Elliot Quest

I can't believe all those negative review. This game is AMAZING! Hands down the best zelda-like out there.

overall a decent game, but bogged down by some glaring issues.
def channels Zelda 2 vibes, but the map system in the game in borderline useless, shortcuts often don't work both ways but then some do with no understanding of why.
also seems you need to max WIS or some boss fights will be nearly impossible.

TLDR i would rate positive if the movement wasnt so heavy. It just doesnt feel nice to move in this game.

Pros:
-Nostalgic Art
-Decent music and sfx

Cons:
-The movement is too heavy.
-Lacks a lot of quality of life.

Elliot Quest is another game that may appeal to a select few. It is not bad, but it is rough and lacking in some conveniences in favour of being.. authentically old fashioned. There is joy in the exploration and uncovering more areas, but in other regards many secrets are just more coins, and can come with a lot of backtracking with no fast travel to ease the process.

As an extra note, respawning on half health is.. cruel. Especially as the checkpoints work as a respawn rather than a save state. If you want to go into a boss fight on full health or with your potions, you need to do so first try. Making learning some boss fights a particular nuisance. Especially later ones that might just insta-kill you as you walk in, or do enough damage to two shot you in general.

Again, I can appreciate a lot of what is presented, but perhaps.. a little more leeway or information to the player sometimes. Less 'get gud'

BEFORE BUYING: make sure you have a way to set your computer's monitor to a fixed 60 Hz (With Windows 10, right-click your desktop, select "Display Settings", find and click "Advanced Display Settings", then scroll down to refresh rate and make sure one of the options is 60 Hz) You will need to play the game on this setting, or it will be nearly unplayable: when set at 144 Hz for example, the entire game runs at at 2.4x normal speed, and floating enemies will be affected by gravity strangely, causing some areas to become inaccessible.

As for the game itself, it is fine most of the time, but with enough annoyances that I can't really recommend it. It has a lot of secrets to discover and challenging but not unfair combat.

However, it has multiple areas in which you can softlock yourself (usually because you run out of bombs or mana in the wrong spots, so try to get the "mp regen" perk if you can).

Additionally, while the save points are found all over and the penalty for dying is minimal, the save points are not as useful as you'd think: they only refill your health and mana to half of max (min of 3 hearts), and do nothing for your bomb count or consumable items. This means that even though there's a save point right before each boss, you only really get one full-strength attempt at any boss unless you want to spend 5 min backtracking to town between each attempt. Worse than that, in the case, say, you're fighting a certain boss that requires bombs to beat and you run out of bombs in one of your attempts, you might need to backtrack across the continent to the starting town so you can buy bombs back up to max again.

It could have been a good game, but man, between the bugs, softlocks, and annoyances, I can't really recommend it.

My game runs at mach 10. Seems to use your monitor refresh rate for how fast the game runs... Controls are pretty jank. Almost nothing is explained. I didn't know what the chain meter did until I just noticed it mentioned in the store page's description when I went to review this... Whenever there is chat text, you can't skip it, you have to wait for some arbitrary time limit put on it before it goes away on it's own. Cutscenes are unbearably slow. The character brushes sand off him for like 10 seconds straight during 1 cutscene... Chests only contain money. Every chest...

Been a month or two since I wanted to leave a positive review.

This game deserves way more than 72%. After playing trash like The messenger recently which has 95% positive reviews, games like this deserve more. While the combat in this game is...not the greatest, I did enjoy the metroidvania aspect in this game. There are two ways I look at a game for metroidvanias. The metroidvania aspect...as in the degree of how non-linear the game is and how much backtracking is involved, and the fun in doing it/time worth while doing it. Then there's just the platforming side.

Honestly, the game was frustrating at first since it seemed the game was moving way too fast, but I got over it. I don't remember much else to write any more details.

Overall, would recommend to metroidvania fans.

Old school adventure platforming love letter, without carbon copying everything.

Contrary to other comments, I don't find the game at all difficult - but I actually grew up conquering Zelda 2 to the point where it was actually easy, so the game is understandibly challenging(without feeling cheap)

Original and a very, very good title. Kudos!

The game: An unabashed Zelda II clone. In fact, some of the music is so similar I'm surprised they weren't sued by Nintendo.

