The Madness of Little Emma

This game really wants to be The Binding of Isaac. There was a good amount of effort put into making it and I did find myself wanting to keep playing at times, but it really lacks polish. Character movement feels a bit too fast for precision but too slow to navigate some of the more obnoxiously designed rooms with way too many walls that form labyrinthian paths to the next room. Character progression feels slow and unrewarding, and you'll feel underpowered in most runs. There's a pretty large pool of items but so many of them have underwhelming effects so the few items that the game gives you in an average run barely give you any power. Too many similar status effect modifiers and worthless active items, and not enough damage. The game is so stingy that you'll be lucky if you find a damage up after two floors. It doesn't help that a lot of enemies are really spongy. There's even a few items that are so bad that they can end a run on their own. A significant number of chests spawn on top of large rows of spikes and low ceilings so you're pretty much guaranteed to lose life trying to get the items inside. There's also chests that are only reachable by bomb jumping. The game does not drop enough hearts to compensate for the forced damage chests. It's usually not even worth it to try since chests barely give anything good. A lot of them only give 1 coin or 1 half-heart. Consumables don't drop enough in general. You only get enough coins in a typical run to maybe buy two items from shops, and that's only if you avoid using active items altogether, which have coin costs that can go up to 4 coins per single use. There's an optional secret area that only spawns if you're holding 50 coins and you'll most likely never see it unless you play the character that starts with 30 coins and still avoid buying items. Some enemies and projectiles are hard to see in some of the later areas. Red orbs on a dark orange background or pale homing skulls on a light brown background, and the same skulls also look exactly the same as some projectiles that are created by player items so you don't even know which are good and which are bad sometimes. Arena challenge rooms can spawn enemies a few pixels away from you so you have no time to react, or even directly on your character if you're playing the flying character. The flying character gets stuck on slopes instead of moving along them. Multisegmented bosses can have a trawl effect on each segment that instantly wipes out your entire inventory of consumables. Regular enemies can have that modifier, too, so you tend to lose your bombs and coins a lot but at least you have a chance to save a coin or two in regular rooms. The mouse isn't locked to the game window in Windowed Mode. You can't rebind the bomb key for some reason. A room in an early area that can spawn a dozen high HP mobs in a small space that fly through walls closing in on you, is almost guaranteed death on most characters. There's bullet hell rooms that are near impossible to survive in, made worse by your imprecise movement. Mini bosses with modifiers that can immobilize you in said Bullet Hell rooms. There's a bunch of rooms in general that feel like trollish traps that are almost guaranteed to end a run. You can't skip them, and it wouldn't matter anyway because you don't know which rooms are death traps until you enter them. 90% of the rooms in this game are brain dead easy and a dozen or so that are so ridiculous that you'll lose 5 full hearts just trying to get a couple hits in. Enemy bullets have infinite range but your character's shot range is very short. Sometimes it's impossible to even get near an enemy because there's 3 or 4 enemies near the ceiling that never stop shooting an absurd amount of projectiles, and you're just stuck in a corner inching back and forth to dodge the unending barrage of projectiles. I had a lot more fun in the separate Arena mode than the main mode since it's a lot more generous with its items and buffs, not to mention you get a choice of multiple items instead of getting stuck with whatever garbage RNG throws at you in the main mode. There's item synergies and special item interactions in this game but you'd never know if you only played the main mode. Finding all four Monster familiars combines them into a single, larger familiar, à la Isaac's Super Bum, that shoots large piercing lasers, for example. It feels like a lot of secrets are tied to RNG. Some of these complaints were minor nitpicks but there's definitely a lot of unfair or unpolished design that sours the entire experience. A lot of my deaths felt like they weren't my fault, and most runs aren't very fun because the game refuses to give you any damage buffs. The game could be really good with some more development time and proper balancing but I can't recommend it in its current state. It seems development has ended, though.