MindSeize

A pretty fun Metroidvania that leans more toward the Metroid side of things; no levels, no grinding, just search and get upgrades and beat bosses. There are some weird interactions (the number of times I've dropped like a lead balloon while hanging on a ledge is in the decently-high double digits) and the final boss's phase shift is... Really not great. It's a DPS check in a game where you don't have a ton of options to actually hit that check. But aside from that, it's a pretty competent little Metroidvania.

Initial Impression - Interesting story and decent graphics but the game feels more obsessed with difficulty than the enjoyment of the experience. It isn't satisfying at all to use the ranged weapon and you don't move fast enough with the melee sword attack for it to be that rewarding. It is really rough around the edges and suffers from just no clear path on what to do. I just can't recommend this game in the limited amount of time I've spent with it.

Just completed this game in under 8 hours of game time. Note early in the game their is a point that will make you think that the game is glitched. If you defeat the monkey boss and select no on going back to the ship, it will appear that you are stuck on the planet and can not continue. Fortunately one place on YouTube showed that if you blow up a hidden wall it will show a computer that you can interact with which will then trigger something that will then allow you to travel back to your ship. It is something they should of patched out. Outside of that the game is a true Metroidvania and well designed for what it is. If you spend the time combing over for secrets you will get very strong and make the game much easier. The controls worked fine for me and the various power ups were mostly all useful. I'm not sure a full price is worth the 6 - 8 hours of playing the game, but if it's on sale for half price then I'd easily recommend this since it was fun and didn't feel like a game that only a few people made. Feels like a real indie game. 7/10

This game is decent. Graphics and sound are reasonably good. Play control feels a bit stiff, even in endgame. Bosses can be fairly challenging (partly due to play control maybe). Story is no frills. I do have gripes about the game, much of which have to do with the way I play metroidvania titles. I suppose others would have the same issues, so I'll describe them here. This game emphasizes exploration. It doesn't always hold your hand like other metroidvanias and tell you where to go all the time. Quite the opposite (with a few exceptions). You need to wander around a lot, looking for the upgrades to continue your exploration. This may result in getting lost looking for the correct path more than a few times. I see this as both a positive and a negative. The major gripe I had was with the map. Contrary to other metroidvanias, there is no benefit to filling out the squares on the map. And the percentage shown on the map is not the current map % completion - it is the total item collection % for the WHOLE game. There are no items or npcs who reward you on filling out map%, so it is useless to do so (which is strange for the metroidvania genre). And there are tiles on the map you think you could reach eventually, but even in endgame, you will not reach (not that it matters - this just irritated me though). Also, there are no custom map markers you can place to indicate suspicious areas, which would have been nice. Another gripe I had was the backtracking in this game. I tend to like exploring, grabbing all the powerups around whenever I unlock any new skills. However, When you go through any area in this game, there will always be many places you cannot access without different skills received through the endgame. As a result (and due to the lack of custom map markers), I had to revisit areas many more times than I feel is normal in other metroidvanias. If you do play this game and are going for 101%, I recommend you fill in all your missing upgrades after the last planet is unlocked (and talk to the Orbei guy) to avoid unnecessary backtracking. Lastly, I did encounter frame rate issues and the game did glitch out on one of the boss fights (softlocking) a few times. I did eventually beat the boss, and the game carried on as usual, so I suppose its nothing too intolerable. Overall, I would not recommend this metroidvania at regular price ($14.99). Perhaps get it if its on sale, if you do at all. While I feel the exploration is good in many ways, the movement was a bit too stiff, the story bland, the map implementation too basic, and backtracking throughout the game for upgrades too annoying.

this game is freaking great, a solid metroidvania indeed and it gets bonus points for not being a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ souls-like these days. it does feel a little grindy to me to get resources to buy new gear but after so many JRPGs i dont mind that since its not to bad. story is a mix but i enjoyed it. and the fact you are playing as someone who is disabled also gets bonus points for me

