Hatchwell

Unfortunately, this game is unbelievably bad for me. The only pros it has seems to be the cute pets available and how you can play with them. Once you try to progress the story, all the bad design choice are out: - Retro Zelda-like attack, including the very short range and limited direction. Short range still alright, but the direction issue is just annoying. It means that enemy can and will easily go to a specific angle that you cant hit them without getting hit by them first. - Some enemies are also designed to be outright annoying - you cant kill them with the normal attack, then using whatever that can kill them will make them running around very fast while you have barely anyway to dodge it. - The control is counterintuitive. Yes, you can set your own control, the problem is, some of them are paired. The attack button and the confirm button are unexpectedly together and is actually the traditionally jump button - while the attack button of most game is a roll. So be expected to roll into enemy again and again. The menu button is actually ... the R trigger... - The boss has a really bad hit box. Basically, you will get hit way before your sprite even touch the boss sprit…

An excellent indie dungeon adventure game! Fun dungeon puzzles, challenging boss fights, cute story (kind of reminded me of LOZ: Link's Awakening). Plenty of optional loot to obtain. Probably my favourite part is the all the different options for your animal companion you can choose right at the start of the game. I picked one of the dogs the first time I played but for my most recent playthrough I chose the duck :)

It perfectly captures the vibe of the old Zelda games! And you get a dog friend.

Cute little take on 2D Zelda!

Zeldalike with some good bits that are ultimately overshadowed by persistent UI/UX and flow of play problems. Good - Some creative ideas e.g. for bosses, puzzles, and usable items Bad - Very little exploration - Lots of missables/loseables. Missable quests (due to timing), missable upgrades/bonuses (from quests and minigames and planting seeds), expensive items that are lost without warning, e.g. the 200gp pet ball is lost if it lands in the wrong place when you throw it. - Despite the lack of exploration, there still manages to be a surprising amount of backtracking -- just within a given dungeon. The dungeon design isn't actually bad, there's just a lot of slow time wasting, especially when e.g. you happen to not take the door with the key in it right away, etc. - The game doesn't autosave. This is good given all the missables, but it's also bad, because we're all used to Zeldalikes autosaving, so it's hard to remember to do it manually all the time; and that means when you actually miss/lose something and have to reload, you're potentially going back a half hour. - If your pet ever has a good use case, I never found it. This also compounds the sidequests being un…

I just didn't really find it all that fun. It is cute, it is well-made, but ultimately it feels that terrible combination of non-stop backtracking and map consultation. Eventually I started to realize that the "game" is just really me remembering what part is next, what little mini-puzzle I haven't had the "thing" to get past, then getting past it. Then there's another thing you can't get past, and you back track suuuuuuper far to push one block you couldn't before for example. It's is a lot of fun, it's is very charming, for the first couple hours. Then the bloom falls off the rose and the monotony sets in. As much as I like about this game, I found it really just a time waster and didn't give me a rewarding feeling. I'm stopping early just after the mine-cart switcheroo part because playing makes me feel exhausted.