Harlow

Some of the worst checkpointing you will ever see. There is nothing more dispiriting than threading the needle through three insane sets of obstacles in a row, then having a randomized and impossible-to-predict item in the environment come out of nowhere and take you out, sending you all the way back to repeat the three previous obstacles. Screw that, and this game.

I love this game for so many reasons! Harlow’s beautiful art style, fun gameplay, and excellent soundtrack all come together to form a super polished, memorable experience. Each level is well designed and the challenges throughout keep you on your toes. I really enjoyed checking in with the characters and customizing the space ship between levels. I'll be recommending Harlow to friends for a long time!

This game doesn't feel great to play. I don't know why but something just feels tedious about this. I stopped playing it because I was not having fun and decided to give it another go now because I'm changing to Linux. There's no volume slider for music in the pause menu, and the music gets exhausting real fast. You can sometimes get stuck when respawning if you try to move too quickly and need to reboot the game. Some surfaces arbitrarily don't recharge your jump ability. SERIOUSLY THOUGH, THAT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MUSIC. The store model of having to first pay to see what you can buy and then buy it again feels almost hostile. And there are some little things about the level design that just feel poorly thought out. Worse yet, aside from all these faults, the game just has nothing I find interesting. Occasionally I'll barely escape death or die in a ridiculous way and that'll be mildly amusing, but I DIDN'T SPEND 4 HOURS LISTENING TO THAT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MUSIC FOR "MILDLY AMUSING". Lastly, this is important. This game has a Steam Next Fest demo but removed it. I played the demo so I'm not salty about missing out on that or anything. It's just that generally any game that does that ALWAYS turns ou…

Pretty good game. I didn't think there could be such a thing as a "zen" precision-platformer, yet here it is. The gameplay is original and works well, based on physics engines and the ability to recharge the double-jump each time we touch a surface - well almost all surfaces, and that's one of the many small issues the game has. Sometimes the double-jump should recharge and yet doesn't. For instance, if we bounce too quickly, it seems it doesn't have time to trigger it. Or sometimes even standing still on the ground doesn't recharge it for some reason. And since we can only move by jumping, we're stuck until the game suddenly decides to let us jump again. (I'm not sure why the devs didn't simply make it so that touching anything recharges the double-jump. That would make things not only clearer but less glitchy.) Other than that, the movements are pretty fluid, and it's fun to be able to bounce everywhere. The main issue is definitely the lack of checkpoints. Not that it makes the game particularly difficult, since we never lose any progress, but it's still tedious to restart from way too far, especially considering the time it takes to respawn, which is way too long for no appare…

While the art is charming, and music, very relaxing, those are unfortunately the only two positives I could give in the time it took for me to give up on this one. The achievements are completely broken (I got the one for beating stage 6 in a certain amount of jumps the moment I launched the game, and neither of the ones related to Lito even thought of triggering, even though I got the dialogue for the friend one and interacted with them so much, the lines started looping), controls wildly uncomfortable (One has to barely move the stick if you want any semblance of control whatsoever), no ability to use the mouse to actually control the character seemingly exists in game (“Drag and Fling” means “nothing you press or do on your mouse will cause anything to happen in-game”), and motion is way too random, all the while demanding precision that's not even thought to be granted to the player to beat levels. Also, Level 5 has some “Party Data” that's seemingly above the double-jump ceiling, making it either impossible to get, or way too finicky. Most of the game feels like blind luck, in other words. [b]Verdict:[/b] In dire need of updates as it's almost unplayable in its current state…

Mellow game with a not-so mellow control scheme. Simply put: WHY have a mouse cursor with the drag-movement controls if all you're moving is moving your guy? On the ship, after moving into prompts, I understand. However, the mouse cursor being present always through the levels...it just doesn't need to be there. It more than frequently screws up movement.