Cavern of Dreams

Cavern of Dreams started strong and rapidly declined around the halfway mark. Way too many symbol recognition puzzles, many of which are hard to even notice, let alone interpret - an odd thing to lean on when emulating low res textures of 90s games. By the third world, I found myself feeling lost after every other puzzle. The game doesn't naturally guide you towards many of the objectives. It even confuses things by incorporating multiple locked doors/gates in each level with a hint "there must be a mechanism nearby", but really, they are just shortcuts between worlds that you find in later levels. Another odd choice when many of the challenges are opening doors with nearby switches. I found it tonally inconsistent. Environments towards the end become quite dark and gritty. We know spooky levels like Mad Monster Mansion can work if they're kept bright and lighthearted, but this was an odd juxtaposition. The biggest offender by far is the needlessly punishing drain/hole throughout most of the last world, which means that any slip up - frequent with the game's platforming mechanics - results in a 20-40 second runback. A complete disrespect to player's time. Maybe some N64 design c…

banjo kazooie if it ate a kindnessberry

Great game, good sense of humor, shockingly deep and kinda sad lore, fun controls and a good story. No complaints, which is shocking if you know me!

7/10 Pretty dang good N64 esque platformer. It was short and sweet, with an okay story, but the focus is the gameplay. Good little collectathon, but extremely underwhelming reward. You get to fly for collecting everything, but then there is NOTHING to do with that ability... so.... It is also a bit confusing if you choose to go without any guides, which I did, but it is still manageable even if it takes a bit longer. Overall decent, but not groundbreaking.

Short and sweet! The platforming is definitely a bit wonky at times and the puzzles can be slightly confusing at times, but I've overall loved my time with the game. There's no way I can hate or even dislike such a friendly game. If you enjoy the classic N64 collectathons, this should be up your alley. Where it lacks in length, it makes up for in love and polish.

Started nice, but really enjoyed it less and less as I continued. Movement is either too slow, with a plodding move speed and pitiful jumps, or too fast, rocketing and diving around with little control of where you're going. Puzzles became more and more unclear, including one that didn't seem to have any hint at all. The game tells you that you can complete it without any abilities which is just blatantly incorrect. There's no brightness option and very few options overall, so playing required me turning up the brightness of my Deck or playing with muddy faded textures. I could go on about the many little things the game doesn't do right but the important part is that all those little things add up to one big miss.