The good: Really nice pixel art by Luis Zuno. I highly recommend checking out his youtube channel. The game also has very nice, tight controls.

The bad: The game is difficult. And not in a fun way. It starts off at a really enjoyable and rewarding level of challenge, but about halfway through it abruptly switches to overpowered enemies and constant instadeaths. The story also blows. Normally I wouldn't really comment on that, because no one plays a game like this for the story. But this game makes you constantly sit through a bunch of boring cut scenes and read droll, emo rubbish.

Not the worst game I've ever played by any means, but it really feels like a beta that needs a lot more work and refinement.

So im playing the game after the full remake, and i can absolutely say this game is fantastic, the Zelda 2 vibes are very strong but with much better mechanics. If you like zelda 2, youll love this game.

This game is pretty good. The two things I didn't like both reminded me of games from my childhood in a bad way, but aren't really issues with the game itself...

First, only the d-pad on my [pc] Xbox 360 controller works. This makes it feel like I am holding a tiny NES gamepad in my adult hands that want to be holding something comfortably after being used to earn wages all night. Obviously this also has something to do with my controller, but I was not pleased about d-pad movement.
(The game has since been rebuilt, so the d-pad issue has ostensibly been fixed)

Second, getting stuck in an area and needing to start a new game after playing for a few hours because I happened to go there before getting the fireball spell. To the credit of the game, it did not take nearly as long to recover and it was pretty fun after getting used to the d-pad...if a bit tedious, which still caused me to not take the game back up.

Now that the game has been tightened up with a rebuild, I'll definitely revisit it and recommend it to anyone who enjoys retro-style metroidvanias.

This game is a fantastic Zelda II/metroidvania adventure. It was lots of fun to play, very addictive, and it only became a drag at the very end when trying to beat the superbosses. I 100%ed this game (well, I didn't get all the coin chests or all the endings, but I don't think that counts) and I have to say, I enjoyed it quite a bit! I did not use guides for most of it; I did get lost at one point and used a guide there, and I also got guidance for the superbosses and the final crystals, but other than that, a careful explorer can get pretty much everything. So:

Things I liked: the metroidvania gameplay, obviously, is the main draw. It's not a straight metroidvania: each area is self-contained. Basically, there's an overworld map filled with impassable areas raising exclamation points, and you go into these places to cross the map to the other side of that impassable area. These areas often have challenges requiring the use of upgrades or spells, so you may not be able to cross them at first but have to come back with better stuff. The game also has a nifty story told in flashbacks, a karma meter (which I never got to move), EXP and level-ups (it would have been nice to know what's actually important to have late-game, because you get 1 skill point at level-up and with the level cap you can only get some of the upgrades). Also, every new thing on the map is exciting to explore and discover! I guess that's what kept me playing for so many hours.

Things I didn't really like: the lack of direction. The game is deliberately designed with a "retro" feel. I honestly wish developers would stop doing that. I buy the simplicity in graphics, that's fine, but the game could well have explained more. For example, at one point you can find a blue book. It goes into your upgrade grid. What does it do? The forums aren't sure. The game sure doesn't tell you! I think, for the most part, you can kinda figure out where to go by just looking around on the map, but maybe also someone in the towns could kinda say something to point you in the right direction too? You also collect crystals -- why? What's the point? Turns out they open doors if you have enough of them, OK. So they're... door counters?

Other things of note: the game is pretty hard. There are lots of puzzles, lots of challenging platforming, etc. There's a very nice Hell-Temple-esque challenge area that's quite a bit harder than the rest of the game. And then there are... the superbosses. MASSIVE DIFFICULTY SPIKE, even compared to the Wizard's Tower. They're not required, of course, but yeah. My last week of playing this game was spent getting frustrated against one of these guys for a bit and giving up for the night. On the other hand, it felt damn good to kill the last one and open the door they were guarding!

Anyway, I had a lot of fun playing Elliot Quest. Other than those superbosses, the challenge level is great, though you may want to look things up on occasion in case you missed something big (I missed a crucial game mechanic, for example, that nobody bothered to tell me about in-game). Enjoy!

It's an excellent game. A fun and difficult platformer. Good music and style. I like it.

But it's incredibly buggy. It's built in JS with an HTML5 engine and I've had no end of game breaking bugs and floor clipping. Random behaviour. Playing through it on another platform I broke through the floor and it autosaved in an unrecoverable way and had to delete my save file from near the end of the game. Maddening.

