Supraland (2019)

For most of the puzzles of the game I found that I could figure them out by myself but as they added more mechanics to use in the puzzles.... I found it hard to remember them all between different play sessions. Furthermore, some of the puzzles varied vastly from over thinking to under thinking that when I struggled for 10 minutes to go look at the solution it seemed obvious but not align with other logic of the game. And some mechanics of the game were straight up not explained. However like I previously mentioned the puzzles was for the most part good and exhaustely used the game mechanics to keep them fresh. Introducing new mechanics at a consistent rate.

Outside the puzzles I don't think there was any other big issues as the combat in the game was simple but in a way that didn't take away from the puzzles so much though enemy spawns were often irrating to deal with during.

Story even though very minor to the game I found to be enough to carry you place to place with odd bits of humours sprinkled in. Additionally through randmon NPC dialogue it helped justify the reasons to explore the whole map as well as built character to the world so the decision making in the story was grounded.

As for my favouite part for an puzzle game I found the exploration to be my favourite part having multiple types of collectibles, "keys", chests with look to encourage exploration of the open world. Sometimes requiring parkour to reach said items make you practice the mechanics in the meachwhile as they could be way off the normal track. If you are a completionist this could easily keep you busy for an additional 8 hours aftert he 10-12 hours you probably spend going through the game. My favourite collectibles was the reference series as it was a nice suprised to stumble upon.

Art style and overall design of the world fit perfectly for the story and I though it was very charming and unique. Using its scaling with everyday items in odd assortment which was logically and comically at the same time. And the cartoony clay men had amusing facial expressions.

Overall a very casual and humourous puzzle game 7.8/10.

Supraland is a very attractive game when looking at the trailer. For me especially because it hypes the setting - an immersive miniature world full of hidden secrets to solve and places to conquer. But the setting never felt immersive for me, despite the very nice graphics that the game presents itself with. The whole theme feels more like a skin, rather than the whole miniature experience with puzzles weaved in. The main reason being that the objects and puzzles themselves felt like being from another game. Enemies are a great example of this - the skeletons were completely out of place for me. They could be anything from mice, bugs or little plastic toys. "It takes two" created miniature world excellently with little details like using a nail for a weapon or entering a home appliance, walking on chips etc. Of course I don't expect Supraland to have the same amount of details as AAA game but more world variety/theming and more ideas regarding the use of tiny everyday objects would help this game a lot. Humor, on the other hand, is great and much better from the atrocious "It takes two".

With this out of the way, I think the core game is quite excellent. I would compare puzzle design with "Portal", without the use of portals. The game introduces many mechanics that are masterfully used. The game also guides you well, showing you what tools to use and which to not. A great example of that would be when you are trapped in the Blue village with all your gear being taken from you. You can't leave until you reclaim it back one by one.This is also where metroidvania aspect shines the best, as you can access more and more areas within the same level as you get more powers back. Of course not all puzzles were that clear to me and I needed to look at the tutorial several times. But by far the most annoying aspect of the game was probably combat. I played with controller, which at least for me is a more challenging way to experience first person games. Aim assist would be much appreciated. I can manage killing a horde of enemies the first time I enter the area. But spawning them over and over again is just annoying as you are trying to figure out the puzzles. That's also the reason I dropped the game at the final boss fight with two big enemies. I just couldn't bother with searching for all the chests to get the proper upgrades to make the fight easier.

For me, Supraland is a great puzzle game, but not very good combat game. However bad combat does not stop me from giving this game a positive score. It is a game worth trying out and seeing for yourself if you enjoy it.

I really really like Supraland...for a while. It has a childish charm, various skills and traversal options and a lot of hidden nooks and crannies. It's cute and has some humor and lot and lots of puzzles.

