Mago

Mago has beautiful pixel art, and while the flashing lights are annoying and mostly unnecessary, that's easily fixed with an accessibility option being added, should the dev choose to. The music is absolutely fantastic, especially the themes for the final boss and shadow chases, no complaints. Sound effects are also nice, with no standout exceptions either way. The plot is simple, but serviceable, with even a little room to interpret certain characters. Speaking of, though there aren't many, the cast of bosses and characters are all fun and mostly memorable. [Spoiler Warning BTW] The worst part of Mago is the gameplay. There are several more minor complaints, like the checkpoints costing orbs (This game's version of coins) to activate, and not a small amount either. Typically close to as much as you earn in the prior section. It needlessly drains your orbs that you could be spending on wand upgrades, outfits, or the Capytowers, and the checkpoints are free in the mech levels anyway, even though they still have you collecting orbs. Speaking of Capytowers though, they are also a massive nuisance, especially if you're going for 102%. They have six rewards, one of which is selected at …

Totally underrated Platforming game. This game is short but fun and deserves more attention.

I'm really sorry, but I have to leave a negative review. It's very obvious that this game is a work of passion, coming from a developer who loved NES/GBC platformers. The art style, the little animations, the attention to detail... this game oozes charm. Which, unfortunately, makes it even more jarring when you realise how many shortcomings are present in it. First and foremost, the game loves to waste your time. You can notice it as soon as you get into one of the large, empty overworlds, where you travel at a snail's pace. And you'll be forced to do it whenever you want to change levels, since the game has no level select menu. Each death, it will take about 7 seconds to respawn, and since the levels are way too long, with a very small amount of checkpoints, and a lot of ways to die in one hit (plenty of bottomless pits, very precise jumps, way too floaty controls, plus a lot of hazards that can drop you into the pits), you'll be stuck in those 7 seconds for a lot of your time. Even more so considering how close-up the camera is (in some cases, you are gonna be hit by attacks coming from enemies entirely offscreen), forcing you to play the same part of a level multiple times u…

I reeeally wanted to like this game. It has charming graphics, solid ideas, and I'll even admit I don't like dropping reviews for games I refunded; it feels like rubbing salt in the wound. However, I just couldn't bring myself to invest my time into this game. While the controls are solid in theory, they felt slippery and a bit unpolished for me, and more often than not I found myself accidentally moving to the side and getting hit by an enemy instead of landing on it. I feel like you could've improved this by adding a bit more drag to moving in the air, kinda like how Mario World's physics were handled in Super Mario Maker 2. That actually brings me to my next issue: I feel like you leaned too hard into the "old game" aesthetic and ended up remaking a lot of the problems from older games that were left out for a reason. For example, the simple button mapping helps emulate the lesser amount of buttons on an old Nintendo controller, but it results in awkward situations like holding down the run button to be able to reach the next enemy in a platforming section to jump on, only for an enemy to appear suddenly in the air and I have to quickly let go of and repress the run button to f…

just play

This game seems to have it all, good character designs, good music, good gameplay, and good levels.