Windswept

originally had a positive review on this game because in all seriousness it's very fun but the developer acts like a degenerate and responded to someone's review with "L take, thanks for the money though" while i don't think review bombing the game over this is the right thing to do (referring to all the 0.1 hour playtime reviews) i'm still not going to give this game support when the dev acts like such a child.

If you don't go for 100%, it's a nice and fun platformer - even if it's still a difficult one. 100% must be brutal (I haven't even tried, as I'm not that good). It's kinda of like Crash Bandicoot 4 - play it normally without caring of collecting everything and you'll get a mostly nice time with a handful of stressful sections; play it with intention of doing 100%... oh poor you!

The game wears its influences on its sleeves but it very much manages to live up to the expectations it sets, even when it invites comparisons to the Donkey Kong Country series and other more modern indie precision platformers. For one I absolutely love how charming and cute the graphics are. That said, where Windswept undeniably shines brightest is in how deep and well tuned its mechanics are - the sheer complexity there is in how you can use them and chain then together and how the levels encourage you to explore the moveset. The hardest bits of tech are saved for the (really quite hard) optional bonus levels and postgame content and those feel absolutely amazing to beat. TL;DR for the longer review: if you like precision platformers, please do yourself a favor and play this game. It is a mechanically wonderful platformer with amazing levels that I absolutely loved to fully complete (despite there being a couple unreasonable difficulty spikes in the bonus/postgame levels). I would say it is a worthy spiritual successor to DKC2, and I hope that comes off as the high praise that it is! Despite the above, there are a few rough edges. A couple minor ones are the animal buddies an…

Gameplay spoilers, don't read this review if you want to play this game blind. If you're looking for a casual experience I would recommend just beating the base game and leaving it at that, or just passing the game up altogether. If you want to feel challenged this is absolutely the game for you. I think this game doesn't work super well as a casual game. Before you get to the final two worlds the game feels like it's supposed to be a decently difficult game, not too easy but not too crazy hard either, and I think it fails to nail that exact vibe in a lot of ways. I could probably think up many reasons as to why the game wasn't gelling with me super hard but the one that always comes to mind first is the game wastes a lot of your time. Sometimes you'll come across something hard and need multiple tries to figure out exactly what you're supposed to do, and that's totally fine, but every time you die you get sent back to a checkpoint and have to do like ten easier things again just to get another shot at the hard thing. This absolutely is something that happens in the DKC series, and many other older platformers that this game is emulating, but it feels worse here, and I think tha…

Prematurely leaving a review after spending 2 hours playing with my partner. This is really good! The levels feel super well fleshed out, and satisfying to speedrun. It's also very accessible too! My partner is not good at games, and the accessibility modifiers in the menu makes the game so much better and forgiving if we need it to be. W game, there's no reason to leave bad reviews for having better accessibility. The art is amazing and so damn cute! My biggest complaint is that there are no emotes in the game, and the duck doesn't have a funny animation like the turtle for reaching the end pole first. (From the first 2-3 levels, the game does feel a little more designed around the turtle character though).

Aw yis, a spiritual successor to the Donkey Kong Country line of games, I love playing those. The movement, and the techniques that enable it, is smooth and great, the collectibles are hidden in a variety of interesting ways that require me to actually pay attention, and the hint system is built in a way to really help. Looking forward to getting through this!