On the minus side, there's not enough signposting and there are several places in the game where it's unclear where to go or what one should aim for next. The levels are also a bit confusing to navigate and require quite a bit of backtracking. I've had a lot of fun with it for a while, but when I had to take an extended break from the game, getting back in was very difficult. Where was I again? What should I be doing here and which directions led to places I hadn't been to yet? What killed it for me was a technical issue with a new Radeon 6550 card that made the game hang after 10 minutes of play or so every time so I just gave up.

Playtime: 3 hours

Review

I didn't expect anything from this, but for the first 2,5 hours this is a fun experience with sensible puzzles and okay combat. You quickly gain upgrades and learn how to use them to solve puzzles. But then you hit the wall.

There's an area where you have to destroy a wooden grave. You can see it. It looks like you should be able to reach it. The door you have to go through doesn't have an apparent solution. So you keep trying to reach the grave. Which, as it turns out, is the first time in the game where you're not supposed to do something until much later on.

I looked up how to open the door and played a while longer, but the puzzles just get too hard for my brain. I often just don't get puzzle logic in games. I never completed Portal either (got to level 15).

Other problems include apparently missing out on upgrades with no way to return to where you get them, and lack of fast travel. But the first couple of hours are quite fun, and i would recommend trying Supraland until it stops being fun for you.

TLDR: Well designed 3D-metroidvania with good puzzles and nice exploration that is a bit unpolished and not exactly visually appealing.

I've been yearning for 3D metroidvanias for so many years now. It's one of my favourite genres, if not my absolute favourite - I simply love exploration in video games. Sadly, after the Metroid Prime series came out, only a few developers have taken a crack at bringing this genre into the third dimension. I can't even name many real 3D metroidvanias from the top of my head. I haven't played them yet, but the Batman Arkham games and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order are supposed to scratch that itch. Yes, yes, I'm complaining about the lack of 3D metroidvanias but haven't played these two - I'll get to it. It could be argued that Dark Souls 1 is somewhat of a 3D metroidvania, but it doesn't have ability gating. Still, it scratched my exploration itch in a similar fashion as metroidvanias.

So when I first discovered Supraland, an actual 3D metroidvania I was obviously instantly intrigued. But the game just looked sooo damn ugly. I tried the demo and didn't even finish it. It felt amateurish and childish, and not in a good way. Worst offender was the HUD, which would feel right at home in some asset flip shovelware on steam. Now, a couple months later, I got it on sale anyway, because I thought the game just had to do something right, with its overwhelmingly positive steam reviews. And I'm glad that I did. The visuals, which (I think) mostly consist of assets from the UE Marketplace, didn't grow on me, especially the NPCs. Neither did the super basic and badly mixed licensed music and sound effects. Seriously, it's impossible to strike a balance in the audio settings of the game, those little volcanos are just stupid loud. The worst part is this one area that has a music track that always cuts off abruptly in the middle of the song, it's kind of hilarious though. Still quite annoying. There are also a bunch of lame pop culture references. But all that didn't matter too much after some time to me. Turns out, the game was made by one person, german guy David Münnich of notpron.com fame. I can accept unoriginal assets and music in that case, I guess. Actually, I ended up finding this world pretty charming after all.

