Recent reviews by YinYin

This game has been in deliberately slow development for at least 6 years (developed one day a week). I occasionally got to try intermediate versions and the end result is marvellous. You get a 100 little levels in groups of 4. Each group is focused on one specific mechanic or visual effect (often both and sometimes they are inseperable from one another). The first few sets teach you the basic mechanics. Once you've learned those you can start with the first level from any of the 25 groups. So you are never starved for choices, should you get stuck somewhere.

But as deceptively easy as it may look, some of the later levels can be truly challenging on both the puzzle and the platformer front. For the puzzle side the game will eventually offer to show you a solution in the form of jump and bounce points in order of execution (if you retry a level often enough). And for the platforming side, you can adjust the game speed between 50 and 100% in the settings.

If you need more rather than less challenge, there are also minimum action solutions per level that take fewer inputs than the hint you can get. If you take less inputs than the amount of dots stacked up in the bottom left corner, you will be awarded a triangle for that level.

And finally there are 37 additional secret levels to unlock (they come in 3 groups of 12 and one boss gauntlet level), which are generally much more challenging than the base 100.

With my testing experience from the majority of the levels as they were developed (including secret ones), but no knowledge of how to uncover the secrets or trying for minimum solutions before, I completed everything in around 10-15 hours.

play the demo while you can 🫵

Impeccable vibes.
The presentation from animation over mumbling voice acting (with intelligible names) to the music and ambient sound effects is perfect.
It also had the perfect structure and length to me, with 4 areas unlocking one after another coming in at 4 hours total.

There isn't any mandatory backtracking. You can play through pushing forward at all times.
All areas that grant you a key to progress will however close up permanently.
So when you do want to revisit areas, you may be locked out of some collectables.

For such a short game and all collectables having no effect on gameplay or story, that is okay though.
In fact, only the easy ones (your shipwrecked crew and audible music boxes) have steam achievements attached.
The difficult and most numerous ones (bottle ships) aren't acknowledged anywhere. All they really do is confirm that you've found a secret corner.

The only real problem I've run into is that starting the final boss fight is irreversible and locks the save into it. You cannot back out of it to restock ammunition, purchase remaining health upgrades or even just swap the only load out option you have: your hat. Different hats do various things once they are charged up from attacking, such as healing you, charging your weapon with electricity or adding additional attacks to your arsenal.

I did not go into that boss fight using the right hat ... but I eventually made it through anyway.

This one requires an informational review, because the game comes with some potentially unexpected design decisions for the genre and presentation. So what follows won't be glowing, but hopefully helping you decide if this is for you.

You start with exactly 4 hit points and can only ever upgrade to 5. Health is only replenished at save points and little fountains in between. And the majority of challenges are all about taking as few hits as possible. Be it the general game play, where you can only take 4 hits in a boss fight or between landmarks - or one of the many different bonus challenges like curses that lock your ability to heal until you've defeated a certain number of enemies (while adding additional hazards) - or chests that ask you to defeat a gauntlet without taking any hit whatsoever. The difficulty setting only affects enemy attacks (reaction times and patterns) as well as how tightly timed optional platforming challenges are. "Easy" is by no means actually easy. (conversely, "Hard" doesn't make the game much harder)

Only the assist options will actually make the game easier. Here you get up to 200% attack damage, 3 extra hit points, no fall damage, and more leeway on timed challenges. (I forgot these options existed until now - but definitely recommend using them, if you are struggling on easy - hell, these might be the better settings to use in general, so you still get to experience more attack patterns)

You always have fast travel to any visited save point available on the map. Health replenish points have infinite uses. You cannot walk off ledges. No hit challenge chests replenish the one hit point you can loose from them on a retry. You can speed up and skip death animations and cut scenes. Map markers for both items and quests can be bought (although item markers require that you have uncovered the respective room). Boss fights are always very close to a save point. There is an upgrade that can disable falling damage outside of boss fights. And outside of boss fights and combat challenges that lock you onto a platform until you have defeated a wave of enemies, you can easily ignore and sweep past all threats. (at least in easy mode - this is how I completed the game 100% in exactly 8 hours getting the majority of achievements except for the defeat 1000 enemies one) And there are probably more details like this. The amount of care taken to streamline everything is astounding. And from what I can tell, absolutely every feedback from the demo was taken into account without compromising on the intended design.

