I reached this game in my backlog a little over a month ago, but noticed it was STILL in Early Access, so I decided to hold off on playing it until it was done. Not long after, I encountered a second game that also promised a major update would be coming soon, so I postponed that game as well. So, you may be wondering: why did I decide to play it now, even though it’s still in Early Access? Well…
Because those two games are the last ones in my Steam backlog.
Also, since the game’s recent updates mostly concerned the level editor and cosmetic changes, I mistakenly assumed that the campaign was finished. Nope; it stops after world 3.
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Vibrant Venture
4 hours playtime
4 of 24 achievements
Platformer. Besides standard left/right movement and jump, you can do a sliding kick by pushing X on the ground and you can swap characters with right stick. The game often makes you do this on the fly, so you can push L to slow time for a couple seconds, giving you enough time to move your thumb from the face buttons to the right stick and back. Alternately, you can have the face buttons be the swap-character buttons and have the shoulder buttons be jump/attack, but that just makes things even more awkward.
Each of the four characters you swap between have unique abilities that honestly could’ve easily all been combined into a single control setup for a single character and were only split to give the devs an excuse to make you use the awkward swap mechanic. The red character can double-jump and dive-kick, the green character can float for a few seconds and bounce off spikes harmlessly, the yellow character can wall-jump four times and ground-pound, and the blue character can forward-dash and use a homing attack. Despite the need to swap between characters frequently, it manages to work pretty well for the most part. My only issue with the controls is that the blue character’s forward-dash is mapped to jump, while her homing attack is mapped to X. If you’ve played any other game, you’ll know that dash is normally mapped to a button that isn’t jump, and if you’re familiar with modern Sonic games, you’ll know they have the homing attack mapped to the jump button, making this game the exact opposite of intuitive. Even when you think you’ve finally gotten used to it, muscle memory will take over at some point and get you killed again.
Level design is pretty good. The first few levels do a decent job at ramping up the difficulty while still letting you get used to how the game controls. The only issue I had with any level in world 1 is this one level that takes place at night, so it has a dark transparency over everything that makes it kinda hard to see the mushroom enemies and their tiny shots. World 2 is still mostly good, but it introduces swimming and underwater segments, which add momentum to your left/right movement! Then there’s level 2-4, which has a blind jump where you fall down a shaft, then suddenly there’s a part of the wall that has breakable blocks you need to dash through, and if you’re not quick enough, you keep falling into a pit and die. Also, to get one of 2-4’s optional collectibles, you have to hit a switch and collect some diamonds–but not all the diamonds, just the three large ones at the top and a few in the giant cluster of little ones in the middle; if you try to get all the little ones, the timer will run out on you, but if you get all three big ones and only a few of the little ones, the game will spawn the collectible for you. Quite unintuitive.
Then there’s the boss fights. First of all, every single one of them are wait-to-attack bosses! They make you wait long enough that you’ll think you have to hit them somehow, but all your attacks just cause you to take contact damage, and you die in two hits (and dying means waiting through ALL previous attack cycles again since bosses have no checkpoints). The first boss has you float up an updraft (that can randomly spawn right next to the boss, meaning you can’t really avoid taking a hit) so you can ground pound a log that has never shown up before now, and you have to do it on the correct side or the log will ricochet away from the boss and not deal damage. The second boss does a better job at introducing what you have to do (ground pound the floor), but there’s a lot of waiting you’ll need to do between when the boss tosses the bombs you can ricochet back at it. Also, you have to hit this boss SIX times (with lots of waiting between each hit, remember!), and the arena floods after the third hit; for this part, collecting the “stay underwater” tokens in time is fine, but the boss’s dash attack is suddenly slightly higher, meaning you just barely can’t single-jump over it anymore, and getting killed because of THAT and having to redo so much waiting is really frustrating. (not to mention the techno graphics and underwater transparency make everything less distinct).
