Master Key

Mostly neutral review, leaning towards negative. I was going to let the game off the hook since it's not very pricey, but most of my thoughts on it turned out to be negative when I put them on the proverbial paper.  Master Key is a basic, casual zeldalike. Its biggest positive is that playing it doesn't involve constantly going into the menu to adjust your equipment like too many other zeldalikes have you do. The simple bicolour graphics are easy to look at and can be set to a number of different nostalgic palettes. The map is big enough to take over 20 hours to fully explore.  The list of negatives is gonna be much lengthier.   A big one is how clunky the combat is. I hated how easy it is to inadvertently queue up actions after attacking -- you'll often end up moving forward after swinging your sword when you really didn't want to. I hated that you can't run without dashing first. I hated how enemies would sometimes (but not always) ignore consecutive swings, as if they had RNG iframes. By default, you even swing your weapon on releasing the attack button, not on pressing it -- an utterly bizarre design decision that can, thankfully, be disabled in the settings. You ca…

A very fun and quite well made top-down metroidvania (or at least the progression very much feels like so) inspired by Zelda games (never played one, but I assume so) with secrets at every step. The abilities and progression feel very good, altough it's hard to remember stuff when the map is so big. Well, there is an in-game map, but it pixelates if you zoom out a little bit and overall I didn't find it that much useful because of that design... Unless you wanna scan it being super zoomed in. Oh, and I hated the furnace dungeon... I think with it being designed in a way where you can end up running around a lot trying to figure stuff out, the respawning enemies were really driving me insane. It's felt like trying to figure out a puzzle while 100 flies are bothering you. These two things just didn't go well together, at all. One last thing. Why is there a menu with around 120 solvable nonograms? That's cool and all, but just why? And why is there an achievement for doing all of them... Almost 8% of players did it. I'm geniuenly so confused about it.

If you enjoy old-school Zelda dungeoneering, this is definitely worth checking out. I enjoyed this one. I got stuck behind a few tricky fights at times because I was stubborn and refused to turn down the difficulty, but I have no regrets.

If I could give this game a neutral rating I would. I feel like it wants to be a cozy Zelda-like but all-too-often the obtuse direction, impossibly cryptic puzzles and tedious, imbalanced combat bring progress and enjoyment to a grinding halt. It's a shame because the music, art style and world design are fantastic. With some adjustments this game could be a consistent, fun experience.

Cool 2D-Zelda-like. Lots of secrets, very fun.

Enjoyed every moment.