Your goal in this game is to make 10 friends. And while the very first one may suggest the formula is one per area and defeating the areas boss will somehow make them your friend, the game actually shakes this up significantly beyond that. First of all, while the characters do have their main area, they will still appear all over the map. And making friends is not always tied to the boss fight. (those do give you required abilities though) Speaking of boss fights, I really like how uniquely the majority of the boss characters are tied into the narrative. I think there are only two that feel like they are just a random unique enemy you only fight once, without any relation to the friends you are making.

Dashing around the map and the dash and jump attack feel really good.

The game has a speed run mode. (auto skips all dialogue and adds a timer)
It unlocks a boss rush mode the moment you defeat the first one.
And it unlocks a randomizer mode on completing the game. (shuffles all item locations)

The game unfortunately very quickly felt somewhat bland beyond the first area. While every area does have a new look, new enemies and new mechanics - it still all seemed mostly reskinned or very single purpose. It's been challenging to figure out why I got that impression, but I'll try to nail down things that contribute.

Every room in this game is floating islands. I imagine this is very much needed for the kind of platforming challenge the game intends to deliver (you can easily swoop out and back onto solid ground to cut corners and avoid attacks), but never being boxed into physically closed rooms certainly added to every area feeling like a reskin of those floating islands.

There were only 3 boss fights I remember as mechanically unique. (Spoiler for those:
a chase sequence, a moving platform fight and a duo that swaps who's interactable every time you dash) All the others (many many more) were just bullet hell damage sponges to me (and I imagine the extra attack patterns on higher difficulties will further drive that home - I didn't have the patience for that).

New area enemies are largely variations on their basic versions: melee, ranged (targeted or omnidirectional), flying and jumping. Apart from the area where all enemies share the unique mechanic of the boss, the challenge always felt the same. You never defeat enemies with something other than whacking them several times. (there are no weak points, pushing/reflecting/blocking interactions or required combat abilities)

And all the abilities you get are mostly single purpose to cross larger gaps and gain access to new areas, which then often let you hit a switch to lower a gate or extend a bridge, rendering your ability unnecessary there in the future. This is good in service of smoothing out traversal, but it also speaks to the abilities not being very fun to use repeatedly. For most of them there are no clever ways to use them in combat or combine them with environment mechanics other than their intended ones.

(there are upgrade perks and special attacks to find, purchase and equip besides the main abilities - but all of them only alter the mechanics in small ways such as changing your attack damage/speed or adding projectiles to your existing moves - I always opted for anything that made me faster)

The only ability that can be used in more than one way as well as in combat requires you to hold the attack button to charge it up and later does not allow you to choose between an upgrade to it or the original (also very useful) behavior when used over ground. Because of these limitations I ended up not using it very much, even though it is the best among them. (aside from the dash, you get that one first and it feels so fundamental that it's easy to forget it was an upgrade)


Alright, I think that covers most of it. It is a very well polished game. Everything works exactly as it should. It achieves what it sets out to do. So I can fully recommend it, if you like what you see on the store page and the details I described are either exactly your jam or won't stop you from having a good time.

This is a perfect game.
If either writing or demonstrated mechanics from the trailers interest you in any way, the game has 15 hours of both - always new and excellently meshed together. (the game can be made easy or hard enough and all story and levels are skippable to get the most out of either writing or gameplay, if you are here for more of one or the other) That's where the writing ends, but there are more optional challenges on each level (which you can replay with a custom team instead of the original story cast) to unlock outfits and the ability to respec your character perks as well as even more optional dream levels and custom user generated levels.

