Rotten Bloom

A fun little Metroidvania! It's on the shorter side and admittedly a bit confusing at first, as my brain couldn't quite grasp the fact that the map simply loops when you reach the edges. The art style is cute and beautiful, and the music is delightfully funky without being weird. I really enjoyed the different abilities and the fact that you had to create your own build for the final "fight" against the flower (although I struggled HARD, but that was entirely on me!). Overall, it's a super cute and fun game. I highly hope the devs plan on making a more fleshed-out Metroidvania in the future, because the passion and spirit are definitely there! :p

Very cool game. I loved the graphics and general aesthetic. The sound design was solid. The basic gameplay mechanics were all pretty cool and were worked into the environment well. The difficulty could be extremely high in unfun ways at times. The final boss fight was just me dying over and over and over until I finally memorized the exact route and timings. I'm not a fan of that at all. I did like that you can go into the boss fight with different ability combinations active, though. Each combination ends up taking a slightly different path during the boss fight. That was neat. The controls were a bit clunky, which I think was mostly due to dash being on right trigger. If that had been swapped with X and attack was put on right trigger instead, I think it would have been much better. Unfortunately, you can't remap the controls. Jumping from vine to vine was bad. It seemed down to luck how much distance I got, so I ended up falling pretty often and having to start over again from the beginning. Using the vines really should have been much more forgiving. Still, the game was overall pretty fun. I definitely recommend checking it out.

My thoughts are overall positive if we take the game for what it is - a demo made by a small team that wanted to do something creative and make a game. The art is very pretty, and by far the strongest part of the game. The screenshots on the store page speak for themselves here. However, it feels like there's some rather important polish that the game's lacking. The best example of this is probably the player's attack animation. The claw FX and model's swipe animation are disconnected - but perhaps more importantly, animation's a form of acting, and the animation doesn't tell the player as much about the character's style as it could do. In fact, "the player character in a video game" is the impression I get from the player's art/model/animation in general. There are more examples of lacking polish elsewhere in the game, but I don't want the review to be full of nit-picking that will put people off despite my positive recommendation. Every project needs to start from somewhere, and this is currently in the demo stage. The concerns I have are more from a production standpoint. Polish and detail take a lot of hard work and craftsmanship. There are many more levels to make for the …

I really like the core idea behind this game, and that's exactly why I wanted to leave some constructive feedback. I believe it has a lot of potential, but at its current stage it still needs more polish. The combat mechanics feel too simple and lack impact, which makes battles less engaging than they could be. The soundtrack also feels quite generic and doesn't contribute much to the atmosphere or immersion. I think stronger audio design could make a huge difference. The level design was also confusing to me, and overall the game felt more like a very early demo or a basic tutorial rather than a complete experience. The menus aren't very intuitive, the color contrast could be improved for better readability, and I was disappointed to see that DualSense controller support is currently missing. Another aspect that stood out was the main character. The animations and overall presentation didn't make the character feel alive or responsive. Instead, it felt more like controlling a paper cutout than a living character, which made it harder to connect with the gameplay. Despite these criticisms, I genuinely hope this feedback is helpful both for other players, so they know what to ex…