Sockventure

nice little platformer

tl;dr version: Sockventure is a solid precision platformer along the lines of Super Meat Boy w/ a variety of mechanics thrown in along the way to continually mix things up before anything gets remotely stale. Not too steep a difficulty curve until around chapter 5 when it ramps up noticeably. And yes, it works great on Steam Deck! (Technically "Playable" in needing to use the Steam Deck pop-up KB for entering a name, but otherwise it was essentially a "Verified" experience!). Recommend picking it up esp. if on sale. Longer version: The complexity of movement is dense and the controls feel good. The latter is crucial and absolutely a make or break for this sort of game so that's a plus. Deaths may be frequent and frustrating at times but just short of ever feeling unfair. Fresh off playing Celeste, I think some of my expectations are going to be unfair coming to this title, so I want to flag that. My primary gripe with Sockventure presently (working on end of Chapter 6) is it's largely feeling like punishing platforming for its own sake, and I'm hard pressed to want to get past a difficult section beyond my own will to do it and feeling a momentary sense of accomplishment. I could see the difficulty (but especially the number of systems I have to juggle) becoming so much so that I may be hard pressed to want to finish it but for now I'm taking breaks and coming back fresh which seems to help. For the record, I never came remotely close to finishing all of Super Meat Boy before bouncing off its punishing difficulty, so I'm sticking with this one more than that at least as of now. Celeste, by comparison, however always kept me going due to the comparably far more complete "package" of a game it presented than either of the other two (i.e., strong story, OST, etc.). This title is feeling much more like SMB. Story is..well, I know it's not where the creative dollars and energies were spent, but I do like the premise of a child's creative mind and where it can take you. I sort of wish that was leaned into maybe more overtly, maybe like a BBC Sherlock where the kid goes to his own "mind palace" and truly becomes part of the imagination himself OR takes on the persona of the hero, as the execution of these elements for me added some level of disconnect for whatever reason. Something about that boy's face and head appearing intermittently totally ruin it for me, and I can't quite explain why. It's like a sore thumb in removing me from the immersion I may want to have in this strange world -- is the Sock a hero with some character or is the boy the protagonist? That sounds dumb to ask but were things like that discussed, because it can inform the vision and execution on the final product? Regardless, I clearly care enough about the characters, story and world to even form such an opinion, so I think that's telling that there's something here. I would like to see a sequel that focused a bit more on story and characters (but then again, I'm an "old"). The still art on loading screens piques my interest, and I would welcome even those coupled with some text so my mind could fill in the creative blanks. So, perhaps less could be more in some instances?