I was very impressed with the game at first, it has an eye-catching art style reminiscent of Little Nightmares meets Sweeney Todd. The set pieces and variety of locations is lots of fun to explore and boss fights were very solid.

It has a major flaw though - exploration. 75% of it is reallllly good, but…

1. The game does not have a proper map. It has an overworld map that indicates small details for a few biomes, but it’s not super helpful. The side scrolling level design includes the z-axis, so it is a lot tougher to keep track of and mentally map than the standard Metroidvania

2. It has some really annoying quest designs. With no real clues, you have to figure out to like “stand in a spot for 20 sec to reveal a coin, but only when it’s raining”. This is a real quest, that doesn’t tell you where or how to do it. There are a number of illogical quests that combined with the lack of map or clues becomes a completionist nightmare.

Despite these flaws, I really have no other complaints. In the first half of the game, it felt like top 3 MV material for the year. But the frustration of trying to clean up the map really exposed some deep design issues (not that they can’t be fixed!).

I would recommend it, especially if you like getting lost and don’t care about 100%ing games. I have mixed feelings, but I definitely had a good time overall.