Elliot Quest

Elliot Quest is another game that may appeal to a select few. It is not bad, but it is rough and lacking in some conveniences in favour of being.. authentically old fashioned. There is joy in the exploration and uncovering more areas, but in other regards many secrets are just more coins, and can come with a lot of backtracking with no fast travel to ease the process. As an extra note, respawning on half health is.. cruel. Especially as the checkpoints work as a respawn rather than a save state. If you want to go into a boss fight on full health or with your potions, you need to do so first try. Making learning some boss fights a particular nuisance. Especially later ones that might just insta-kill you as you walk in, or do enough damage to two shot you in general. Again, I can appreciate a lot of what is presented, but perhaps.. a little more leeway or information to the player sometimes. Less 'get gud'

BEFORE BUYING: make sure you have a way to set your computer's monitor to a fixed 60 Hz (With Windows 10, right-click your desktop, select "Display Settings", find and click "Advanced Display Settings", then scroll down to refresh rate and make sure one of the options is 60 Hz) You will need to play the game on this setting, or it will be nearly unplayable: when set at 144 Hz for example, the entire game runs at at 2.4x normal speed, and floating enemies will be affected by gravity strangely, causing some areas to become inaccessible. As for the game itself, it is fine most of the time, but with enough annoyances that I can't really recommend it. It has a lot of secrets to discover and challenging but not unfair combat. However, it has multiple areas in which you can softlock yourself (usually because you run out of bombs or mana in the wrong spots, so try to get the "mp regen" perk if you can). Additionally, while the save points are found all over and the penalty for dying is minimal, the save points are not as useful as you'd think: they only refill your health and mana to half of max (min of 3 hearts), and do nothing for your bomb count or consumable items. This means that even though there's a save point right before each boss, you only really get one full-strength attempt at any boss unless you want to spend 5 min backtracking to town between each attempt. Worse than that, in the case, say, you're fighting a certain boss that requires bombs to beat and you run out of bombs in one of your attempts, you might need to backtrack across the continent to the starting town so you can buy bombs back up to max again. It could have been a good game, but man, between the bugs, softlocks, and annoyances, I can't really recommend it.