It also does not in any way work in the Steam Link. White screen and crashing.

So the game is good, but it's plagued by technical problems and is no longer supported.

Beautiful, Challenging, but Ultimately Frustrating

This game is so close to being a classic. It's clearly influenced by the likes of Zelda 2, Super Metroid, Kid Icarus, Castlevania and Demon's Crest. It's got a great visual aesthetic, music, and game feel. The world, villagers, and monsters all feel great. The bosses are challenging, and have respawn points beside them if you mess up and need to retry.

However, there's a lot of frustration in this game. First, there's no instructions to tell you what the controls of the game are. There's only movement, shoot, jump, and secondary item (arrows, D, spacebar, S) so you'll figure them out pretty quickly, but that's still not great. Could have just been a quick screen accessible from the main menu, even if they weren't remap-able. There's also a lot of unexplained things in the game. Your new abilities are always unexplained. I can sympathize with not wanting to hand-hold, and have condescending tutorials like most modern games have, but you can't just chop them out of the game. The powers could have had a short little cutscene, ala Megaman X, that show your guy using the new power. You'll probably figure it out in a minute or two, but it's still annoying. A really bad one, is that there's an unexplained level-cap in the game. So you'll be playing along, thinking that eventually you'll be able to fill out all the little level-up skills, that are all shown from the beginning of the game in your inventory screen. Instead, you'll eventually hit the cap, and find out that you spent your level-ups wrong, because you didn't know you'd run out.

The real killer, however, is the sheer volume of time-wasting you'll do in the game. There's no quick-travel in the game, and almost no short-cuts, so you'll spend a lot of your time back-tracking through levels you've already traversed numerous times. I know the games I listed as references have backtracking, but in this game it's a lot worse. It's aggravated by not knowing where to go, your character's painfully slow movement speed on ladders, and slow walking speed. Finally, there's the time wasted by the economy in the game. There's some plot-essential things you need to buy, which need hundreds of coins. However, you'll only be scraping a few dozen coins per hour of real-time, from the enemies and crates in the game. There's some one-time bonus coin-chests in the game, but those really just feel like a reminder of the stupid grinding you're doing for gold, rather than something to be excited about. Plus, they're usually locked behind some metroidvania-style doors and item-requirements, so they also serve the purpose of confusing and annoying you, because you thought there was going to be some useful item behind that locked door, or a new area to explore. Instead, it's just a handful of coins.

If I were to wave a magic wand, I'd get rid of the coins in the game. Just have the villagers who sell you things, instead make you use your metroidvania abilities in a small little mini-dungeon, or room in their house. I'd also make your level-ups tied to main-plot progress, and maybe a couple hidden optional items, instead of killing monsters for exp. Actually, the chests that used to contain coins would now contain level-up items (and maybe some ability-items), since I've gotten rid of the coins. Finally, I'd make your character move faster on ladders, and throw in a fast-travel system, like Super Mario World, or Shovel Knight. (Actually, Shovel Knight is a good comparison, because I have 8 hours in that game and 100% of the secrets. After nearly 8 hours of Elliot quest, I'm about 1/3 done the game.)

Unfortunately, I don't have a magic wand, so I just have to recommend not playing this game. :C

If you're searching for a game like Zelda 2, you have found it!
Surely you will enjoy this game...but, there are some problems!
The max level of experience you can reach is 20.
For each lvl you gain a point you can spend to upgrade a stats.
There are 5 stats (stregnt/agility/magic/vitality/critic) and a max of 5 point to distribute each.
So.... you can't max all the stats, you can only gain 20 points through all the game!
If you want to play and enjoy the game, finding all the secrets (items/places/boss)
I recommend you to MAX the MAGIC stats because it's essential! (you can't reassign the exp points).
Nice pixel art.
Nice music.
Obviously it's an hard and challenging game.

