Valkyrie Saga

A surprisingly varied open world platformer! I think it could do with some small visual touchups in the environmental texturework, but the character models are extremely charming, and otherwise I've never seen a game look quite like it, and I do enjoy the very saturated character and "objective" models (crystals, halos etc) contrasting with the more washed out environment, makes it very easy to read.

Really came around to liking this tiny rough gem. The beginning can be a bit rough with the art direction being indistinct and lacking a lot of upgrades and moves. By the end it suckered me in a bit, and I look forward to any other projects the dev releases. + The grandiose scale of some of the platforming sections with how far you can fall and how far you have to go really sell the games mechanics and overall vibe + Soundtrack is solid and fit the PlayStation era atmosphere the games going for + There are plenty of secrets to find/unlock (Though most are small upgrades like increased run speed or palette swaps for your character) ~ Fighting enemies in the overworld feels pointless outside of getting achievements, as they don't really offer much outside of extremely small portions of health regen and they're almost never directly in your way when platforming ~ Some bugs during my time mostly just getting stuck a wall once and colliding into sidewalk ~ Controls I'm mixed on as things like vaulting and casting spells never fully clicked as I would do the vaulting button combination on accident a lot and spells never coming out the first time. Climbing up walls with the spear also had issues as you needed space between you and the wall, but the wall sometimes would only have sweet spots (usually on corners) where the spear would only work there. - Game states do not carry over if you turn off the game, so if you activated statues and turn off the game before getting to whatever follow-up upgrade/crystal is at the end you will need to reactivate the statue (It's usually nothing major lost but was frustrating to find out) - The mismatched art assets are definitely not doing any favors in terms of art direction. Its understandable a lot of the assets were outsourced as its a solo dev, but the differing texture work/polygon count on the environments versus the models make them stick out more. You can just see the UI during gameplay on the store page and how slapped together it looks.