Inescapable

NOTE: Exile's End, also available on Steam, is apparently a remake of this game with higher production values and some game improvements. Other than the price difference or curiosity, there is presumably no reason to buy Inescapable. A bad combination of boring and annoying. Despite the user tag and even the "About the Game" section of the store description, I wouldn't consider this a Metroidvania. This is more like a really old PC game, where you keep opening locked gates to progress. (Either "find the physical key" or a "hit a switch and/or navigate the platforming challenge" key.) Areas look boring. There is no music and little audio in general. Combat (when present) is dull. A lot of little annoyances just pile up. There just seem to be so many "slightly wrong" design decisions in this game. For example, at the beginning of the game, you take fall damage. (You also start with half health and no apparent method of healing.) Within a few minutes, you get a suit upgrade that completely negates fall damage, which begs the question of why the game ever bothered with fall damage in the first place. It might not even matter except there is at least one pixel perfect jump that delivers fall damage if you miss it. Or consider the very old school approach to using keys. You do not automatically use a key at a gate, or even when you attempt to "use" the gate. You have to first select the key as your active item. This might not be so bad if there were only a few keys, but again the gameplay seems to be built around finding keys to open gates. While the key does vanish from your inventory after use, even this leads to an annoyance, as the item the game auto-selects afterwards is almost certainly not the item you actually want active. I only spent a brief time with the game, but it just wore on me. I was soon performing a manual save at every decision point, so I could check both options as quitting to the menu and then loading a save was faster than backtracking. (Yes, you cannot load a manual save from the pause menu. You have to instead quit to the main menu, and from there you can load a manual save.) I could continue to complain about minor things. But that itself is kind of annoying, so I'll stop here.