Recent reviews by zephyrean

Got stuck, by design. I thought the worst that could happen was losing my beads, apparently not.

The game has autosaves (in retrospect, this should've been a warning to REFUND) but the one where I'm not stuck was 4 hours earlier, I spent time farming beads, and then breaking through to the new area. I think that's enough time wasted.

I hate the antichrist

I am too stupid for this.
No switching between puzzles: if you're stuck on a puzzle, either solve it or restart the whole game.
Also, undo works based on character position, not block position, which is annoying.
Nice art tho.

My cat approves.

This is how I remember 2020.

Great, balanced, rewarding game with a poetic and imaginative setting and beautiful pixel art.

beware fun game therefore buy

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A kusoge with garbage controls. The shield doesn't actually work. The first enemy in the game is a crossbowman and he shoots every two seconds, you need to be ALWAYS ROLLING or he shoots you to death, lol. What if there are two crossbowmen later? Hahahahaha ♥♥♥♥ you.

A combat-focused game should give a lot of combat maneuvers to master. Jump, parry, dash, a variety of weapons to switch between in and out of combat, what have you. Nothing of the sort here, only the roooooollllllling.

Trash. Screw you Metroidvania Review for recommending it.

First of all, this is an extremely technically competent game. Fighting is fun, enemies are fun to kill and fun to avoid, platforming is fun, secrets are EXTREMELY FAIR (you shouldn't ever need a walkthrough, just do something else and trust the game to be fair if you don't yet know how to solve a specific room), bosses are original (except We Have The Radiance At Home, but vastly improved by not having to fight the Hollow-Knight-equivalent again if We Have The Radiance At Home kills you) and fun. There's a secret-alert upgrade about 1/3 through the game, so if you don't want to look for secret passages, you don't have to (although those hold health and mana upgrades).

Two difficulty levels, normal and game journo, I played on normal.

The Xbox controller works. The pace of the game and the challenges are such that the buttons never compete for fingers, no need to remap, no need to contort your hand to press X with your index finger or anything like that.

For achievement hunters, all achievements can be easily gotten in a single playthrough without a guide and extra effort, as of the current version nothing is missable.

One drawback is the penalty for dying which is mechanically gloating, as if death alone wasn't punishment enough, but I handily avoided it by just quitting on death (or quitting before I died if a boss fight was going poorly) until the very end.

There's no Hollow Knight style quick return to checkpoint: usually, to save progress, you need to get to a checkpoint (go back via shortcut, or loop through a new path, or find a new checkpoint, or go back the hard way), which I love.

The map is good but doesn't show obstacles. It can be remedied by putting markers. There's only one kind of markers available, but you can usually differentiate by context what's what.

The art is pretty, but all the same I couldn't shake off the feeling it's a retread of the themes I've seen somewhere else. Let's see: cheerful forest, dark and decayed forest with a female boss that's not quite what she seems, pretty-to-nasty illusion boss jumpscare, shoot-them-up sequence against a comical character, East Asian air temple, emerald caves, lava level, slowly rising platform you ride as things fall on it from above, cloud step, ornate gilded flowery palace looking like the inside of a certain music box, and when I entered a PURPLE MAGIC TOWER WITH LAZORS (also sliceable bubbles) it finally hit me: hey, developer, I see you played The Messenger, one of the best games ever!

Don't misunderstand, the sprites themselves are completely original, and there's a level that's astoundingly beautiful and original thematically. But you can't unsee that everything else is a retread, especially the PURPLE LAZOR TOWER.

(Incidentally, The Messenger has verbal gloating in addition mechanical gloating on death, ♥♥♥♥ that, too; I was quitting to desktop there, too; Kingdom Shell's developer chose well to get rid of at least one type. But I wish he copied the one-time monetary penalty, so you wouldn't get punished over and over for repeatedly dying to the same boss until you potentially can't even afford healing.)

Lots of unique animations for cutscenes, an amazing attention to detail of body language and such even for npc sprites.

The storyline is... well...
I'm old. You know that old joke about a guy who started with dial-up and developed a fetish for pixellated tits? Well that's almost me, I started watching movies as a child with broadcast tv that I usually didn't have a programme for, and intermittently working stolen cable. I'd catch a movie 20 minutes in and the screen would go War of the Ants on me during key scenes, to say nothing about series. Out-of-print books were hard to get, I would get stuck with volumes 2 and 3 of a tetralogy, or 2 to 6 of a seven-book series for over a decade.

The TL;DR is I love a story told in bits and pieces if I know they're bits and pieces of a coherent complete version that the author kept in mind, not just JJ style mystery boxes. This being the style of storytelling in Kingdom Shell, I had fun playing, even though the writing is all over the place, from genuinely brilliant to "autistic furry visits Auschwitz" level of retarded. But in the end, I got the complete coherent version with every t crossed and every i dotted, and it sucked. The good bits went nowhere.

I got the bad/stupid ending, too (there's only one ending). Really I'd forgive everything else if it had a good ending. I thought the final battle was to specifically prevent this garbage from happening.