Recent reviews by Pibonacci

This is one of the best puzzle games of all time. Yet I feel the need to leave a negative review. Sadly the developer's obsession with mazes, noneuclidean geometry, and trial and error from the first game is still present and maybe even more pronounced. There is just way too many areas that detract from the puzzle solving because you just stumble around trying to find the one panel you missed, that I'm left feeling pretty drained in the endgame instead of feeling accomplished. There is also a lot of quality of life options missing somehow that I was willing to forgive in the first game but not in the second. (there is a warp system but you can't warp directly to the GREAT for some reason, the main first hub area; the first game had an external panel checker and map to find the stuff you were missing in the lategame, but I can't find something like that in this game). It's just way too raw for the second installment.

Hoping that the talented community iterates on this, the first game had amazing custom worlds like LIduongo.

This game is a bit of an underrecognized gem. It very competently combines the two genres it seeks to combine - puzzle game and roguelite, with a sprinkle of turn-based strategy mixed in.
I can't find any big faults in it. A lot of the design is super clever, be it in the enemy variety, the immersive solutionfinding to combat puzzles the game randomly generates.

There are some small issues that could be easily fixed and don't prevent me from enjoying the game a lot; tall sprites can make it hard to sometimes see whether a tile is targeted by a temporary trap, sometimes it's also hard to see the distance from enemies. Both things could probably be prevented quite easily with a grid view and some other minor polish.

The game would also benefit from a loadout system where you can swap between two setups, one maximized for offense and one for defense, since swapping between those is something you want to do more often than you are actually willing to go through the progress of doing so.

But that's about it for criticism, and the actual gameplay loop is just really fun and the design is super clever at times. I especially enjoyed, as opposed to some negative reviewers, the way the Space Death subverts the whole ruleset that the game carefully crafted and established, which is just a brilliant design decision if you accept the premise that the game is just over when you pass that turn limit. You should also pretty much never need to see this happening if playing correctly.

Big recommendation for anyone that has any remote interest in the mentioned genres, since I have not encountered other games of this scope (except some even smaller scale indie games) that fill this niche so well.

I just want to leave a brief recommendation as a counterpoint to the negative reviews. This game is a really good puzzle platformer with unique ideas and mechanics.

I cannot share the common criticisms in the reviews at all. The controls are fully functional, the platforming is tight, the aiming system works fine both with controller and mouse. The difficulty and learning curve is fine. There are a few reviews of people with less than an hour or two in the game complaining about pixel precise alignments etc. These people are, no point in mincing words, just wrong and didn't understand the room they were in and missed a mechanic or alternative way to progress, which is pretty normal and even encouraged to exist in a puzzle platformer. I can confidently say, 5h in and not really getting stuck anywhere, that no room required an absurdly precise solution that the controls didn't support.

I find it a shame that the game went far enough under the radar that a few of those reviews bring the rating of this little gem down so heavily.

It shines when the various mechanics combine and open up the solution space dramatically. I'm playing together with a friend and the amount of times we found quite different solutions from each other is surprising. One optional room stands out where after a back and forth of ideas we ended up with six different ways to solve the puzzle, all distinctly different from each other.

The game isn't a masterpiece and has some minor issues, none of which have detracted majorly from my positive experience. Sometimes it's a bit unclear how close the ageless dash needs to be to a target.
The escapes are a bit trial and error because of the time pressure and checkpoints being more scarce, but aren't a massive difficulty spike and fulfill their function of changing up the gameplay for a bit as well as progressing the narrative.
The biggest problem for me is that I missed one relic in an area, know which one it is, visually, in the relic garden, but can't do anything with that information to find it. The best thing I could do is check back every single room which I'm not interested in doing.

All in all, this game is way better than its small and mediocre reviewing would indicate. In the indie puzzle platformer genre which I'm quite fond of, I'd rate it 4/5, under the absolute highlights like Celeste which I'm sure was a big inspiration, but it's definitely a good game worth the experience.

The game is an excellent puzzle game, everything has been said.

However, I do want to make people aware of one thing that really rubs be the wrong way. A big selling point for the game is the extra user-created content, it's right there under "Over 25,000 usermade rooms available for download!". I finished Gunthro and have been looking for some of those to play, and.... I effectively cannot play a single one of them, it seems. Even the most recommended ones, those that are mentioned in discussions of what Levels to play first, require knowledge that the game just has not taught me at all. Decoys, Mimics, Spike Traps, Potions, Tokens - none of these things are part of the game I played.

