Aria

The movement and navigation is pretty annoying, I feel like I am just gliding/swimming around with nothing obvious to do. I think I must have grabbed it because it was free. This is the second time I've tried playing this game and it's pretty confusing. I am uninstalling.

The controls are bad and very awkward to use, just having the camera shake trying to find the right angle to swim made my eyes hurt a lot. However, the story itself is quite interesting.

🧡3/10 - ARIA: The destroyer of fun. [-] Bad / negative [+] Good / positive [+/-] Mixed / could go either way - [-] First an foremost, the controls. They're not good. You can independently use WASD and/or camera movement, but in multiple situations, you'll need WASD to get around obstacles unless your camera sensitivity is maxed to whip it around for movement. This results in using 75% of your brain to move your character and camera at the same time in a smooth motion without the cameras orientation flipping and W now going DOWN, and S going UP. | > That aside, the camera is okay. Sadly, it shares the same properties as souls-like games where it clips through objects. [-] The lava section at the end is lousy. It's built up to be an impactful moment only to have the momentum torn away if you die, repeating the section. The falling blocks drop in predictable vertical patterns only to jut horizontally when you go by. If you die even once, there feeling of importance drops significantly. [-] Hitboxes are a bit wacky. You can slip through tree branches while flying then get flatlined by a block 5ft away. [-] Gameplay just isn't fun. You go from menial objective-to-objective while the controls bully you for your lunch money. | > You're punished for attempting to have fun in certain sections due to being respawned. After exiting the windmill puzzle section, I was trying to fly down one of the straws, but kept dying resulting in my speed being ripped away. Having the player build a massive amount of speed from flying through the straw could've been a fun idea. Sadly, it's just a decorative item. [-] Dolki (your traversal companion) is quite useless. She points you in the direction of your objective, but is not reliable whatsoever. She'll defy your request when pressing Q (the game tells you about this), and when activated, will do a 180 and point in the wrong direction as if that's where you're meant to be going. This results in a wild goose chase of you flying around looking for the objective because among Dolki and the NPCs, those are the only "waypoints" to the objectives. [+/-] In the final cutscene, you see Dolki floating in the sky. Not sure if this was left in on accident or one of the bear council's pets. [+/-] How dare they take away Dolki after I trudged through their game.

Nice concept, but doesn't have the skill to present what the author has in mind. Judging from their game's "Logo" we can easily tell they don't even have the basic art skill and from there, we can easily tell that the whole game is made from readied assets. And as soon as we got in the game, that bad optimization confirms it all. No art designer in the team and no coder/script writer ended with a very nauseating control, Judging from the floor plans of the stages, they don't even have a proper flow plan/chart when creating this game and it ended up worse than most amateur works i've ever seen, like a kid trying to paint but doesn't have the right color and skill to do so. That nauseating control is bad enough to drive players away, even though it's a free game, doesn't mean it has to be cheap and bad in design. But this game really needs to go back to square one and plan everything from scratch for it to really work. What a waste of publishing fees, this game don't even have the quality to get you guys the "experience" you need. Let alone getting bombarded by negative reviews. Should try another platform if you guys wanna learn and get user reviews as you develop your game and get good from those experience, steam is just not the place.

Not a fan of this game at all controls are super annoying and janky the game itself runs perfectly just rubbish execution of the controls

[h1]Before I played Aria, I had a small pp, no friends, no gf, depression, and no life. These things havent changed, but the game is pretty good[/h1]