Am a backer and tester of this game.

Even in the demo it already was mechanically THE best F-Zero type racing game - outdoing it's inspirations on the game mechanics and accessibility as well as having it's very own style to set it apart.

Short and sweet. 4 Worlds with 4/5 levels each (one optional) and a boss fight level at the end (no platforming on all except one of those - it's straight into the fight).

5 well hidden skull coins in each level are used to unlock that one optional level per zone, a bunch of hair colours and outfits as well as sticker pages representing each level. The other unlimited gem currency can be traded in for random music or stickers you can place onto those pages or temporary bonus health.

Besides digging (which is already greatly varied with a boost attack, trapdoors; growing, crumbling, falling and jelly materials to dig through) the grinder is also used for moving platforms, turning keys, shooting guns, rockets and cannons, riding snow mobiles and mechs. Great stuff.

The few things that bother me are the difficult grapple hook mechanic being introduced before the simple one (a timed spin release versus a straight forward pull) and the sticker vending machine being terribly slow for the amount of gems you can aquire rather quickly. As with everything else you have to hold down your dril button - and with the rewarded stickers being random and others limited to time trials of completed levels, it's hard to tell how long you should keep going at it. You'll probably soon want to rubber bind your right trigger and go for lunch while the sticker machine does it's thing.

Excellent experience so far. Hard to describe how well everything works.

The unlock process is something that positively surprised me in particular.

You have to simply finish each track first before you unlock further challenges - which usually consist of beating a track within a certain time or with a maximum amount of crashes. You might be able to do both of these goals at the same time, but for the most part going fast will cause you to crash a lot more and vice versa. These challenges in turn unlock new bikes, paint jobs, rider outfits, trails and even entire mountains.

I really like seeing the female player option being default here as well.

The only thing I did not like so far is that a new bike only comes with the same default yellow paint job. While the handling is a night and day difference, your bike ends up looking the exact same at this camera distance until you manage to fetch some new colours.

Also the ranking server couldn't handle the launch period of this game, but I don't particularly care about that myself and expect it to settle in with time. (and it will take you time anyway to make a dent among the professional early riders)

I've got a lot more to unlock now 🚲

Here's the scoop: I got into closed beta testing for this because I love my original copy on Gamecube, but cannot quite enjoy it all that much today with the low resolution, frame rate, disc swapping, load times, limited save space and being boxed in on all the wide screen formats I have (no 4:3 hardware left here).

So I did not technically receive it for free. All the hours you can see here are beta testing to make sure it has the quality I want. I received/retained it as compensation.

I enjoyed every minute of it and with so much time in it learned to appreciate the very well tuned mechanics even more than before. Compared to other games they are odd, but still very good.

Now, I'm gonna assume you already know and/or can find details on the original game content itself, since this is a port.
(you'll mostly find high praise for the original)

So instead of regurgitating that here I'll just break down the significant changes/features of the port.

• original 4:3 support
  
• entirely new wide screen support, this is especially juicy for the video cutscenes - but also tons of other scenes you won't ever get in wide screen from an emulator
  
• 60 frames per second
  
• higher texture resolutions in several places
  
• fully customisable mouse/keyboard/controller bindings (you can take functions apart that are on the same button in the original)
  
• mouse aiming with sensitivity setting
  
• sound/cutscene/music volume settings
  
• new exit game option to get back to the main menu
  
• new quick heal input
  
• new quick swap shortcuts to change personas without the pause menu

There a few things to watch out for as of now though:

• reload animations are still partly in 30 frames per second (more have been updated to 60 with patches though)
  
• all the new settings are only available in an external configuration tool (can be launched from the game options and via F11 at any time, but you cannot operate that with a normal controller)
  
• the graphics settings boil down to full screen/windowed, wide/original aspect ratio and antialiasing - the window can be resized, but there are no resolution settings for full screen, that defaults to your native resolution
  