Zelda II: Elliots awakening. A far more gorgeous version of a NES classic. Has the same crippling difficulty. Doesn't provide any hand holding to a fault. Yet once you complete a task that killed you 17 times, you breath a sigh of relief. Not for anyone looking for an easy ride, or those prone to throwing controllers.
I hope for a sequel!
Pros: Zelda 2 beautifully reimagined, yet unique in it's own right. Huge number of secrets. Well thought out bosses, level design. Tough yet rewarding gameplay.
Cons: These are not game breakers, rather quips that are worth mentioning: No item explanation, Sometimes it's tough to figure out where to go. Bombs can be a pain in the ass to get, Level cap, No ability to redistribute skill points
9/10 Highly recommended!

40+ hours so far. The most frustrating feature of this game is the obscurity. Controls are L-shift, S, D, Esc, Enter, Space, and arrows and cannot be changed. They are not explained in the game. The max level is 20 for a total of 19 upgrades. This was not explained beforehand. I could not figure out how to progress at one point until I tried using an item in a slightly different way. And I only just realized what an item I found days ago even does.

But this is where the lack of explanation in-game enters the gray area of pro/con. To some, it's a barrier. To others, it becomes an invitation to experiment and explore. I was incredibly frustrated while I was stuck, but when I progressed it was extremely satisfying. I've died again and again trying to find out how to even damage some of the later bosses. But slowly learning their weaknesses and taking them down has been incredibly rewarding. The exact order in which to explore the progressively open map is a little foggy, but the overall direction is clear.

Exploration is where the game truly shines. Many areas are more accessable than they first seem. Enemies can be tackled with more practice as opposed to more items. Many puzzles are solved not by finding a new upgrade but by creative use of Elliot's existing abilities. There are many side areas with their own rewards, and one or two decisions for Elliot to make that will stay with him for the rest of the game. There are always multiple uses for an upgrade. None of them are spelled out, but some are made clear by the design of the area they are found in. The clever puzzles make yet more applications for Elliot's powers clear.

In summary, this is a game that is difficult to get into at the start due to the complete, *absolute*, UTTER lack of hand holding. But it quickly builds momentum and continues building it the longer you play. For those who enjoy exploring their surroundings, their alternatives, and the hidden mechanics of their game world, this is an experience I can't recommend highly enough.

I want to like this game, but I can't. It has nothing to do with the presentation or story, but with how horribly broken it is. Maybe this only affects the linux version, but the controls consist of spacebar, directional keys and D, with no way at all to change it. This is simply not a control scheme that works. Controller support is also almost entirely lacking, with only a handful of keys mapped to my logitech pad, not including movement, and again, no configuration at all. There isn't even a way to display it fullscreen. Sorry, but this gets a thumbs down from me until it gets fixed.

As an obvious homage to Zelda 2 for the NES, Elliot Quest largely succeeds, but a handful of serious flaws hamper what would otherwise be an easy recommendation. As such, I'd only recommend it to players who like the style of game enough to enjoy a budget version that falls short of its potential.

Awkward and frustrating mechanics really cut down on the fun in leveling up and exploring. The low level cap prevents you from maxing your abilities. Experience loss on death punishes you for falling down some pits while others contain secrets. Several abilities only have a small chance to activate, meaning you will often die from something that you easily could have beaten if only your abilities had worked.

Exploration also feels extremely limited and unrewarding. In contrast with other games of this style, Elliot Quest has you constantly running into walls instead of finding new areas to explore. Often you'll finally get past one barrier only to find another on the other side. Your eventual reward is then too little too late: mere coins or exp for finally getting through the area you've revisited three times.

Elliot Quest is not a bad game, but it suffers from numerous rough edges that take quite a lot away from the parts that are supposed to be fun.

Excellent for all lovers of old school, or for those who simply enjoy a good adventure. Equal parts exciting and challenging, it doesn't tax my Mac Book Air, and runs silky smooth. Great soundtrack, excellent atmosphere and an original slice of a story makes this a sure thing.

Elliot Quest is one of the best games I've played this year. Playing through it, you can tell that a lot of heart was put into making this game. The sense of exploration in Elliot Quest is far greater than any other game I've played recently. It keeps pulling you back to find out where else you can go and what else you can find now that you've gotten the next powerup. The art style is wonderful and unique, and the music and sound effects are great, too (there are also some well-placed Link to the Past references). The game does sometimes fault in not explaining enough of what is going on, but I feel this is better than erring on the side of explaining too much and ruining the chance for discovery and exploration.

A wonderful old school inspired game that's hamstrung by its obvious design inspirations

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