TWWWR

holy gem

I don't often post reviews of the games I play, but this here deserves to be an exception. [strike] I'm going to preface this by saying that the game isn't an amazing masterpiece that you'll remember for the rest of your life, but you can't expect that from a small indie game that's less expensive that a meal at McDonald's.[/strike] Scratch what I previously said about this game not being a masterpiece, I really should have finished the game first and then write the review because this game is an actual indie masterpiece in my opinion. I know the word "masterpiece" has lost all of its meaning as of late, but I genuinely consider this game to be one. I don't remember the last time I've spent more than an hour and a half or so playing a game with friends, let alone a singleplayer one, but this game managed to achieve that. I've spent 3 hours straight just completing this game and all of the optional side stuff - that's how much I liked it. It's difficulty is so well done, it doesn't waste any time hitting you in the face with challenging bosses and especially that optional gauntlet. After playing so many games that either take their sweet time with giving the player any challenge whatsoever, or immediately throwing bs at the player before they even manage to grasp the core mechanics of the game they are playing - I found the difficulty progression in this game so masterfully done that it doesn't once feel like the game is too easy and should increase it's difficulty, or it did a difficulty spike out of nowhere causing incredible frustration. With one exception being the Forest Spirit boss fight which I find to be the equivalent of V2 from ULTRAKILL (ULTRAKILL mentioned RAAAAAAAAH.) With that boss fight serving as the skill check for the player to see whether or not they have learned the game's mechanics by now. Back to the review that I originally wrote: What you DO get with this game is really beautiful pixel art with really nice ambient music (and pretty good boss music) with bullet-hell gameplay with a progression system sort of like in Dark Souls 1 (you get to explore the map and ascend floors with the occasional "bonfire" serving as a checkpoint and a way to restore your health as well as the ability to warp between them.) And the gameplay is really damn good, not just for the price. The game has a really fun gimmick (that some people might have a hard time clicking with, but I got in tune with after a couple of deaths) where you can jump over any orange attack, but any attack of a different color you can only walk around to dodge - jumping won't save you. As for the game's downsides, the only ones I found so far are that the portraits of the characters look creepy as hell compared to how cute their overworld appearance is, the fact that the game often crashes for me when playing on controller and alt tabbing in and out of the game (but still thanks for controller support that's built into the game natively), and that there's a weird glitch where your game WILL crash consistently on layer 1 in a room if you kill any enemy and then exit out of that room (look around on the Community Hub, it's a known issue that the dev just doesn't address for some reason.) You can avoid this glitch entirely by just not killing any of the enemies in that particular room and just going around them and into the path where you need to go. It's very strange to me that the dev doesn't fix this issue, as I nearly refunded the game before looking around the Community Hub to see if anyone else has the same issue as me. Glad I didn't refund it though, it's worth every penny to me. If the dev is reading this review, the game is really good and you've got a ♥♥♥♥ ton of potential in game making. Please keep making games, I'll be glad to check them out. Just please don't make the character portraits so creepy next time :p