World 3 also sees its level design quality start to dip. Graphics are less distinguishing, gimmicks are less intuitive, and the optional collectibles start getting easier to miss (I never missed any until world 3, except the “don’t take damage against bosses” ones). One of the new enemies here is a rat that’ll run away from you and throw a rock in the exact right arc to hit you when you try to jump on it. There’s a jump so wide, you won’t see the next platform until you’re over the pit. Stationary spotlights stay on for too long (yes, they hurt you on contact). 3-2 introduces rocket platforms that move forward automatically and which you can guide up/down, except that has even worse momentum than swimming! Also, there’s a part where you’re just supposed to figure out that the pink bubbles that don’t really stand out from the background that much are actually bounce pads that’ll reverse the direction of your rocket platform, and if your rocket platform hits a wall instead of them, you just die outright. This world also has a mini-boss on top of a regular end-of-world boss, and of course, it’s also wait-to-attack, but worse since the length it runs before attacking is variable, so you can never be sure if it’s safe to jump over the boss or not.
Overall, this one’s hard to recommend. Not only is it unfinished, but all the bosses make you wait, with the waiting compounding upon previous boss waiting, and the level design starts to falter as well by introducing less-intuitive gimmicks and more momentum (less responsive controls). Wait for a sale, and DEFINITELY wait for the game to be out of Early Access.
So yeah, even though I’m technically not done with my Steam library, there’s not a whole lot I can do with it until those two games are updated, so you can consider this a tentative “I finished my Steam library” milestone. I still have a bunch of other games from elsewhere, so I’ll be sure to make a post when I find a game decent enough to warrant posting about.
Hey congrats!
Congrats on clearing your backlog!
Congratulations! If not the first, you’re probably in the first 5 I’ve seen doing it, although I’ve been a bit away from blaeo. Either way, that’s a great accomplishment!
What happened. You had 13 games the other day when I looked!
Well done though on doing your backlog. While you do have quite a bit in wont play I did notice most of them had actual playtime so that’s definitely a beaten backlog. Now everyone who is on blaeo needs to give one game each so you got a bit more to do
Short answer: I decided to limit making posts about games I outright wouldn’t recommend, and the games I did beat in that time were pretty short.
Long answer:
What happened
This should cover all of those missing games
85 minutes playtime
6 of 8 achievements
I tried really hard not to give up on any of my SG wins, but this game broke me. Movement has no momentum, which is good, but everything else about the controls is wrong. Your entire jump arc is completed in 1/3rd of a second, which is far too quick to make accurate jumps on its own, but it gets worse. See, you're also regularly required to make VERY precise jumps between hazards, but the slightest tap of the D-pad sends you at least half-a-unit forward or backward, so if you realize you're off by a pixel or two, it's already too late. To add injury to injury, hitboxes are larger than sprites, so you can die even without touching the hazards:
All three of those jumps require literal pixel-perfect, frame-perfect timing, which just isn't possible to do without getting lucky, and after several dozen deaths, I had enough. Not recommended.
16 minutes playtime
no achievements
Platformer, no controller support. Jump is mapped to W, but unlike normal games that have left mapped to A and right mapped to D, left is mapped to Q and right is mapped to E! You can't even really focus on the platforming because--at least in the first level--level design is bland and gaps are too wide to jump across, so you need to control falling Tetris pieces (their controls are also mapped awkwardly, by the way) to build a staircase to the next platform. Oh, and you have to do it quickly since the game auto-scrolls, and getting left behind causes you to die. I did make it to the first boss, but your slow movement means you can't run past its foreshadow areas before the attack lands; you HAVE TO WAIT. Plus, you can't attack the boss directly; you have to collect syringes along the (looping?) battle arena. I can see how other people might like it, but it's not for me.
62 minutes playtime
3 of 15 achievements
This is an adventure-puzzle game wearing the skin of a platformer. One of the first things that happens is a slime blocks your way, so you need to get it some meat without any other slime stealing it from you. At first, you'll think it'll require some tricky throwing/platforming, but no; there's an underground path you have to find, and then it's just a matter of tediously getting the food through those crouch-tunnels and dash-through walls. After that? You have to spell the word "FOX" in binary! After enough prodding, the game does eventually relent and teach you what you need to know in order to solve this "puzzle," but then I reached a dead end and only had a rock as an item I could toss. I never figured out what the game wanted me to do with that rock, so I gave up.
