beautifully crafted world. simple yet challenging and satisfying mechanics/game play.

A compact and streamlined Metroidvania that boasts style, substance, and exhilarating combat, while suffering from a recurring technical issue.

Positive:
- Sprites are vivacious with fluid animations, pixel art is beautifully designed with vibrant colors, and environments are polychromatic with impressive lighting effects. Visually, the overall presentation is top notch, exhibiting and encompassing a gorgeous array of retro styles and expositions.
- The save system depends on checkpoints and savepoints, allowing for convenient saving and loading opportunities without much time spent on replaying what has already been accomplished in order to reach the point of continuation. In a genre that involves at least some degree of retracing steps, backtracking, and revisiting previously reached areas, this accommodation benefits the player and makes progression more efficient.
- Controls are tight, responsive, and can be executed well within the range of one's expertise. Attacking with melee weapons, launching projectiles, and casting spells are all weighty activities resulting is perceivable impacts against enemies and in noticeable changes within the game world. There are weapon and ability mixtures to fit many playstyles, as well as room for experimentation for those interested in acclimatizing to new methods of attack that are mightily tactile and substantially material.
- Although the arsenal of weapons, equipment, and spells is not extensive, what is available is enjoyable and creates variability in the form of adaptive synergies that are fun to perform at their highest potential. Melee weapons hit enemies with a heft that is tangible as a physical force, chemical reactions are explosive and destructive, and spells epitomize magical dismantlements of their targets. With that said, there are certain combinations of items and equipment that absolutely annihilate foes with weaknesses to those item interactions, making for extremely satisfying combat, but practically negating many of the other items during much of the adventure.
- Crucial to the success of the adventurer, one must be mindful of their weapons' strengths and their opponents' weaknesses, as preparing for fights requires prudent planning and the careful equipping of the most effective blend of items. Carrying the most appropriate consumables for specific areas also necessitates judicious organizing, as one maybe depend on a stock of items for emergency measures. This layer of strategy is a welcome addition to the elements of thrilling action demanding dexterity and cleverness in each and every hostile encounter.
- World map provides easy indications of where one has been, where one can or cannot go, and comprehensible icons that are indicative of several interactive mediums. Because of this, becoming lost or not knowing where to go next, is a nonexistent problem in terms of world navigation and accessibility.
- Almost all environmental puzzles are straightforward and sensible, enticing the player to think about their abilities and the physical attributes of the space, and how to utilize them in cooperation to achieve an end. On the other hand, a few puzzles require too much experimentation of valuable resources, such as magic points or expendable items, in order to solve. This is not a hindrance, per se, since traversing the world will allow for the player to accumulate the necessary experience to eventually understand the puzzle expectations over a natural progression of time through the journey.
- Bosses offer the best and most gratifying fights in the game, combining varied attacks, multiple forms, and diverse tactics. This heterogeneous quality to emergent combats heightens circumstances and promotes situational urgency, in addition to allowing the player to consider alternative methods to choosing equipment, items, and when to use consumables, all in especially consequential moments in the journey.

Neutral:
- Navigating menus can be fiddly, as there are several submenus to use and a map to peruse. This initial discomfort eventually subsides as the player becomes more accustomed to using the appropriate buttons or keys, so it is not a lasting issue. Going to and from the map from another menu can be especially pesky.
- Plot and story involve the findings and interactions of a young girl in the context of an otherworldly setting, including the tropes and generalizations of myriad previously released fantasy narratives, but it manages to be sufficiently entertaining as the flavor to the more important player-controlled branching action platforming adventure. On that premise, the standard of the actual writing is unexpectedly skillful and competent, adhering to proper English grammar expectations, and applying descriptions and expressions that are wholly proficient.
- Most characters present in the game world are female humans and female humanoids that are moderately sexualized, but in a relatively tasteful manner. While some characters certainly demonstrate a proclivity to expose cleavage of the breasts, as well as the choice of donning very tiny articles of clothing, revealing other parts of the anatomy, it is all portrayed playfully, innocently, and unoffendingly, without any innuendo toward pornography. Ultimately, this scantily clad aesthetic is merely cosmetic, and there are never any allusions made to the reasoning behind the fashion choices.
- Beating the game unlocks a few more difficulty modes, which operate under specific restrictions and specifications, along with a total of three endings for the player to attain, and more achievements to unlock, but these variations are not significant or revelatory to warrant multiple playthroughs.
- Mechanics, itemization, and world traversal are neither deep nor complex, with the overarching experiential arrangement being as linear as a Metroidvania could possibly be. Learning battle techniques is clear and nonambiguous, discerning how to best employ items and equipment is uncomplicated, being lost in biomes and areas is a trivial rarity, and finding oneself underpowered against any enemy is not functionally applicable. All facets and aspects of the gameplay are well-defined and transparent, with the primary requisite for triumph being battle alertness and item knowledge.

Negative:
- Crashes happen very frequently, rendering the software unusable, and requiring a manual termination. There seems to be some engine-related glitch that causes the game to sever the connection between graphics and audio, causing the video portion of the software to stop functioning while keeping the rest of the game operable in the background. Ending the application, restarting, and loading a previous save will allow for the maintenance of the problem, with some lost time due to the gap between the save time and the crash time. There have been several posts about this in the discussion forums, but the developers never fixed this major problem.
- Upon starting the game, one must wait through ten seconds of promotional splash screens associated with the engine, developer, and publisher. There is no way to skip these, and their sole purpose is to waste the player's time.

Overall rating: 3.5/5.0