea when it's coming out.