I like this game, but probably more for the potential it has and literally just the art. The artists and pixel artists who worked on this game have made a game that looks true to the GBC titles it is evoking that I honestly think carries this game far more than its gameplay. I wanna say something like "You'd be forgiven thinking this is a Yacht Club Games offering based on the visuals", but I fear that may come off wrong in some way. The overall game is a fairly short affair. You will play through this game and go through the motions, defeat the big villain of this game in maybe less than a day (A previous review I wrote was done in about 8 hours). You can then go on to both get the true ending of this game and get the post-game content in a matter of maybe another day of play (it seems to have taken another eight hours to get through the content). At time of writing, I have 17 hours and 21 of 40 achievements in this game. This is an extremely short game made by what looks like an extremely small team of people (It's a shame the game doesn't have a Credits button). This is a game that looks like a GBC Zelda game, plays a lot like a GBC Zelda game, but falls short in many aspects. I might be an outlier here, but I was personally fine with having to do a lot of back and forth with the inventory for a number of dungeons in the Oracle games (I barely touched Links Awakening as a kid and my copy of the game became lost, lol) This is a difficult "thumbs up" of a game just because there's a lot of promise on display in this game, but that's about it. At times it feels fairly thin. The plot kind of rushes past me, details get introduced in passing that I sometimes feel as though I might have missed a detail or another early on. By the time the games villain appeared I felt a bit sidelined and wondering if I might have accidentally skipped a piece of dialogue with clear foreshadowing (and I may have given how often I accidentally skip the dialogue of some defeated bosses due to the text speed being maxed out by default I think) I want to say that personally, I do find parts of the world building fascinating. What does work in this game in its writing works well enough that I'd probably take notes for my own TTRPG games I run. Like I said, the game feels thin. You can go into just about any dungeon in this game and feel pretty confident that you can get to the boss room in pretty good time. The puzzles in this game are primarily a sort of block/barrel mover set of puzzles where you have to get all of the switches pressed at once. One thing I will say is that a lot of the puzzles feel like there are either multiple solutions to them, unintended solutions, or just designed with very purposeful red herrings. The puzzles range from being either pretty easy, frustrating as a result of those red herrings, and in one very specific case absolutely absurd. The actual layout of the dungeons is a point of frustration just as well. The game seems to be built on a certain awareness that under ideal circumstances, the play should be taking very little damage through their exploration of any given dungeon. I say this because the only way to regain health is in town by sleeping, talking to Lynn, or eating the Smoked Salmon buff item. However, the designers seem keenly aware of how frustrating fall damage from falling into pits is and gives you a buff that lessens it. This other problem I have is, and maybe just MAYBE this is a skill issue, it is stupidly easy to put in a bad input and throw your character into a pit, especially when you're walking down a path that is basically only a tile wide. I'm playing with an Xbox controller, maybe I'd have had a better time playing this game with a more comfortable D-Pad placement, but good god is it frustrating to be walking down a path and your thumb nudges a bit in the wrong direction and you fall off into the abyss. There is also a rant I could go on and on about with Crystal Keys too. Basically they are items you carry through a dungeon to a door and the keys will break if you take damage. It is aggravatingly easy to take damage in this game. Siska's Workshop was made by a madman either more insane than Siska herself or just an absolute sadist. Which there are so many moments in this game where I kept wondering if something was designed for the purposes of schadenfreude. If it is that, all my whinging here amounts to is satisfaction from the developers. The other side of this game is your sort of VN affair of going around the town, entering homes to start a cutscene (potentially), and even marrying one of the girls in town. I kind of just committed to marrying Oakley on accident because I sort of unknowingly was doing things to progress my relationship with her when I thought I was doing things to get better potions. It works out because I am pretty sure I married the character who would absolutely punch God and boy do I love the crazy eyes her sprites have for that and I love her for that. Let us poison God. I could complain endlessly about this game, and yet the weird thing is I give it a thumbs up. I liked what was on display, I liked the potential this game had, and I could tell that a fair amount of effort and some polish went into this game. It might have need a lot more polish, but I wouldn't know what to say exactly that would look like. The unfortunate thing I will say is that at the 15 dollar asking price, I think that is way too much. However, this game goes on sell these days for less than 3 bucks, at time of writing 1.49 for the 2025 steam summer sale. It really does pain me to wonder and write out whether even at that price I can go "Worth the price" because a part of me wonders if it's more a proposition related to overall satisfaction and time. Were this game free, would I even tell someone to play this game? I don't regret sinking about 17 hours into this game, I am cautiously interested in picking up Colorgrave's other games. It would pain me if their future offerings (that is to say the other games they have made) continued to illicit this kind of review from me, because I think there is a lot of promise on display in this game, but nothing to write home about. But the only way from here is up, I hope.
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