Estimated total reading time: 4-5'

Title: Shantae and the Pirate's Curse
Developer: WayForward
Publisher: WayForward
Release date: 2015-04-23
Regular price: 19,99 €
Bundled:      ☑Yes ☐No
Achievements: ☑Yes ☐No
Cards:        ☑Yes ☐No

Oh, how I’d like to make a nice post about this game.. but I’m not that fluent at english yet so have a standard one =P

Let’s start saying that I had not played this before (nor any of the previous installments) so I went into this knowing basically nothing.
Had a quick look at the achievements before starting my playthrough to have a rough idea of what to expect/do and that’s when I decided to try beat the game with the starting health level, as it’s one of two requirements for an achievement (the one you can see featured on the right).

As far as I understood, Shantae acts differently from other episodes ‘cause she lost her powers (so she can’t transform).
The game also assumes you’ve played the previous titles, as there are a couple of references to them and most chars are supposed to being known.
Nothing that can break your game, don’t worry :) Focus on the game instead, which is very good! :D

Given the low resources required by the game I was able to let it run in the background and play it while doing other stuff :)
Jake Kaufman made the soundtrack, which is varied and generally good but can be a bit repetitive if you die/reload too frequently. Anyway, you can listen to (and even download) it for free here (51 tracks) :)
World is not very big but things are well placed, providing you some backtrack once obtained a new power-up.
Graphic-wise, this is a pixel game but its sprites are very clear and colours are powerful. Only time I had some problems discerning object in foreground from those in the background was in the “icy” island (sorry, don’t remember the name) where I couldn’t always tell if I could jump on a tree or not.
Played with a keyboard and sometimes I died because I had pressed a wrong key. Pretty sure you won’t have this problem with a joypad :)

There’s a constant yet “gently” increasing of difficulty throughout the game until a sudden spike before the last boss battle. Going through the tower to reach him is very-likely rage-inducing.
I’ll be honest though, I used a little trick to pass that area but I’m going to cover it in case some of you want to play it and do not want any kind of spoiler:
Useless filler sentence just in case you accidentally move your pointer over here. The review will continue in the next sentence, you have been warned.
ok, as I was saying, I used a small trick to reach the top of the tower as I couldn’t even pass the first “floor” (perhaps I didn’t try enough), and so I don’t have the slightest idea of what awaits you there. But, I noticed that the exit door is right over the entrance one and given all the aspects of the game I think it was something that was done on purpose by devs/designers. I mean, they could have simply placed it way above, why put it right there, so close that you can almost reach it jumping? So I focused on this solution and.. it worked! Combining both the Hat and the Cannon you can jump from lower to upper floor fully skipping those hellish platforming segments inbetween.

If I really have to find a negative aspect that bothered me, I say the absence of quick-load. There may be something more but I can’t think of anything else.

9/10

Other played games that fit the theme but that I won’t beat in time

(If I unlocked achievements in the current month, do they count for stats even if I don’t beat ‘em?)

@mandrill: as you can see, code bits can be seen through the spoiler tag. And a bit of images too:

See? if you move the mouse away you can still barely see it