Supraland ends up making up for most of these shortcomings with just plain good game design. In classic metroidvania fashion, you start off with a very basic moveset. Really basic, mind you. But in the first hours of the game, new abilities come fast. You'll be triple jumping within the first hour. Too bad the jumping feels like shit, with a height of what feels like 20 centimeters. The additional jumps don't add much to height, but to flexibility and to how far you can jump. There are a couple of cool abilities you don't see every day. Plus, there are a bunch of abilities you would have from the start in other games, like a map, that you have to find in Supraland. And i love that, it makes finding chests much more thrilling. And there are a lot of chests to find in this game. 172, to be exact. Of course not all of those contain all new abilities, but mostly upgrades to those, and rarely a bunch of coins. Additionally, there are upgrades and abilities you can only buy from a store. All of that makes it highly motivating to go out there and explore the hell out of this little world. And this world is pretty contorted and full of interesting nooks and crannies. It's one of the more linear metroidvanias - think Ori, and not Hollow Knight - and that's okay. Exploration doesn't seem to suffer from it, since every place is just chock full of very diverse puzzles to solve in addition to a truckload of chests. And these puzzles are pretty good! They are smoothly integrated into this world and take many forms, from pushing buttons to mixing potions, often with multiple (some unintended) solutions. Some puzzles overlap, which reduces this feeling that you're always just overcoming one obstacle before the next - it feels more immersive. There was this one rather large area (actually the one with the abruptly cut music) that has multiple puzzles you've got to solve. While you're doing them you can lose track of where a puzzle starts and another begins, and how all pieces fit together. It was pretty challenging, I spent like hour there (maybe I'm dumb tho) but it mysteriously didn't frustrate me! And I get frustrated quickly. Comin up with puzzle solutions in this game feels great. They often require out of the box thinking, and only sometimes get too obscure. The developer, David Münnich actually wrote a pretty interesting post about his puzzle design philosophy. There's also combat in this game, which is okay. Actually it's more engaging than it seems at first. It's not exactly hard, but enemies hit hard, so you'll have to be quick on your feet and should best be pulling off your AOE combo to not get overwhelmed. Enemies are incredibly generic though (and LOUD AF) thanks to their asset store origin, and they also appear way too frequently, getting in the way of puzzle solving sometimes.

As you gain abilities, and you're getting more flexible in your moveset, you might get the urge to scour this world inside out, and the game rewards it. It happened quite a few times that I was trying to get to somewhere to what felt to me like out-of-bounds areas, only to be greeted by coins and chests there. Supraland is one of those few games that got me sucked into it so much so i had to 100% the game, which strongly speaks to game's quality. Thankfully, in the post-game you'll get abilities that make this victory lap much more managable and fun.

I can definitely recommend this game to anyone who might be interested in a 3D metroidvania with a dash of zelda and portal. There's a bunch of influences here coming together beautifully. You'll just have to stomach the sluggish movement at the beginning of the game and the generic visuals. You'll get used to the latter and significant upgrades to the former. Coincidentally, there's a sequel coming out in a couple of days, Supraland - Six Inches Under. Supposedly, it's going to have original music, less enemy encounters and the harder puzzles are going to be optional. And I'm confident it will also be more polished. There's a successful kickstarter campaign behind it (the one for the first game failed) and additional people working on it. Although I'm a bit concerned because of the fact that the game will mostly play out underground, since part of the fun in the first game came from getting out-of-bounds (but not really), especially in the post game. It might be a hassle to 100% the sequel, and it could feel claustrophobic compared to the first game. I'm surely gonna check it out anyway.

It's a relatively smooth experience, but it's just not fun. There's jabs at other franchise that are supposed to be cheeky, but they're just misplaced. the platforming isn't anything great, and just generally, there's little that makes me want to play this for more than I did.

In a world with too many games, I won't be wasting my time on a mediocre one like this.

~David.

Developer with a decent grasp of unreal engine creates a hybrid of all of the joking game ideas he wants to do with a toybox aesthetic. Result: It's a soulless collectathon that has boring jokes just as much as it has outdated references.

There isn't much to talk about the specifics of the game, as a lot of it leads to very easy puzzle solutions that really shouldn't be compared to Portal like the game advertises itself as. You have some sequence breaking in terms of the openish world but a lot of decisions and upgrades are not interesting and just generally hit the bullet points of a first person platformer would consist of.

Everything is phoned in, whether that be the really skyrim-but-somehow-worse combat, the really really lacking soundscape (seriously nothing increases monotony than hearing a fat load of NOTHING as you're doing everything in this game), including the sequence of enemies and events. I was reminded in a respect to Snake Pass, in terms of unreal tech demo, but at the very least Snake Pass had a super interesting movement system you had to master. This however feels.... like nothing but an average timekiller. (5/10)