Explore a large world, unlock lots of extra powers (jump high, jump even higher, DoubleJump?, DoubleJump? higher, bounce on red glowy things, jump really high... you get the picture)
Oh, and you're an egg.
It's got a map, and you'll probably need it. You can teleport freely between save points and there's lots to do. It's also quite open - there's really no required order to many of the zones, though certain jumping puzzles (and let's be frank, apart from the occasional sokoban, this game has no other kind) are much much easier with the proper power ups.
This is accurate, but slightly misleading. There are other things you can do with the right powerup - shoot, duck/special, divebomb, stick to things, etc - and puzzles are often figuring out which of those to use. Just... combined with lots of jumping too. :) --AC
Art style is /KnyttStories? style, pastel colours and obviously marked spiky things. Music is dismal.
There's plenty of play-time in here, and it even has a SuperMario? 3 two-player combat mode. Which you'll never use.
After a certain point the game becomes 'collect all of the...' where '...' is hearts, flowers etc. This is annoying. The bossess are fun. Some of the jumping puzzles are painful.
Hints: When you get a bounce (from jumping on an enemy, or a floating-shiny-thing once you have the powerup) your jump resets, this means that you can DoubleJump? again. The game does not signal this in advance, for which I fine it fifty tasty cookies, but I award it half a garibaldi for correctly signaling almost everything else. (Though it has to give up and use text a couple of times 'Jump here' on a big floating arrow over a bosses head is particularly memorable.)
There is a very subtle signaling of the jump-reset factor - you're right-way-up before double-jumping, and spinning after, and hitting something turns you back right-way-up. This is initially very hard to see, of course. --AC
What this gets right
There are very few keys (arrows, action, pause-menu) and they pretty much do what you expect. (Exception: Shops. An explicit 'exit' button would be better than using just pause.)
It almost always signals new tricks to you in a simple situation before expecting you to use them properly. (Exception: Heart gates. Though it does signal them, it doesn't explain that you have to stay healthy for the entire zone)
What do you mean here? I thought you just had to be at max health at the moment you touch the heart gate. --AC
And it does guide you, whilst letting you roam around.
There's few insta-death traps. Usually you can jump down any hole you like, and the worst you'll find is a way back up.
Unfortunately, that also makes it far more irritating when suddenly you discover the section where falling does kill you. Some kind of visual indicator would have been nice. --K
It's another 'blue door, blue key' platformer, which doesn't even have the sense to tell you when a particular path is impossible, as opposed to just insanely hard. (At a couple of points I got stuck with several possible routes, thinking none of them were possible, and looking for something I'd missed)
It's not quite "blue door, blue key". It's more "power to do X, obstacle of type X to further progress". But yes, I agree with the second frustration. --AC
It doesn't often tease you with things just out of reach - and when it does, it doesn't tell you what they are going to be. (There's a powerup over there, maybe it will let me continue my quest - oh wait, no, it just improves my shot power. Whoo.)
I think it does. There have been several occasions when I see something and figure out what an upcoming powerup must be in order for me to get it... and other cases where something's just slightly visible, enough that you could miss it on your first couple of visits, but it's there to be seen and collected if you look carefully. --AC
And actually, the shot upgrades both let you get to new places (though not a particularly useful place in one case). --AC
Some powers have no obvious use at all. (Hint: The divebomb lets you smash small stone bridges.)
It did tell you that when you got it, I thought? But it didn't tell you what ducking does (hint: all sorts of random things if you do it in significant places). --AC
Unless I missed a hint somewhere, making you some guess that you were supposed to qhpx ba gur nygne is pretty unforgivable. I'd run out of things to do at that point and without AC's comment above I'd have been completely stuck. In general I'm enjoying it but between that and having to farm snails for cash I was definitely losing interest. --K
That particular one is hinted at by the cave painting to the right of the first Grotto boss (which I only saw by divebombing the bridge by the savepoint in Grotto). I think it's the game's lowest point, though. As for cash, though, you don't need anything from the shop beyond the blue powerup which is the cheapest thing there; there are a few other doors you have to pay to pass, but basically you don't need much cash at all. Over the course of your adventures you'll get enough cash to pay everything you need and get most of the shop's goods without trying. --AC
Unless I'm more confused than usual, you don't get to the grotto until after you've had to do the thing in question. --K
I think you're right that you can't climb the red energy until after you've done what you need the hint for. But you can get into the secret cave by following a secret passage from the first grotto boss, which the game seems to expect you to follow as soon as you've beaten said boss. I spotted it early enough but found it one of the hardest secret passages to get through in the game so far, so... yeah, like I say, I think they dropped the ball there. --AC
There's a couple of invisible walls.
Practical problems? You can't resize the window. It doesn't quit on Alt-F4, you have to remember to go to the pause menu and find the quit option there.
And when you die-and-retry, it moves the window back to its default position, naughty game. --AC
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