[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote] I have said this before and I think I need to say it again: Someone once told me that the impression given by a game in its first two hours is very important, as if the player does not get hooked by something or does not find something that interests them, they are very likely to drop that game and never return to it. And I see myself agreeing with that statement. As time goes on, we find less and less time for our entertainment. Our free time, which seemed to be endless as a kid, slowly becomes a luxury as we tackle much more important tasks and take on more important roles. And all of this is without mentioning the refund systems that allow people to return a game shortly after purchase, if some rules are not broken, should they not want to keep onto it anymore. Therefore, the first two hours of a game are very important. So, if I play a game and find nothing that interests me about it, I'm not going to continue playing it for a very slight chance of suddenly falling in love with it. I'm not going to dedicate my very limited free time to playing something that I do not seem to like. Hence why I dropped this game after spending nearly an hour and a half in it. The very first thing that put me off about this game, was the story presentation. The first cutscene of the game seems to be in a rush and just throws you inside its world without any proper story development. You won't have any idea about what's happening in the game's world, you won't know what's the deal with the main character and his enemies, and the NPCs who work with the main character are not properly introduced. The cherry on top of everything is probably the main character's name though, as he is literally called "M.C.". If you don't know, that is also the abbreviation of "Main Character", which I personally found to be very jarring. And this is not the end of story problems. Do you know why the game starts like this? Because some of the story context is on the store page. No, I'm not kidding. Just go and see for yourself. A whole bunch of the information that is written there is not relayed to the player in the game. Why? I have no idea. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a game putting its story details on the store page and not inside itself, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. It's such a shame that even the gameplay failed to get me hooked. Now, the game did feel interesting at first. A metroidvania with a main character that uses the same combat methods as in Mega Man Zero? I'm totally down for something like that! But then... I don't know why, but the level design did not feel okay to me. Navigating the environment and going through the platforming challenges did not feel fun or rewarding at all, and the fact that the game does not tell you what you have to do just made things worse. It gives you no indication or even a hint on where you have to go in order to progress further, so you just keep moving around just to suddenly trigger a cutscene or find an ability that you need to get through specific places. And these are without mentioning the occasional bugs and glitches that can happen while doing simple platforming, or the fact the main character will instantly drop down like a bag full of stones if their head or body hits a diagonal part of the terrain. About those abilities. I did not like the fact that the collectable abilities you can find for the main character's mechanical suit are just spread around in the wilderness with no reason behind them. Why is a module that helps us slide under narrow corridors hidden inside an underground cave? Why is a module that lets us cancel a dash stuck inside a tree? Now, this is not a game-breaking fault, but I expect to have a reason on why this is a thing in order for the world to feel logical and believeable. I mean, Samus got her abilities from Chozo Statues, or Alucard got them after defeating Dracula's strongest allies and underlings. They just didn't find something that was absolutely necessary for progression in a random ditch or something. And you know what's worse when it comes to collecting abilities that are spread around? The game ignores all advancements in the genre since Symphony of the Night, and does not let you put a marker on the map to identify locations of interest. Now, I would have just dealt with this and accepted it, if I was actually enjoying the experience. At many points in the beginning areas, I just thought some of the enemies were purposely put there so there's a higher chance for the player to take damage or get juggled between them. Some of the enemies can even attack through walls, which is very unfair. And if you get hit, you will lose a substantial amount of health. The game lets you recover HP with repurchaseable health packs, but even that is not very well implemented. Simply put, the amount of health you recover with these packs are very low. You just need to take one or two hits from the enemies or the bosses to lose all of what you had regained. It also doesn't help that trying to recover health while in a combat situation is usually a death sentence as not only there's a wind-up animation prior to using a health pack, but your health regenerates gradually instead of instantaneously. So, if the enemy or boss you are facing against is pretty aggressive, using a health pack means you are basically committing seppuku. I was already having a very bad time with the game, and then came the final straw to break the camel's back. You know how stubborn we can be, right? Even if the characters in a game tell us that something is very hard or impossible to do at that point in time, nothing stops us from trying anyway. And if we find out that yes, there is indeed a way to claim victory, we just keep trying over and over again to win. So imagine how infuriated I was to see the game constantly replaying a conversation after dying to the second major boss, telling me that maybe I have to come back later. This conversation just kept coming up after each of my even numbered deaths, and made me angrier bit by bit. "Does the game think I am an idiot?" is what was circulating in my head at that point. I understand that some players might legitimately be too braindead to realize maybe they don't have what it takes to tackle a boss, but to just repeat what you have already told them over and over again? That's just overkill. I eventually understood the boss' behaviors and attack patterns and defeated him, just to get a new firearm and find out I still need to explore the environment to find out where to go. At that point, I started to think: If I did not enjoy my time with the game so far, it is definitely not going to get better. So, I decided that enough is enough, and quit. This could have been good; But the flawed storytelling, the unenjoyable exploration, the questionably-designed gameplay mechanics and all the bugs & glitches sadly make up for a game I can never recommend.