It seems very clear that what you're expected to do is to buy and play every single DLC first before you can properly enjoy the free user created content, and that should probably be mentioned somewhere.

Even more so, there seems to be a Mod made for Gunthro, specifically, called Flood Warning. Except you can't download it for free and the most recent information that I found on it is a 3.5 years old forum post indicating that it does not work with the steam version and people will have to wait for it to be released on steam, except it apparently hasn't yet. (source: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/314330/discussions/0/350542683196964995/ )

I even tried making a caraval account, but apparently the only way to register a game that I bought from this developer with their external service that is also advertised in the product description is to buy the game again directly via their external site. Additionally, to use the, again, advertised high score system, I would need to buy a subscription with caraval for only 12€ a year! That is NOT what is to be understood under "Hi-score competition and hints system via our CaravelNet service"
None of this is okay. So at this point, I can't access their score system, I can't access the otherwise free Mod Flood Warning, and I can't really enjoy most of the free user created levels because they require knowledge that is not taught in the base game they technically belong to, but in the multitude of extra purchasable DLC.

At this point I can't leave a positive review, sorry. The advertisement for these features are just completely misleading.

Strongly recommend not buying. The game is smal in scope (I finished a playthrough in 2 hours), honestly incredibly easy once you figure out the basics and has nothing of interest to offer for fans of the genre. Yet it manages to break the most basic design principles, like punishing the player for progressing. Three bosses and the final boss are completely trivial and got first tried by doing nothing but using heavy attacks, which also works for every single enemy in the game with one exception, the first knight. That one takes the prize for worst designed boss in a game of this genre that I've seen for various reasons, one that she can chain attacks during which she is invincible unless you use the obscure parry mechanic that is never needed anywhere else in the game and uses limited resources, and the other one that she can overlap her attacks with a "set to 1 HP" attack that for some reason just happened nonstop for me during the last phase of the fight despite the dev making various different and contradicting statements on how the attack is supposed to work, neither of which explaining this behaviour. See below for a link to the relevant discussion.

Mostly though I can't recommend someone to buy the product of a developer that treats customer with an unbelievable ignorance and arrogance as can be seen here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/444590/discussions/0/364041776190348538/?ctp=2

I love roguelikes, metroidvanias and souls games, I speedran plenty of them, so this sounds like the perfect game to me, right? Except I actually hated it. The game is incredibly boring to me. There is very little actual variety with most biomes having like what, four different enemies total. Additionally, while the fast paced gameplay is supposed to be interesting, it just didn't exist for me. You can get a turret and a freeze on pretty much any run and then you just don't need to interact with anything anymore. You just spam all your skills which include throwing a freeze grenade/freezing enemies in other form, pop down a turret and mash away attack buttons until the enemy is dead. There is no enemy that counters that approach unless you're incredibly stupid and get hit by incredibly not dangerous ranged attacks. And it's not like I just wait out my cooldowns and take down enemies one by one, I play at normal pace. It doesn't help that enemies don't really do any damage anymore either (I don't remember that from the early pre-release version I had played) and you can often enough get hit like 30 damage without things becoming dangerous.

There is also something incredibly weird about the difficulty curve where I can literally stand there with a build like that that admittedly doesn't even work really well against bosses, yet they just don't do enough damage to kill me even if don't dodge and I just slowly kill them.

So why don't I just play on higher difficulties? Well, all this works. Until the very final boss. Which completely breaks all of this apart and just absolutely murders you. And I'm not up to dealing with the tedium of a 45 minute run without anything interesting happening ever to just get another shot at the final boss to learn his pattern. This is not even remotely close to how you do difficulty right.

I stopped playing after like three full runs of the full release version, all ending up with a similar build since there is no build variety either until you go through the incredibly painful and tedious unlock progress. I never had the urge to go back. I could limit myself to not use these tools but that's like telling someone to not roll if they find dark souls too boring. The game should be balanced around a player smartly using the most basic tools not completely breaking apart the core gameplay.

Don't understand how this game is universally beloved as a result of this. You can play it like a braindead button masher and it has nothing of the meaningful impact of decisions and actions that define the games it tries to mimic.