Supraland

While I can acknowledge the quality of the world they've built, the actual gameplay in this is so tedious, slow, and dull. I'm legitimately shocked to see I only have 1.5 hours on record because it felt like I've played double that. The game hooks you in once you start discovering secrets in spots that you'd expect to be out of bounds or when you jump behind a piece of background scenery and find an upgrade, but the game pretty quickly delves into some super generic and repetitive gameplay. Combat is hitting things over and over until they die, at first super tediously and then you get powerups to make your weapons do a few more points of damage and to make enemies drops coins and health, which is really only rewarding because the combat is so bad and unfun that otherwise you'd try and actively run past the respawning enemies. The combat section on the description of the store page almost feels like outright lies, it is not fast-paced at all and this is NOWHERE NEAR the quality of Quake or Unreal. Seems like the actual game description acknowledges how bad the combat is though? As well as the playtime which is just strange to me. 12-25 hours feels more like a threat now lol. Progression is tedious as well since usually you'll find something you can't open yet somewhere, run to the other side of the sandbox and complete a simple task which then rewards you with the tool you need to go do that first thing. It's a Metroidvania and I get that, and they're not my favorite genre but given that this is supposed to be a puzzle game I expected more out of the puzzles. "Find this thing and place it here", "Climb this thing using your 'put a box down' ability and reach this thing to get a gun that feels awful to use", etc. are really weak challenges and your willingness to explore more shrinks and shrinks as your forced into more awful combat encounters. I also think the powerups are a little contrived. Stuff like adding max hp (in a game where dying has very little punishments), incrementing weapon damage (while upping enemy health/damage so really it's scaling for inflation), and being able to carry more coins so that you can buy things that cost MORE coins are all very unrewarding. I think I actually laughed when I unlocked a TRIPLE jump seemingly within twenty minutes of unlocking a double jump. I also think they're pretty uninspired in terms of worldbuilding as well. I'm a little toy guy with a wooden sword which makes sense in a sandbox, but one of my first powerups is a glowing energy ball that I can turn into a purple cube? I have a futuristic Metroid-esque blaster, but it just looks like a blaster. It's not constructed out of pencils or erasers like the rest of the world, so what's the deal? Feels like it cheapens the aesthetics a bit. I'm pretty blown away by the overwhelmingly positive rating. It feels like this game is benefitting a lot from the "Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down" binary rating system on Steam. I don't think this is necessarily a "bad" game, I'm sure there's some people who'd get a big kick out of this, but I also imagine those people are probably also people who look at the average playtime of a game and deem a higher number as being more valuable or who maybe aren't used to games where the environment is open and exploration is a focus, so the scale and lack of signposting is probably more freeing. Personally, I think it's just really bland and middle of the road. I can only really recommend it if you have nothing else to play (which you do, let's be real) or if the idea of a puzzle-Metroidvania in first person is REALLY specifically piquing your interest.