Dandara (2018)

This title is a Metroidvania with a unique twist on movement. Instead of running and jumping in the traditional sense, the player warps between surfaces, floor, walls, and ceilings, creating a distinctive flow and rhythm in exploration and combat. This mechanic gives the game a fresh feel within the genre.

The game excels in atmosphere, featuring detailed pixel art and haunting sound design that immerse the player in the surreal world of Salt. Exploration is rewarding, with secrets, upgrades, and hidden paths that encourage curiosity. The game also carries subtle Brazilian cultural influences, adding personality and depth to its artistic presentation. I'm biased since this is my home country, but I can't recommend this title enough if you have any curiosity regarding our culture and folklore.

However, the unconventional movement can feel imprecise, especially in combat or tight platforming sections, leading to occasional frustration. It is also relatively short, and some sections in the mid-to-late-game can feel punishing due to spikes in difficulty. The story is minimal, serving more as a backdrop than a narrative driver, which may disappoint people looking for strong storytelling.

Overall, this game is a memorable indie Metroidvania that stands out for its movement mechanics, aesthetic, and exploration. It’s best suited for people who enjoy challenge, discovery, and unique gameplay experiences, even if it occasionally tests patience. This is one of the best indies I've ever played of this genre, I highly recommend not skipping it if you like Metroidvanias to any extent.

The game’s movement is the best part- it’s novel, feels great, and works well in beginning levels. Around the halfway point, the game extremely ramps up in difficulty, and the weaknesses of the controls begins to expose itself.

After cruising through the early levels, I truly loved my experience. But all of a sudden I was dying 80+ times and having to turn on every cheat. Eventually it just became not worth it.

Art is mediocre, music and sound is pretty sweet. The map could use some work, maybe some markers and more detail.

I wish I could’ve seen it through to the end but it just gets impossible at a certain point.

Playtime: 6 minutes

Dandara greets you with the typical utterly pointless "don't shut off your machine while this autosave icon is showing" message. It's the answer to "tell me you're an incompetent developer without telling me you're an incompetent developer". Even worse is that it has to be closed manually. For fucks sake, can this console bullshit please die already?

Next up the game tells you how the PC version has been improved in various ways, which includes the mouse controls. And let me tell you, i don't think anyone has ever failed this bad at doing just that. You know how the big advantage of the mouse is that you can just point it at something like a digital finger? Yeah, Dandara doesn't do that. Instead it directs your aim from your character, like a tank rotating its turret. It's utterly maddening.

But wait, it gets worse. They implemented auto-aim too. And the mouse sensitivity is incredibly high. And there's no setting to change either of those things. I have played over 1500 games and i honestly wouldn't know how you could make the controls worse.

1/10

The game was equal parts frustrating and enjoyable. There were periods where I was addicted and excited to explore all the rooms. There were parts where the difficulty was perfectly balanced and it felt great to clear a section. There were also parts where I nearly quit. There is no good reason to hold back fast travel until about six hours into the game. The final secret boss was difficult to the point of fury. I felt a great desire to beat it but nearly gave up just due to a feeling of wasting my time. I played the game in July 2020 and apparently it has been greatly expanded… AKA the Trials of Fear Edition. I wasn't aware until looking it up that all this things were extra. The game felt a bit overlong and the extra final boss made me want to tear my hair out… so perhaps I would have just enjoyed the base game more.

There are glaring design flaws, sometimes the controls are wonky, but the game has a really neat artstyle and is just different. There is no game that plays like this so there are moments that are intensely fascinating from a design perspective. You have to gauge your warps and your attacks. It's not a run and gun but a teleport and gun and your gun has limited range. They really do some cool things with combat encounters and platforming with this system. There are also some really awesome exploration puzzles that feel rewarding.

There is too much backtracking and oftentimes your exploration will be punished by finding a dead end and requiring five minutes of going backwards. Sometimes the punishing old-school nature is fun, other times it feels like my time is being actively wasted.

Overall, I really appreciated the uniqueness of the design and gameplay. There were some brilliant aspects and some maddening aspects but I'm really glad I played and there were moments here that were genuinely unlike anything I'd done in a video game before.

I played the 'Trials of Fear' edition and absolutely loved it.

Yes, the control scheme was awkward at the beginning, but I got comfortable with in in no time, both with the Joy-con and the touchscreen, and I had a blast. It's a really hard game and the DLC content was almost impossible, but getting through felt amazing.

You can read my full review in spanish in Gamerfocus.

I really reccomend to check this one. Maybe is not your thing, but if you want a challenging metroidvania, you probable won't find one so different from the rest. I actually think the genre is getting a little stale lately.

Also, I really like to support latin american games.

Dandara is a quite unique metroidvania game. With nice pixel art, a simple but serviceable story and an interesting world. Gamepad feels required.

Dandara from the start separates itself from similar titles by introducing quite original traversal mechanics. Your character sticks to the surface and can only move by darting from one surface to another. The movement sort of reminds a flea closed in a box. To make things more interesting the range of the jump is limited and after a little bit of practice you can move quite quickly.

Additionally to the movement you get the ability to shoot in any direction but you need to charge the shot. This adds another layer of complication - one stick and button for movement - other stick and button for shooting. There is no up and down in standard understanding of it and often levels shift themselves so it can be disorienting at times.

But the above while making the game a lot harder than normal metroidvania game is what is actually interesting about the game. I struggled through many places but generally had a lot of fun and really appreciate the uniqueness of it.

