Recent reviews by bmeow

I really REALLY want to like this game. I'm still kind of sorting out my thoughts but while it's still fresh I don't think I could recommend this to a friend.

I love the music, the visual art style, the way it weaves rhythm tracks and minigames into the story. Everything down to the voice acting is good and passionate.

But it's a very story-driven (almost visual novel) kind of game, and the story is...inconsistent if it I had to describe it in one word. It kinda jumps between timelines, locations, and emotions on a whim. It also suffers from some middle-book syndrome. It feels unpolished and unfinished - a draft. I literally wasn't even sure if the game was over several times, and even when it was, I still wasn't sure.

I've seen a lot of comments and reviews about bugs. I ran into a few but none that were super impactful if that's important to you.

Came for the gorgeous art style and music. Stayed for the powerful narrative around how different people deal with powerful emotions. Lovely story and intuitive gameplay!

Bonus was the LGBTQ inclusitivity :)

Nice balance between simple and complex. The more you play, the more you are able to plan and think ahead about potential bonuses. After beating floor 20 (think ascensions if you've played Slay the Spire) I went back to just casual floor 1 runs for the occasional replay. May do some more achievement hunting but it was a fun ride!

Pressed E to go up a zipline and instantly fell upon reaching the top, taking out most of my health. Why bother with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

I enjoy hard games, learning attack patterns, learning the movement, learning to adapt to different types of challenges. But this isn't hard; it's straight-up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Here's why:

1. There's not enough room; everything's too big.
Some bosses take up 1/4 to a 1/3 of the screen. Add on to that that their attacks can easily take up an
extra 10-15% of the screen, and your character is 5-10% of the screen, and there's nearly nowhere to
stand.
2. Too much RNG
How can you learn how to "git gud" if a game relies so heavily on RNG? Honestly on most bosses this isn't
too bad, but sometimes attacks appear in places such that there's literally no way to avoid damage. This
only compounds on bosses where platforms spawn randomly and if you fall off the platforms, you take
damage.
3. Unresponsive
I get it, you're probably reading this thinking "No, you just have poor reaction times." I've taken damage so
many times from controls just not registering: jumping down through a platform because it didn't register
that you stopped holding down, not jumping to avoid an attack because it didn't register your jump, not
registering that you started holding the lock button and running into enemies. Still think it's just me being
bad? Reasonable, but I can prove it. If you have the game, pause the game in a fight, push down to get to
the retry button, then press enter (or whatever your select button is). If you do that too quickly, it doesn't
even register that you push down, and you just resume instead. This happens to me 100% of the time if I
don't consciously wait for half a second after pausing.

Don't confuse unnecessary ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with genuine difficulty. Save your time and money and skip on this one.

At first, I gave it some slack when some of the controls were kind of jank because it was a story-driven game. I didn't even mind that the plot was super rail-roaded throughout the game, and just sort of treated it more like a story than like a game.

The problem is... that the story was just bad.

Many situations that came about because "video game logic" throughout the regular gameplay. Without spoiling too much, one character is pitted against another and determined to kill them for literally no reason. They're not to blame, and hate the same guy he does. But that doesn't change his unfounded sense of justice from deciding he has to murder someone who just got caught up in it all.

Only half-decent takeaway from the game was the music... the little that there was.