Return to the Skyway

"Return to the Skyway" is a student project from Digipen, this time they set the students up to fail by making them do a 2D platformer. I guess if I was teaching game design, one of the first things I'd tell people is not to make games in formats that are old, dead, busted, obsolete and only "go viral" in a couple of really rare cases like Cuphead and Hollow Knight. The vast majority of 2D platformers get relegated to the trashheap of garbage amateur games nobody ever plays. Like "Return to the Skyway". I feel bad for the students, but the blame falls squarely on Digipen. Anyway, this platformer is really not good, while it works, the graphics are mediocre at best (better than what "professional" indie devs put out, of course), it's short, it's not fun. It's not the best game from Digipen, while they probably are one of the better game dev academies out there. But why is it good for gamers for colleges to publish every single homework assignment their students get? Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this real…

just another half-assed student project by some should-be dropouts. as janky as it looks on the store page, and not in a good way. buggy as hell too. shame, because it's an interesting idea to use creatures to solve puzzles, except they all die once they remove some branches and whatnot, not exactly sending a good message. the only settings are separate volumes and windowed mode, the only controls are a/d to walk, space to jump, mouse to grab and throw. nothing's rebindable, arrows don't work, so non-qwerty people are ♥♥♥♥♥♥, movement is really slow, performance is subpar. and with the character having wings, it'd make more sense to hold space to fly instead of really clunky double-jumps that don't work half the time. dying means getting put back to the last checkpoint and if you were holding an animal, it's now back where you first found it for added frustration. and there's no saving, checkpoints are only for the current session, gotta do everything in one go. esc brings up the pause menu but doesn't close it, then the camera starts off at one of the previous checkpoints until it pans to the player, wherever it is. and again, if you had an animal in your hands before, it's now…

This is a short, but sweet, little platformer from DigiPen. It's about a 15 minute game with some easy achievements... all for free!

I was getting worried I wouldn't be able to complete this one after I encountered my first void box, wherein most or all of the graphics were completely absent, leaving me to guess about the terrain. Luckily a restart allowed me to reach far enough to learn about throwing, for which Chad was also invisible. The combination of these two bugs created an unexpectedly delightful opacity to what would otherwise be very easy. Bruno the dragon, as well as the main character to a lesser extent, has a tasteful incorporation of visual design for the robotic kinematics somewhat inherent to Spine animations. The game is more or less split between its two mazer levels for Mind and Nerve motivation. In the first, the aforementioned difficulties in navigating the terrain provide a pace of acclimation for the movement speed, although I'd still say that Ezra accelerates just a touch too slowly. In the second, "crittervania" is all gone to make room for the big boss lizard, who offers quite a captivating chase. Games that take "mazer" mechanics to a truly intricate level, i.e. "metroidvanias," are an interesting challenge for making as small as possible, which in this case boiled down to an accide…

It's a pretty neat little game! It's not terribly long or complicated but it's a fun little experience! Would be very excited to see more from this sort of world!

It's alright. Short and sweet though the throwing feels a little stiff