thecluckmeme posted:

I'm a simple man. I see an inventory screen with empty spots, I see an obstacle I can't overcome. I make a note of where it is, and later on I will come back and mash my face against it with all my shiny new toys to find all the secrets I can possibly find. That's what makes a good EXPLORATION-BASED ACTION PLATFORMER ADVENTURE game!

That's one reason why I highly, highly recommend Supraland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viUJ_oTqYJ0

It's a first-person "Metroidvania" inspired puzzle-heavy exploration game styled after a kid's sandbox full of toys and household objects. You play as a Red Meeple who has to save the Red Village by finding out why the Blue Meeple have sabotaged the water. You start off with a (admittedly pretty dire) Triple Jump and a Force Cube that essentially acts as one triple-jump-sized vertical lift. You'll get to whack things with a wooden sword and eventually get a gun that gets upgrades to shoot stuff. That's all pretty bog standard.

What's completely different about this game is that the puzzle-solving/movement upgrades you get throughout the game turn the game world on its head multiple times. While the start of the game has you shooting little skeleton men and collecting coins, you very quickly pick up powerups that fundamentally change how you look at the environments and how you traverse them. I won't spoil any of them in here (and the trailer only shows one of them off for a brief second), but one of the first major movement upgrades you get in the game lets you return to earlier areas to completely break open the platforming you may have been struggling with before. Once you pick up one of the major color-coded new items that affect how you interact with the world, there's always a genuine moment where you have to ask yourself "...Well gently caress. How many ways can I use this on its own, and how many ways can this item interact with everything else I've picked up to really break this poo poo wide open?"

There's also a ton of secrets in the game, and they actually matter quite a bit for general traversal and dealing with enemies. There's general "Laser goes pew better" powerups, but there's also a ton of secret powerups that will only come into play within other secret areas that get you even more secret unlocks, which all make moving around the world/dealing with enemies easier. And one place that the game excels is with its secrets: You can find a secret area, inside a secret area, with a third secret stashed just off to the side if you're paying attention. The solo-developer who made the original game spent a lot of time mashing his face against all the corners of the world, because if you can get someplace, there's probably at least some gold coins in a chest or two to reward your exploration, or a useful boost to one of your abilities.

There's also DLC for the base game called Supraland Crash, which doesn't introduce new powerups, but expands the development team a fair bit so more people can try to iterate on the puzzles from the base game and find new/interesting ways to implement the same powerups in ways you couldn't do in the base game. A sequel was also released called Supraland: Six Inches Under which is just an improvement on both the base game and the DLC in every way, in my opinion. I'd recommend playing them in-order, since trying to return to the base game's original super-short triple jump instead of a single regular-sized jump is pretty annoying until you reacclimate to it.

Between both games, + Crash DLC, I've spent about 55 hours exploring and I know I haven't gotten 100% in either yet. Probably around 85-90%, but some of the secrets are so well-hidden that they can be genuinely hard to find without using some of the unlockable radar-skills (and I'm a stubborn dumbass that wants to find it without help "