Zapling Bygone

Imagine a hive mind that can absorb the memories of the dead by taking over their remains. What sounds like the setup for a villain, instead, is the starting point for the main protagonist of Zapling Bygone, where said hive mind is invaded by another deadly creature, a virus that takes over the creatures it infects. So off goes a tiny seed of the hive mind to a faraway world where the virus was fought to a standstill. This isn’t a massive game by any means, nor is it one of those tiny metroidvania-likes that is over in like 2 hours or less. Instead, it’s a solid experience at around 8 to 10 hours, depending on your playstyle, with a limited number of biomes. Instead of quantity, there’s a focus on quality. You start as a weak and tiny offshoot of the hive mind, take over the first skull you find on the ground, and slowly grow your abilities. Occasionally, you find new skulls, either from some bosses or others lying around, that give you new abilities, like in every other metroidvania. From the standard double jump and dash, you also get stuff like crawling on walls, which feels significantly different than wall climbing, as you can, just as the extremely cool but rarely copied sp…

It's fine. - Controls like absolute ♥♥♥♥ - Not one of the hitboxes in the entire game is where it should be - Its design very disjointed and pretty nonsensical - Narrative push is limited and that makes the world uninteresting - Exploration is deeply unrewarding as the currency is almost totally useless, the mutations mostly come with drawbacks that outweigh their benefits, and the skulls don't change gameplay much at all All this makes it a fairly difficult game, but not because it's hard to figure out or because you're bad, it's just not that well made. Like a sticky Rubik's cube made of pieces from 27 different cubes. But its fine.

really cool, simple metroidvania obviously a bit awkward in places but for a solo developer, more than acceptable very good yes yes

Somewhat fun, somewhat frustrating with instant death mechanics (spikes n similar). Many of the equipable skulls just feel like.. filler? they have a unique look but with the "charms" you can equip most just dont have the slots to be worth using at all

Overall very good. Interesting art, responsive controls, open exploration. One of the best games I've played in a while. Nothing felt too difficult or too easy. Very well balanced overall. High on my list of short/compact metroidvanias. Definitely worth your time, but by no means perfect. There were a few issues with the map/character GPS being off, but it wasn't a huge problem until end game. My main problem was that the game provides no method to discern completion/comb through the map in end game. When a game has a 100% achievement, I think this is a poor choice. Soured the end of my experience a little. Some sort of biome completion rate, item detector, etc. is always my preference. I just don't find wandering aimlessly to be fun when I have zero clue what I am missing or where it might even remotely be found. Still, if you don't care about completion like me this game was so so cool and felt very fresh to me.

fun little game