Fifty Farts has a new favorite as of 21:57 on Jul 23, 2023

• All of the movement is very snappy and fine-tuned, if you played Hollow Knight then a lot of that muscle memory slots right into this game pretty well. There's a few quirks to get used to, but it controls wonderfully.
  
• The movement starts out pretty basic, and your classics do show up eventually (double jump, dash, pogo) but after the second or third main story dungeon it introduces a new mechanic: the crystal arrow. When you fire the crystal arrow, it travels at an OK speed through the air. Within a certain distance of the arrow during this flight, or when the arrow is stuck into a surface, you can press LT to instantly teleport to where the arrow is. This opens up movement in a huge way, and the entire back half of the game relies on it for its platforming puzzles.
  
• The area designs are gorgeous. The opening area is a dark, rainy, dreary place that looks like it belongs in Hollow Knight. Once you get past its Eastern Wall, you move to a Catacombs area with lots of spike and spear traps. After that you can go down into a cavern/mine area, but if you keep going East you'll end up at the Tower of Light, a gigantic, radiant tower with a huge column of light pulsing in its center. It occasionally overloads with Light and fires off the column straight up through the center of the entire tower, distorting the area around it and really selling just how powerful that beam of light is.
  
• There's also an area that looks like it came straight out of Brutal Legend. Metal spikes? Check. Raining Blood? Check. Red/Black shadow creatures? Check. Is it all a bit hokey? Yes. While the Tower of Light belongs to the Queen of Light (whom is your greatest enemy that you're locked into an eternal battle with), this area is yours, motherfucker. King of Darkness has to have his lake of blood and whatnot It's so funny that, presumably, he's made the place up like this on purpose. You just know this dude's bedroom has a 10-CD Player with 9 albums of Slayer/Megadeth/Metallica and 1 album by The Cure.
  
• The game has "Noctis" difficulty (hard mode), which is what the game was originally designed around. It's hard. The second Catacombs area has a few rooms that are reminiscent of the White Palace from Hollow Knight, complete with timed spear traps jutting out of the floors, walls, and ceilings. That area is before Main Dungeon 1 of 7.
  
• To offset this, the game hands out checkpoints like it's candy on Halloween, and the "bloodstain" mechanic a la Dark Souls can be negated by equipping a gem at one of the warp points.
  
• There's also a constant reminder in the Pause menu that you can lower the difficulty to "Aeterna" (easy* mode that was added after release) at any time, and you can also raise the difficulty as well. There's differences with platforms, traps, enemy placement, boss health, and all kinds of stuff. The only thing the game penalizes you with is the achievements: if you want the "beat X boss in Hard Mode" achievement then obviously you can't do it on easy mode.
  
• There's a gem that makes your Double Jump a Triple Jump. It's honestly the only way I'd play the game, because there's some jumps that would require messing with other abilities that you can just do a triple jump instead. It feels almost designed with the triple jump in mind, but judging from some discussion threads I've seen online, there's definitely a group of people out there who think it's not the "true experience" if you use it, so it's not original with the game.
  
• Bosses hit that perfect balance where the first fight is "what the gently caress is happening I'm already dead" and by the time you beat the boss, you're pogoing off their head instead of scrambling for heals between phases, just because you can.
  

bawk has a new favorite as of 07:23 on Jul 24, 2023