Elephantasy

Dramatically increase your [i]chill[/i] levels with this simply surreal adventure! There's no death or danger here, but a big, magical scavenger hike in a deceptively small package. While it uses Dizzy-style "take an item, leave an item," it's not nearly as [i]piecemeal[/i]-feeling, and as you gather gems and increase your rating, you can carry more of the ability-granting relics at once -- there are only four (unless you count the secret, optional one). Do you need to [i]chill out[/i] brah? Feeling wrathful? Tiny exploration elephants are a great complement to meditation, it seems. (I've been getting into the free kind, not the thousand-dollar David Lynch kind.) Maybe that's why I didn't increase game speed from the default "walky blocks" until the end of the game, when I was sniffing around for that last gem, nestled in a box I'd long forgotten about by the time I learned how to open them.

A neat little Metroidvania with a twist - you have access to the items giving all four traversal abilities from the start, but [i]how many[/i] of the items you can hold at a time depends on collectible gems, and, unless I'm missing something, you need to collect enough gems to be able to hold all four times in order to finish the game. Not much in the QOL features - the automap is pretty rudamantary, not showing much beyond rooms and their exits, there is no fast travel, and every time you quit and come back to the game you start at the ... start (though with all progress beyond your position being saved). Oh, and Kudos on the dev for adding Steam keys to the itch.io version of the game, and even including the game, with the Steam keys, in the No ICE bundle (and replenishing them when they ran out). There's a pretty annoying, potentially game breaking bug - if the game crashes (and probably any other method of exiting the game without going through the menu), you lose character progress since the last save, but the world progress remains, potentially making the game unwinnable if you didn't have all four traversal items picked up before your last save and had some gems picked u…

It is cute

Great little puzzle platformer with lots to figure out yourself. Gentle pace, cute characters. Feels like an old home computer classic.

A delightful adventure for exploration gamers.

Fun game, I liked all the different regions and how they connect together