Recent reviews by Sassy Tree

All souls-likes have been slowly evolving toward this...

EDIT: After beating this game, and working towards 100%, this sits up there with some of the best souls-likes out there. Don't miss this one. Worth it at full price. Big ol bundle of charm and polish the whole way through. The entire game feels like a brilliant love letter to the souls-likes and 3D platformers that inspired it. Will definitely be doing subsequent playthroughs.

Would love NG+.

I was so excited for this game. It was one of the few games I've ever pre-ordered. I should have waited. I am a sucker for a challenge, but this game seems to have done everything it can to make itself as much of a slog as possible. It's grueling, and not in a way that keeps you coming back for more; In a way that makes you wish you hadn't picked up the controller in the first place.

Overall gameplay is cludgey. If you want a game with parry focused combat, just play something else, sorry. Movement is slow, staggers are prominent, attacks feel like you're swinging a boulder around, which may be a good thing or a bad thing. I didn't like how it felt, personally.

Inventory slots are incredibly limited, so even if you do end up trying to explore and pick things up, you'll pick up a few different pieces of armor and a few weapons and you'll get hit with the "Inventory Full" message. No problem, just have to run a tight ship and manage effectively, only keeping what you need. A shame if you wanna try anything else but what you're currently equipped with, but fine. The resource inventory is also limited, which becomes significantly more of a problem when I've encountered probably 50 different types of resources and have 16 slots to put them all in. All equipment is too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ heavy. There is no recharging healing method, so you're stuck crafting food, which uses those resources you can only have so many of. You also do not get these items back upon death for another attempt. Had 10 food items and used 8 on a boss before dying? Too bad. Go get more before you try again. It just seems needlessly complicated for the sake of being complicated. Why limit inventory slots at all in a game so focused on picking up everything you find? Why strictly punish players for experimenting and trying things out even if it gets them killed, in a game so focused on killing you at every encounter? It just seems like this is two different games, going in two different directions, and neither one actually wants you to play.

Performance is abysmal. Even if it's early access, this is inexcusable. I'm running a 7950x3D and a 3080 on water. I shouldn't have any issues playing your game at 1080p. God help my computer if I actually got to use all of my 32:9 monitor...

I stuck it out and didn't get a refund, in about 5 hours I've trudged my way into Nameless Pass, and have now completely given up in the quarry area, after wandering in circles for almost an hour trying to find where to go. There's doors, can't open em. There's a crane, can't move it anywhere that helps me. There's higher platforms, wandered around for an hour trying to find how to get up there, can't see a single thing that'd help me. It's like either the doors are bugged and I should be able to open them, a ladder didn't get placed in the final game (Early Access lmao...), or I just can't see what to do because everything is black, or some small variation of black. Trying to find where to go and just not really being able to see it has been a prominent part of my 5 hour experience. I'm not looking up what I'm supposed to do because I have no desire to see what's afterward anymore.

I went in excited, trying to love this game, and there is no part of the experience that didn't just outright stomp on that, or at the least make me roll my eyes and sigh.

Game just needs a MAJOR quality of life overhaul. It doesn't even need to be easier. That part's fine. Just get rid of all the purposeless hurdles. Add some sort of replenishing heal so I don't have to keep going out and finding crabs and mushrooms if I die more than once. Right now you're punished for using the items you find, why would you? You can make those heal more than said dedicated healing item to put some sort of incentive behind them still. Remove inventory caps. Why? If I'm supposed to be crafting all these healing items and upgrading my armor and my weapons and crafting potions and repairing the town and mining and chopping wood and digging and whatever else I haven't found yet, why the ♥♥♥♥ can't I just pick up all the stuff I want? Why would I even bother trying to do any of that when I can't hold more than one task's worth of resources at a time? Make armor/equipment lighter so I can actually still wear some of it and still normal roll. And fix your performance.

It's like you made a fun game, then went backwards and tried to make it unfun by complicating the ♥♥♥♥ out of every aspect.

Mmm soda...

Hyper Light Drifter is an action adventure game by Heart Machine Studios. From start to finish, I literally couldn't stop playing. (My parents eventually had to intervene...) The gameplay is excellent and I dare say near perfect. The world is quite expansive and fun to explore with plenty of goodies and secrets to find. I've played for about 18 and a half hours as of writing this and I still haven't found close to all of the things there are to find. I'd say that if you just run through the main story, this game will take you maybe 8-10 hours depending on how quickly you go. I wouldn't recommend that, as half of the fun of this game is exploring every nook and cranny of the beautiful levels to find just one more little gear bit. If you can, I recommend playing this with as little time in between play sessions as possible, as this game will grip you from beginning to end. My one gripe with the game is that some things are hard to do on the game pad (that the developers recommend you use in the title screen...), namely Chain Dashing. On the keyboard and mouse it's actually easier, but the gamepad works better for everything else.

TL;DR
Pros:
-Solid gameplay
-Expansive world
-Beautiful pixel art
-Amazing ambient soundtrack
-Kept my interest from start to finish
-Lots of secrets

Cons:
-Chain dashing on the gamepad is incredibly clunky and difficult to control, and controls need to be tight for the areas you need to use it in.