Timespinner

I thought this was a pretty fun game with a good core and some major flaws.
The good:
- (on paper) a lot of ways to customize your build, with a ton of different loadouts available.
- The level design was generally pretty good. It felt fun to explore, especially near the end.
- Movement was fun.
- Game had few glitches.
The mediocre:
- The story had fairly heavy emphasis, but I don't think it was up to snuff. The technical details (diction, grammar, etc.) were pretty good, but not the plot itself. It was pretty generic "evil empire" -> "maybe things are more grey."
- While I did say the level design was generally good, there were some nitpicks with it. There are some enemies that are really boring to deal with (eg mushroom towers and the laser eye spiders) that just kill your speed. They block full passages, and they weren't interesting to fight, they just make you sit a few seconds as you deal with them.
The bad:
- There isn't much room to experiment with different loadouts (specifically orbs and familiars) since they level individually with use. I ended up trying out the shatter orbs early on and couldn't use the others because they were so much weaker in comparison later on.
- Difficulty was poorly balanced. Most of the game was too easy for my liking (even though I barely used the backdash), right until the end, where I'll admit it got more difficult, but I only died once to the last (non-secret) boss. That last boss's section of the map was a massive difficulty spike though.

None of my problems were really core to the game, so I'm hopeful that the sequel addresses them. As it is now though, go ahead and buy it (maybe on sale if you're cheap like me). It's a good game at its core and none of the flaws were game ruining.

Maybe one of the best metroidvanias I've played in a while.
This game is a time travelling story done right. Oh, the soundtrack is amazing too!

Gay Queens!!! Need I say more!?

Bad Writing

I am not done with it just yet, but I love the game. It was great fun and I had a good time with my first Metroidvania game too.

Favorite boss was the Succubus and Incubus. Favorite orb is either the Radiant or the Moon Shatter orb. Favorite location was Lake Serene. The music was phenomenal.

BUT the Winderians SUCK. Listen, no one in this world is innocent. Major spoilers sorry. Her mother basically had Lunais as a designer baby with a genetic disease that is like depression or anger management issues. Her people were just like the Viletiles in the way of thinking that Lachaims are nothing but something to be used. WHICH HAPPENED WITH NUVIUS. Now, Nuvius had the worse crash out ever, because not only did he get used, he also didn't get to see his daughter and the woman he fell in love with treated him like he was disposal. I mean I get why he went after her in particular and why he was doing what he was doing. Still wrong and horrific. Having everyone get eliminated was an overreaction. BUT THE LEADERS OF THE VILLAGE KNEW TOO. So again all three groups suck so bad. Lunais was also basically manipulated to hate her father she barely knew because he is Lachaim. Imagine seeing your grown child and welcoming her only to be told to get bent. Again, hurting a bunch of people is horrible but dang, not even an attempt to talk about it. Not even an attempt to talk to Nuvius before he decided to get revenge on the mom. Revenge is bad who knew.

Anyway, amazing game. Love it lots and Nel and Lunais are so cute.

Nice and small metroidvania.Everything felt like nds castelvania titles.The graphics,the menus,the abilities etc..It was pretty easy for normal difficulty I think cuz I only died thrice? The progression was pretty smooth too until one of the keycards was buried with a skeleton and u had to interact with it to see it.I didnt one hundred percent it,there were still some quests and couple of areas to do but imo they wouldnt take much time either.

Cool platformer w/ some cool abilities. Pretty art.

Timespinner is a solid good, but not great, look back into the style and feel of the GBA / DS Castlevania games. If you're itching for more Castlevania, I think you'll get a kick out of it. If you're just looking for a metroidvania in general to play, there are better options but few as compact an experience as this one. If it looks good to you then give it a shot. There's a sequel in development, and I'll definitely be checking it out when it releases.

pretty fun game id recommend it, doing a 100% playthrough will take you 20-30 hours

A mediocre at best metroidvania that capitalizes on its similarity to Symphony of the Night and the SNES aesthetic that it adopts. The game looks good in its pixel-art sprites and backgrounds, even if the art design is not that great. Music is fantastic though, very Castlevania-like and a few tracks are quite memorable.

For being a game about time travel there is a severe lack of different time periods to explore, having only two of them, a futuristic "present" setting and a medieval-like "past", with very few connections and interactions between them. Both game worlds are quite flat and small, not having much verticality, and both maps are put to shame when compared to other titles in the genre.

Gameplay-wise this is a typical metroidvania having 2D platforming, exploration and backtracking once new abilities are found. However there is not enough enemy and weapon variety, regular enemies and their attacks are lame, and the titular mechanic to stop time serves for little more than to create temporal platforms out of enemies to reach higher places. There are some secondary quests regarding collecting items but that's it. Boss fights are cool though and traversal abilities like dashing and high-jump are fun to use.

