Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition

Well, what an interesting game. I’ll say this, the art style, story and even gameplay concepts presented here are really unique. However, unique doesn’t really mean good unfortunately. The movement in this game is point and jump, linear movement to a surface, but in several occasions now I’ve had the game force my trajectory to where it though I wanted to go and not where I actually wanted to go. I can’t think of anymore more frustrating that repeatedly dying because the game thinks it knows better. Yes, please throw me into that fire ball and I’ll get stuck in the air, not the surface behind it, that’s perfect.

A good metroidvania with an interesting central mechanic. Loved seeing the Brazilian inspired art design. Combat could have used a bit more time in the oven but I could tell it wasn't the central focus and I'm glad the team spent their time elsewhere. 7/10 would recommend for someone who would ask about it.

The choice of making you move around by leaping from surface to surface it's an original concept, but originality alone doesn't make a game good or appealing. At least in my opinion. I am not trying to say this game is terrible, it's just that the novelty of playing this way kinda wears off after a while and just becomes an annoying way to traverse and fight. I think a way to improve this would have been to simply allow you to move freely on surfaces, maybe replace the jump button with a button to leap between surfaces, but you can move and attack freely otherwise just like any other metroidvania game. But this is just my personal take, maybe the devs intended the game to be plaid this way and only this way, but the risk of doing that is that this will only attract very niche audiences that are into this kind of game with unusual controls.

One of my top games, playing it on switch for... I want to say 7 years by now... Use controller if you want a somewhat logical control scheme... The mouse controls are quite funny, I enjoyed them a lot, but I have ~[i]experience[/i]~ Also, yeah, the controls are weird af, you get to struggle with them for a few hours but you get an amazing speedrunning game out of it. [strike] Oh, and the game keeps trying to trick you to slow down, don't beleive it, you can serpentine through most things with a few well placed attacks if you... can do them... hmmm... I guess once you learn the controls it gets much easier... [/strike] seriously, try this one. the DLC is free, FREE, and seamlessly integrated. The base game is worth it too. Anyways, I'm off to suffer with a no level-ups run.

If you like bullet-hells, platformers, metroidvanias, and games that are short and sweet (ignore my time spent playing. I take longer than most in games.) then I highly recommend. It gets a bit tedious in the last 2-ish hours, but I otherwise have no complaints.

Huge fan of this game. Bought it a long while ago with the soundtrack and I still listen to it all the time.