• some legacy issues with models and texturing remain unresolved

Nothing to detract from recommending it though :)


Patched in after release (some of these used to be cons):

• dead zone setting for the gamepad
  
• cloud saving
  
• more high resolution textures
  
• unofficial free aspect support (add "Force169AspectRatio = false" to the killer7.ini)
  
• Japanese now uses their region specific vial maximum
  
• some more animations now use the correct frame rate
  
• some randomisation now works as in the original
  
• the moving subtitle shadows for wide screen have been removed for better readability
  
• English now has brand new optional subtitles for all cutscenes
  
• the tutorial and game prompts now support custom controller and keyboard bindings

peeks at hours played and messages begging me to stop

Okay ... it's about time I tell you exactly what you're getting here beyond the minimalistic puzzle dungeon crawling poem reader described on the store page. (that stuff is all pretty on point)

Among them:

• a clever set of rules for movement, pushing and smashing
  
• skeleton and zombie enemies with differing behaviour
  
• termporary and permanent pickups that can be used by you and enemies
  
• hazards (pits and spikes)

Both are a little difficult to pin an exact number on. Puzzles, because there are plenty simple transitionary ones in the story (they are excellent for teaching you) and rotated or mirrored variants (that make a difference for the solution). Mechanics because you may view them more or less fine grained.

All of that is presented to you in two story acts and a dungeon crawler mode, which have to be unlocked in sequence.

The story acts alternate narrative with puzzles, gradually introducing you to all mechanics. You can fail puzzles here as often as you like and immediately try them again without punishment.

After clearing the first act you'll get a small teaser of the dungeon mode. It creates a random set of puzzles using the mechanics you've just learned. Failing a puzzle here will require you to start over.

Act two changes the appearence of the game, the way your character moves and introduces the remaining mechanics. Once again interlaced with narrative and instant retry should you fail a puzzle.

The complete dungeon then has two floors, the first using puzzles from act one and the second from act two. It picks from a pool of 30 to 40 puzzles in total.

Entering the dungeon always asks you for a name and a character icon first. If you complete the dungeon, an icon with that name will be added to the graveyard. If you fail or end a run prematurely, an unmarked tombstone will be added to the graveyard. This way the game records all of your runs.

The icons are the steam achievements and their unlock requirements range from very simple (such as completing the dungeon once) over quite difficult (completing the dungeon with all perfect puzzles) to pretty meta (messing with a game file).

The name length is initially limited to just 2 characters, increases the more runs you complete and can be used to enter passcodes.

I'd say a first play through (unlocking and completing the dungeon), while still learning the mechanics, takes about an hour (much more or less depending on how smart or sloppy you are).

Learning how to perfect all the puzzles and figuring out all the unlocks takes a whole lot longer. My first attempt at doing a full 100% run in one go already knowing about it all took a bit under two hours, which involves a whole lot of puzzle repetition (running the dungeon 10+ times).


Well, first you can probably slice that in half since at times it was just idling. But there is more to it:

Rokas has managed to create something that is the equivalent of a Rubik's Cube to me. It just feels good to solve it despite already knowing all the algorithms.


The game has no customisable controls. But with WASD, arrow keys and stick or d-pad of any controller I've tried you should be covered.

Most of the game is just navigated and played with these directions. Opening the menu works with one of the various back buttons (B/Esc/backspace) and selecting things or getting a detailed view of an enemy with the confirm buttons (A/enter/space).

The game auto saves, so you can continue playing where you left off in the story or dungeon (you may get a death quitting inside a dungeon puzzle though).

There are plenty of video options. Fullscreen/windowed, a plethora of scaling levels and most pominently the option to usa a CRT filter. It has a hand full of presets (with a funny over the top "Indie" option), but the custom one is where you can make the game shine for you (setting curvature, line density/shift/strength/lightness, brightness, chromatic aberration distance/strength).

You also get to adjust the audio volume, play the game in English or Lithuanian and use written or instant text for the narration.