Visually it’s quite nice. The pixel art reminded me of celeste for some reason. Not the breath taking but absolutely fine. The story is a little bit generic - the balance has been broken, come save the world chosen one - been there, done that.

The soundtrack seems a little bit too much. The music seems over the top and I had to considerably lower the music volume as I couldn’t focus on tasks at hand. Imagine the Interstellar famous track but set on loop for an hour.

The world building is not bad - some varied locations to explore and traverse.

The difficulty might be a little too hard but some of it could be attributed to the uniqueness of the movement. The difficulty settings in the game were a joke though - I was stuck in a particular section - which I thought was the way to go but actually just led to some extra ability I had no use for at all - and decided to lower the difficulty as the game suggested. So the option I had was - add more checkpoints - which added exactly 0 checkpoints in the long section I was trying to beat and I actually only found one of the extra checkpoints later in the game. The second option was basically a cheat mode - restart on every screen and unlimited energy - I did not dare to select that.

Overall the game was quite challenging and fun. I must admit I enjoyed most of it and would recommend giving it a try.

The concept of this game seems pretty cool. I like the aesthetic overall. However, the mouse controls are honestly awful. Why even show the mouse pointer if it's useless? The game seems like it has potential, but that the devs didn't care to implement mouse controls.

This game is all about pointing in a certain direction, to jump onto different walls, or aim your attacks, and so forth. The mouse controls force you to drag your mouse a certain way, so where you're aiming is totally dependent on the direction of the mouse movement, not on where the actual mouse pointer is. However, at the same time, you DO have to worry about where the mouse pointer is, because if it's at the edge of the screen and you can't move it any further in that direction, you're screwed.

Devs, this game seems cool, but PLEASE fix the mouse controls to something less frustrating. I honestly do want to play this game but right now with the mouse controls in the state they are, I just can't say it's worth my time. Luckily I got it in a bundle so I didn't lose money on it. It's just weird to me that they say "controller strongly recommended" when this game seems like such a good fit for working mouse control ...

There are so many great things about Dandara. I really like the level design, the art style, the surreal atmosphere, the NPCs. The enemies are visually distinct and you apprehend how each works immediately based on its design. The folk legend around Dandara is exotic material for a video game, even if it's not clear to me how much of the real life woman or her story really made it in here based on a perusal of her Wikipedia article.

There are not many games where the protagonist is both female and a person of colour. The fact that Dandara is an Afro-Brazilian lady is not treated as some big deal at all; the game is not in your face about its "diverse" protagonist. It's just a design element and I like that! I think that's the way to go.

I can't say I really cared for anything else.

This game wanted badly to be a twin stick shooter. The entire gimmick is that this is a metroidvania platformer where you can only move by flinging yourself from wall to wall along diagonals. Sounds cool right? You could use one stick to control your direction and the other to aim your weapon. One trigger launches you, one trigger fires. See, game design isn't that hard.

Instead, the control scheme is to use one stick to control whatever direction Dandara is looking, and there is no other stick. You can launch in that direction or you can fire your weapon. In 98% of circumstances, you aren't going to want to move in the same direction you're firing, so combat mostly plays out by dodging to a place where you can set up and then unload, turret-style.

I feel like this could still have worked, except that you can't just fire your gun. You have to be able to plant for a half second to charge it before you release the button or else nothing happens.

Even this MIGHT HAVE WORKED, but the handy line that shows you where you're aiming if you launch disappears if you're charging the gun, so in the heat of the moment it's not always clear you're aiming where you want.

The result is certainly a game you would describe as difficult, but not really for the right reasons. It's more like Surgeon Simulator or QWOP is difficult. What you need to do is often straightforward, it's telling Dandara to do it that's hard.

The designers were apparently aware the controls are bad and made some effort to balance around it. There are rarely more than a few enemies on the screen at once. But I found I still died a lot because bad positioning is often fatal regardless of how much health you have. When you're hit, you get knocked off whatever wall you were standing on and are left floating. Not infrequently, this will hit you right into the enemy that was shooting you, or into the path of another projectile you were trying to dodge. You have a short period of invulnerability as is standard for the genre, but I found usually this was not long enough to stop aiming, find a wall, and launch there.

So, being hit often means being hit more than once. Enemies also hit harder as you progress (although I like the artistic style of the game a lot, there is little to visually differentiate the various projectiles, or to give later forms any weight that says "I hit for 6 hearts" as distinct from the bullets at the start of the game that hit for 1), and although you gain health as you go, my experience was that you've got 4-5 hits in you unless you can stop to heal.

Oh and I have a special gripe about the healing and energy recharging mechanics: You tap the button for this and it activates. This is a two second animation which you cannot abort. In a game where you have to charge your gun, the designers did not add even a millisecond delay in case you hit this button accidentally or a check to see if the player is already at max health (there are limited charges for this ability, of course).

Overall, this one-stick-controls-everything plant and fire approach is just such a weird choice for a game which is ostensibly about a warrior whose origin is particularly tied to a dancing, acrobatic style of martial arts, and it's more frustrating than it is fun.

I found myself compelled to finish the game on the basis of its artistic direction, but not compelled to continue just because it told me I didn't 100% the map and chests.

Oh and the map! Why doesn't the game pause when I open it? Why isn't there a little Dandara icon to show me where I am in this giant room? Why isn't there an icon to show where I've left chests unopened? These are just little things that would improve the experience so much.

Played on the Switch.