I played mainly on Switch and I can tell it's a great game, kind of a hidden gem. It's a pure metroidvania taking all the best from classics, offering tight controls, crisp pixel art, nicely designed bosses and very immersive world with nice story. You can see it's all done with passion.

Mindseize es un metroidvania que sigue la logica de los viejos metroid de SNES pero con un poco de interfaz y otros detalles mas modernizados. La historia es sencilla somos una persona la cual los Ascendidos se robaron la mente de nuestra hija y buscamos los medios como unirse a una nave y su crew para poder lograr recuperar la mente de nuestra hija y devolverla a su cuerpo, y para esto deberemos buscar a Shiva, la jefa de los Ascendidos que fue quien robo esto. Los diferentes mundos que vamos explorando en nuestra aventura para derrotar a los Ascendidos, son bastante diferentes, cada uno con su propia ambientación y enemigos. A su vez el sistema de progreso de ir obteniendo habilidades los cuales nos permiten explorar zonas que antes no podiamos, me parece bastante bien realizado. El mundo que mas me gusto fue Takomo 7, se siente realmente abandonado.. Tambien el juego copia lo del Metroid que muchas veces para progresar, deberemos nosotros mismos explorar el mundo y encontrar donde debemos ir, esto es un punto positivo y negativo, positivo ya que nos da la curiosidad de que podemos explorar del mundo cada vez que conseguimos nuevas habilidades y negativo porque a veces uno puede llegar a confundirse por donde debe progresar o que necesita para avanzar. Fuera de ello, los enemigos cumplen en general, y van escalando adecuadamente a medida que progresamos, donde al final ya tenemos enemigos mas rapidos y con algunos patrones de ataque diferentes. Los jefes, algunos me parecieron dificiles, otros no tanto, cada uno tiene su propia personalidad y estilo de pelea. Lo unico que no me gustaron fueron los ultimos como el Monstruo Abisal donde pasaban tantas cosas en poco espacio que habia muy poco margen para salir vivo, y la pelea final senti que le falto un poco mas de dedicacion ya que muchas peleas anteriores parecian sentirse mas complicadas y intensas especialmente la de Valkyrie y la del Ascendido que nos da la espada Thyr. Lo malo del juego puede ser a veces los controles, como son bien estilo Metroid, presentan los mismos problemas que uno cuando dispara tiene esos microsegundos donde uno no puede moverse o reaccionar y eso muchas veces nos cuesta caro en las diferentes peleas o en algunas zonas de exploracion. Encontre algunos bugs como cuando saltas y te quedas trabado o si chocas contra una esquina no diagonal que te empuja violentamente hacia otra zona pero bueno no terminan generando bugs graves de juego y generalmente se arreglan a los segundos, los cuales no me parecieron tan graves. En resumen recomiendo este juego para los que les gusten los metroidvania, facil tendran entre 8 a 10hs de juego jugandolo y espero que lo disfruten si lo juegan!