Recent reviews by Plush

The game is great, will write more when I feel like it

I'm a bit of a "write all or nothing" guy so for now I'll just say the game was really fun

I am probably in the majority when I say that RutM is my first and favorite game of the Momodora series, I played it back in 2018 and since then it stuck to me deeply. I'm pretty lazy so I only now decided to write my thoughts about it, because I am still very much in love with how many things they got right.

Where do I even start? The art is staggeringly beautiful in every layer of the screen, the choice of color palettes and filters is godly, even almost six years after I played the game for the first time the resulting atmospheres still leave me with refined sensations of bitterness yet serenity. This enjoyment is only enhanced by the fairly intuitive and simple yet nice gameplay, moving and attacking with the priestess feeling tight and responsive, the priestess' physics carefully planned to be not too floaty, all these factors deeply suiting my tastes. Some people say the experience felt too short but personally I don't feel that, with this I don't mean to say I dislike long games, but sometimes I think highly motivated gamedevs fall into the common trap of padding their games with purposeless content that negatively affects the cohesiveness of their game. On the contrary, RutM feels like extremely coincise and perfectly adequate work of art. It plays on its strengths all the way until the end, so in my opinion if you will enjoy the game from the beginning, chances are high that you will enjoy the game all the way to the end, while if it's not the game for you, you will be able to recognize it quickly and look for something else.

If I didn't make it clear enough by now, this is one of my favorite games ever and I don't have significant issues with it, but I will write some smaller things that if were handled a bit different I would have enjoyed more. I will also try to be as clear as possible on the reasoning, so you can make your own judgement.

I didn't feel much satisfaction from how the main collectable of the game, the Ivory Bugs, were implemented. You are highly unlikely to find many of them unless you are the type of insane player (to each their own, but come on!) who rubs every wall even when it doesn't look anyhow suspicious, or you have a passive item equipped at all times which is a significant cost when you can have only 2 passive items equipped ot once. Also between the fact that they are presented as tiny bugs and the fact that you can't claim anything until you have at least 10 of them (which is a lot considering unfeasible they are to find), you will easily get the sensation that they won't be worth the hustle, and because of this they are prone to get ignored until after you finish the game. Only then, if you want max completion, you do the fairly mundane task of visiting every room a 2nd time with the Ring of Candor item, and once you're done bug collecting you claim your rewards which is items that mostly aid you in gameplay, when you've already finished the game. I think this could have been implemented better in different ways, maybe even by having the collectibles be more straight-forward rewards like permanent stat upgrades (the new Momodora game, Moonlit Farewell, takes this approach! I wrote a review on that too)

One thing that's really nice is that items aren't just useful, sometimes they look cool, their descriptions are interesting, or you might even get some lore out of it (for example I remember the Sparse Thread). However there are several of such items locked behind doing bosses without taking a single hit which is fairly hard, and it is pretty much the same hard difficulty to do so regardless of the difficulty you picked for your save file. I have a lot of experience with videogames so this didn't affect me personally, but I thought it was worth mentioning after watching a friend play and having this unfortunate situation come into play.

That is all! I'm bad at writing conclusions so I'll very very smoothly say, I love RutM and I have met many cool people thanks to it, I'm very grateful to the devs and I hope more people give it a try <3

A tip for whoever is getting into the game: some room elements are randomly generated upon being loaded, so try re-entering rooms multiple times (specially ones with background objects or animals) to find cool new details!

accettabile dai

Game is good man

poop funny

Ho provato ElecHead dopo aver notato la quantità spropositata di developer che lo hanno caldamente suggerito, da Terry Cavanagh (developer di VVVVVV), a Maddy Thorson, Noel Berry, e Lena Raine (developer di Celeste), da Derek Yu (developer di Spelunky), ad addirittura mostri dell'industria come Yoko Taro (developer di Nier)...!

Il gioco si presenta come un puzzle platformer non troppo lungo o impegnativo, ma comunque molto brillante. Lo stile grafico in pixel-art e la musica sono molto piacevoli e stimolanti. La meccanica principale consiste nell'usare il tuo stesso corpo, capace di condurre elettricità, per riuscire a farsi avanti tra le stanze. Oltre alle schermate principali sono sparsi in totale 20 collezionabili che aumentano gradevolmente la rigiocabilità, 10 skin sbloccabili oltre alle 3 di partenza che vi permetteranno di cambiare a piacere la palette dei colori del gioco, ed un power-up opzionale (MOLTO nascosto...!)

Una cosa che mi ha catturato particolarmente è la curiosa dedicazione e capacità nel guidarti alle meccaniche e alle soluzioni delle stanze, in modo interamente non-verbale. Non c'è nessuna stringa di testo in ElecHead, addirittura nel menù le opzioni son rappresentate soltanto da icone, e addirittura il developer stesso, Nama Takahashi, risponde quasi soltanto usando emoji su Twitter!

Senza dubbio, terrò d'occhio questo developer per progetti futuri :)