Ancient Mind

[h1]FoxMania: The Quest To Review All Fox Games On Steam![/h1] [i]Conditions for inclusion: [list] [*] -The player character must be consistently a fox; the fox must not be merely a skin or a character option [*] -Must have 100% working Steam achievements [*] -Must not be a visual novel [/list][/i] [b]Game #34: Ancient Mind[/b] [i]Ancient Mind[/i] is an indie Zelda-like dungeon crawler game that, sadly, gets some of the basics [i]very[/i] wrong. I tried very hard to like this game. I saw it through all the way to the end, and then some. I took an honest stab at 100% achievements, and trudged through nearly everything this game has to offer. Sadly, at the end, I can't call it a positive experience. So, this is a Zelda-style game with 30 dungeons and no overworld. The overworld has been replaced by a generic and unhelpful level selection map of monotone dots and scribbles. If you want to backtrack to a previous dungeon, you have to remember its name or its location on the map. That’s a problem since this game is very much built around backtracking, replaying levels, finding alternate exits, and forced completionism. [b]Things I liked:[/b] [list] [*] -Pixel graphics were crisp …

TL;DR: Avoid this game. It has trivial "puzzles", terrible QoL, unfair and bugged movement and combat mechanics, and will invite you to potentially screw up your actual PC in order to get all achievements - and after you've done that, you will still not get all of them because the hardest achievement is bugged and crashes the game instead of awarding. The game consists of individual levels, accessible from the map, each independent from the other. You are supposed to wander around the dungeon, looking for keys to open the doors with, while fighting enemies like slimes and bats. The are "puzzles", like move a box over the switch plate next to it, but they are trivial and may have not been there at all. There are bosses. Some levels have secret exits that lead to otherwise inaccessible sections of other levels. The game actually invites you to write down on an actual piece of paper what you have noticed where, because it has zero QoL to remind you of that or to let you put a marker on a map. And you better listen and get that piece of paper ready if you go for achievements, because you will spend dozens of hours trying to find that door that you saw earlier and couldn't unlock but…

furry zelda good

A pretty well done Zelda-like. The art is lovely, music is great, level design and puzzles are super fun. However, two major issues for me: 1. Some of the backtracking is just annoying along with the lack of the ability to see where exactly I should be backtracking. It doesn't help there's no information/walkthroughs anywhere. 2. The fact that I can't attack diagonally but half the enemies attack specifically from diagonals, is incredibly infuriating. That's not strategy or patience, just poor game design.

The main reason I recommend against this game isn't the bevy of other options for dungeon-heavy Zelda clones, be they Link to the Past randomizers or games like Pipistrello or Fountains. It's not the stiff combat with sword swings that are easily punished, few i-frames when hit, and against respawning enemies with janky hitboxes. It's not the puzzle design that's deliberately a laborious maze of switches and sluggish backtracking (and god help you if you have to walk with a torch) rather than actual puzzles. It's not even the fact dungeons are structured like levels so if you miss a chest and don't get the gem you need to progress or if you need to take an alternate exit for a second path, you can't just go back in and grab what you missed, you have to redo the entire dungeon; every puzzle, every chest, every fight, top to bottom. No, the main reason I recommend against this game is that in the level summary it describes the number of times you ran out of health and had to respawn as "Times Unalived". How utterly capitulatory and craven. There is absolutely no place for that insipid newspeak driven by paranoid alignment with a social media algorithm. You have endless words to spa…

Started this game from a friends recommendation and i've made it past 3 of the areas so far. -I have not had movement bugs. -The game is cute and runs well. -Old school Zelda game vibe. I think this game having a "Mixed" review tag is unfair. Yes it has a good sum of reading but the dungeons/ruins are a decent length too