Necrosphere64

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This game feels perfect for me, a metroidvania reminiscent of Animal Well, with a lot of interesting mechanics and challenges. There is less room for exploration, and less cleverly hidden puzzles so far, as well as a more basic graphical style and even gameplay style than Animal Well, so they aren't identical, but the fact that I was reminded of that masterpiece is one of the best possible signs. The boss fights are pretty basic in hindsight, but they took a few tries and felt satisfying to beat, as did the platforming challenges, though the ones after the first boss seemed to be too much of a difficulty spike at the time. The room with a map is a nice touch as well. The opening of the game seemed to be setting up some sort of story, that I completely forgot about, but if that ends up getting developed further it would be very interesting to see.

This game has something to it! Despite its seeming simplicity on the surface and its very successful implementation of a frustrating precision platformer, metroidvania experience- there's more than just a damn fine free game! I am left after finishing it with the sense that I played a game that somehow was a kind of poem, ironic to something so rife with tense and furious button smashing and nail biting timing. But the game, in combination with the very restricted use of cutscenes, serves dually as a treatment upon very real existential themes- such as the search for self and rebirth. Further adding to this exploration is that the two men shown in the cutscenes are both military and one of them has to show his faithfulness to the other by ending his life as the catalyst for the game and his reality to be reduced to that of primitive pixels. As extremely bewildering in its sudden distortion this new scape we find ourselves in with its brutal navigation system- and only the 16 jewels to be found to represent some level of kinship to beauty and familiarity with our world is it not that maybe the game is making a bold statement that the real war is the inner war within the self and tha…

It's pretty good! A short little platforming challange. As a fan of I Wanna Be The Guy, this was like that but way less evil. The only downside is the inability to reset to the beginning, exploring for the last trinkets became extremely tedious because there was no way of exiting certain areas without redoing whole sections.

Metroidvania yes. You can do a lot with a little.

This is an extremely interesting game that pushes what you can do with only two buttons. The level design is hoenstly a lot of fun and it's surprising how far they can push the limited controls. I had a blast though most of my time playing it. That being said, I think it's biggest strength ends up being it's main issue. Since you only have two buttons they have to get creative with upgrades, relying on a double tap. Most of the time this works completely fine, but during the escape section it really starts to show the limitations. Prime example being a room where you hit a spring and then shotgun to the portal. Sounds easy enough, but the motion of moving left to the spring, double tapping right to shotgun (and you have to release left or else you will shotgun the wrong way), then switching back to the left is not a very smooth one and makes it more frustrating than difficult. I think it needs to be more forgiving if you are going to require the player do things like that. But that is only an issue at the end and the rest of the game easily is worth the time. It's free so why not check it out.