21 minutes playtime
no achievements
This is like if Super Mario Sunshine or The Gunk had no enemies. All you do is wander around the area and shoot the red corruption until it goes away, then you move on to the next area; rinse and repeat. You can "die" by falling in water, but that's the only hazard in the game, and it just sets you back on land without you losing any progress or anything. There's some very basic platforming that's only made tricky due to your character's movement momentum, but besides that, it's quite boring. Not recommended.
7 minutes playtime
no achievements
Platformer. Movement has momentum, and that's where most of the challenge comes from because the level design is pretty basic. At the end of each level, a hazard wall chases you back to the start, but that doesn't really add much. Not recommended.
29 minutes playtime
no achievements
Very boring twinstick shooter. No level design, and the only two enemy types are the generic "beeline towards you" and "shoot at you." There's exactly one boss type, and all it does is jumps over you and ground-pounds (and sometimes summons four of the aforementioned basic enemies and waits for you to kill them). The final "boss" is just waves of these enemies followed by a very brief period where you can attack the "boss"'s weak point. Not recommended.
39 minutes playtime
no achievements
Platformer. The main gimmick here is that you whip grapple points, then swing and jump to the next grapple point or platform. However, not only is it physics-based, but there's a delay between pushing the attack button and your whip extending in front of you (if you've ever played the old 2D Castlevania games, you'll know what I'm talking about). Plus, if you're too close to the grapple point, your whip won't catch it anyway and you'll keep falling. I reached a part in level 3 where you have to jump from a grapple point and whip a switch to move said grapple point in front of you, then whip that same grapple point, and I swear, even through I quickly let go and hit the whip button again, the game just wouldn't register my second whip and I'd miss the grapple point (I even switched controllers thinking maybe mine was broken, but that didn't help). I did make it past that part exactly once, then died just a bit later before reaching the next checkpoint. After a couple dozen failed attempts, I gave up.
11 minutes playtime
no achievements
Twinstick rail shooter. Move your ship with left-stick, aim with right-stick, fire with…I think it was RT? The game's main gimmick is that your shots become weaker and less rapid the more you shoot, and you die if your weapon energy runs out, so you want to be precise with your aiming. Problem is, the first boss is a massive damage sponge; just when I finally got enough energy for rapid fire, I'd lose it again after a few shots. I died when the boss had very little health left and was forced to start the battle over from the beginning, so I opted to quit instead.
10 minutes playtime
1 of 28 achievements
The perspective is top-down, but don't let that fool you; this is a racing game, not an action-adventure. Plus, you're just racing against the clock--and not even to win; just to improve your time (you unlock the next level after beating the previous level regardless of your time). That could still work, but in at least the first few levels, there's literally NOTHING besides ground, spikes, and green crystals that give you more time. I got bored and stopped playing.
11 minutes playtime
5 of 12 achievements
Permadeath roguelite. Left stick moves, A button dashes. Not only can the visuals be chaotic, but world 4 has the walls made up entirely out of variable-length swords that always point at you, making it hard (if not impossible) to get around tight corners without taking a hit. Compounding on this issue is the darkness gimmick in World 5, which is where I died on my second run and decided not to play the game anymore.
7 minutes playtime
no achievements
Kururin clone. There are only eight (8) levels total, and the first four are literally copies of each other with just a bit more content added onto the end. The reason this game took me so long to beat is because it can be kinda unintuitive where your bar will be positioned once it turns 90 degrees, so I'd just barely tap the wall by accident and get sent back to the start of the level. I can only recommend it as a tech demo if you've never played a Kururin game before and you want to see if it's something you'd enjoy, but even then, you're better off just emulating the GBA Kururin game.