Halcyon Days

This is an incredible tribute to Megaman Legends! It nails the unsettling ambience and visuals of the ruins perfectly. The open world is all fully loaded, so there are no loading screens between zones on the same island, which feels very nice. Movement is fluid and feels good. I especially like that you can fire at enemies while using the jet skates, it adds a nice extra bit of mobility to combat and just feels good. The voice acting is good and fits the characters well. The open world is vibrant and nice to look at, but there isn't much to find when you go exploring. I keep hoping to find a hidden treasure chest or an easter egg somewhere tucked in a corner, but I haven't found any yet. I'll keep looking, just in case! This game also works very well on the Steam Deck! In open world areas there will be some loss of FPS when looking toward areas of the map with a lot of objects, but otherwise it seems to perform flawlessly. I have now finished the game and highly recommend it. I did encounter some odd bugs in the final ruin, but could not reliably reproduce them.

I feel conflicted about not recommending this, because I want this game to be the best that it can be. I don't consider this a cynical cash-grab or an asset flip; it does give me the impression that the person making it has a strong love for Mega Man Legends, but they admittedly said that this is also their very first game. And it shows. Aside from the presentation being rough and inconsistent, I have encountered a numerous amount of bugs, whether it be dialogue boxes glitching out for me, weapon energy no longer recovering after reaching a certain point in the game, clipping through the floor in a dungeon and falling into the void and getting softlocked, or encountering an occasional crash or two after blowing up certain enemies. I can forgive the majority of the bugs I listed above, since most of them can be anticipated or worked around. I cannot recommend the game in the state that it is in because I have encountered a bug in a mandatory cutscene that is supposed to trigger the endgame glitching out and preventing the cutscene from moving forward, and by extension, being prevented from finishing the game. I do not know whether or not the head dev will fix the bugs that I have proposed, but until they manage to do so and make the game completable, I cannot recommend Halcyon Days in the state that it is right now. I don't like leaving negative reviews, but I feel I should leave this to warn anyone who want to play a game like this from start to finish, when it is not possible for the time being. I will change this review when this particular bug is properly fixed, among others, and the game is in a properly completable state.