Magical Monster Land

It's an early access game that may very well never be completed, and it's very clear while you play that the game is incomplete (only one boss, progressively fewer levels in each stage, power-ups that are only used once, etc), but what's there is a decent retro-style platformer with charm. You run, punch, jump, swim and use a few special abilities to get through a variety of platforming-based levels. Controls are pretty good, although the momentum takes a little bit of getting used to. Each level contains 3 "mystery medals" to be collected, encouraging exploration. Besides those medals, though, the levels are loaded with lots of fun little secrets, usually rewarding you with gems (collect 100 for a 1-up), coins (to be spent on power-ups from a shop), or 1-ups. There are false walls, breakable walls, hidden blocks that make gems appear when hit, ceilings you can walk on... Basically, it's fun to explore every nook and cranny because odds are there's a lot of stuff to find. There are a handful of transformations that mix up the mechanics a bit, but they only show up for one level each. I found them fun to use, so it's a shame we don't have many opportunities to use them. But then, …

Magical Monster is like a mix of mario world, mario 3 and donky kong country. hopefully the dev keeps working on this as its a solid game so far. right now there's only 1 world with 4 zones with 9 levels (zone 1&2 have 5 each, zone 3 has 3 and zone 4 only has 1) but that gives you atlest a good hour or so of gameplay. suggestion to the dev i feel the castle boss in the 1st zone needs worked on. its a bit hard becasue the ground shot spacing is to short for your jump so maybe if there was only 3 shots and maybe removed a few shots to space out later transitions. this way players could more easily jump the shots or jump off the wall to get over them. this would give players 2 ways of dealing with the shots. it's the first zone this boss doesn't need to be this hard.

A Mario-like with potential - quite the hidden gem, actually. Developer just released v2.0, after quite some time of hiatus.

Incredible game. Hopefully it gets finished

Got this game cheap during a Steam Sale. Love the graphics, that's largely what drew me to it. Takes heavy inspiration from Super Mario World and some other games of the time, like probably Donkey Kong Country. The platforming controls are not as tight as I'd like, but they're not bad. The stages are difficult and can get really frustrating. My main problem with the game was that I'm getting frame skips every few seconds. On most stages it was annoying and sometimes got me killed. On the minecart stage, it killed me dozens of times, perhaps because you're moving faster. It's not a problem with my PC's power, don't know what the problem is. Messed with graphics options, turned on/off scanlines and rounded corner, even tried playing it windowed, the problem persisted. Side note on the options - there are no audio options at all, the music plays whether you like it or not, and you can't change the volume. Not bad for gameplay, but the overall experience is a negative.

ThE game you are looking at here is top drawer quality it has the best elements of the best games with a careful attention to the implementation. Magical Monster Land just feels VERY good and thats all there is to it! 10/10 platformer