Even among all the mediocre stuff the story is easily the worst part of the game. The setting is good enough, there is decent lore about a planetary war between a colony and a metropole and some mystical tribe in one of the planets but none of this is explored in enough depth and is provided just as a background. I wish the game had spent more time in developing the world in its secondary quests instead of focusing on the love life of the various evidently non-heterosexual and/or polyamorous characters, as the game makes a huge deal about that both in dialog between characters and in notes found throughout the game. It was a wasted opportunity to tell an interesting sci-fi fantasy story instead of a cringe-inducing fanfiction. The main character is on a quest to repair the damage done, save the world and find out who she is, and will find a laughable and overused plot twist down the line while facing comically evil one-dimensional antagonists without clear motivations, all culminating in a pretty non-sensical (but cool) battle that came out of nowhere. Or that's what I remember as I can't be bothered to replay it just to be sure.

Honestly I can't recommend it by its merits, it's good that it exists for people that is interested in that representation stuff but it's clearly not for me as I don't care for that, and I wish it had been marketed better to make it more clear.

Fun little Metroidvania with good LGBTQ+ representation. Short game, took me around 8 hours to complete the main story. Like every Metroidvania there is a bit of a grind after to get everything unlocked. Fun overall, and would recommend.

I am a lover of Metroidvania's fist and foremost. Although Castlevania and Metroid are my primary interests, this is my personal fav no CV/Metroid Metroidvania game. The atmosphere is just as good as Hollow Knight without the Dark Soulish difficulty of Hollow Knight. The soundtrack is banger after banger. Movement in this game is super smooth. Very Castlevania SOTN smooth. I am a lore junkie and this game doesn't disappoint on that front. Overall, it's a 10/10 for me.

I watched Dr4gonBlitz play this on his stream and was intrigued to play this. I have not been disappointed at all. The story so far is well done and I absolutely love the sound track and the retro graphics. Controls are smooth. Definitely recommend this.

CINEMA

Feels like an Atari oldschool game, which is not bad.
But the game is imbued with modern societal righteousness, which is a "no no zone" for me.
I don't want to do politics when i am playing, I stoped playing when it became way too obvious (mid game ?).

Fun, easy, basic metroidvania.

I largely enjoyed the gameplay. Past a certain point everything except boss fights felt kinda easy, but I still had a good time with it. The time-stopping mechanism was neat, and helpful, and usually not needed, but clutch in boss fights and a few other circumstances. Platforming wasn't too painful, and it was usually pretty clear whether I should be able to make a jump or if I'd have to wait until I got some sort of better traversal ability. I did sometimes have a hard time finding a thing I was looking for, I had to scour the map a couple times to find "OK, where can I advance?"

I *really* appreciated a number of things about the story, the two biggest being it starting out as a stereotypical "There's A Bad Guy Stop Them" plot but acquiring nuance and good LGBTQ+ representation. The story-stuff isn't super-dense, though; it's more "along the way" (makes sense for a platformer).

The Orb system was neat, especially being able to combo in jewelry from different orbs. The quests were very vanilla. But what kept me playing was the narrative, and some exploration-itch.

Surprisingly good. I decided to buy it after beating Order of Ecclesia and wanting more and yeah, Timespinner is exactly what the doctor prescribed.

It pulls it's ascetic and music from ye old SquareSoft from the SNES era and does so beautifully. Copying the fundamental without being derivative is exactly what you want when making an homage so no complain from me. It even made me nostalgic.

Its gameplay on the other hand comes from Order of Ecclesia, to a fault at times. It does add its own spin at times, but whatever Order of Ecclesia did, it follows suit most of the time. It's good though, but lack the secret sauce. I feel there is too many orbs and too many things to level. In Order of Ecclesia, when you level up your fire mastery, you can reuse it for every fire abilities. But here, what is the point of levelling the blue orb if I am never going to use it ever again?

It also good to weird places with the Blood Orb, Eye Orb and the lab level. Not sure it is fitting. You can sense that the dev went for it because he wanted it to be there at least, so it helps making it not too jarring.

All in all, I recommend and can't wait for the sequel.

A very solid, well-paced adventure. It's a bit short and light on content, and the writing is kinda not great, but the gameplay is on point. The map is a bit basic, and they could have done more with the time mechanic in terms of map changes, but it's still fun to explore. Movement is good, combat is good, lots of build variety, and the new game+/multiple endings help make up for how short it is. Not best-in-class, but a good A-tier/8/10 title.

While I understand the game was based around the style of 90s action platformers, I was under the impression from the screenshots and trailer that the game would feel that I would become invested in the world's story from the get go, or at least within the first twenty minutes of gameplay, but that is not the case.

I found the main character lacking in anything to make her more than just a player avatar for me to run around as, and even though I could probably played through more than just 15 minutes, nothing drew my attention as 'important' other than "Oh hey, here is some very blatantly obvious lore and motivation that acts as a focal point of our protagonist!" (not that it's a bad thing, it just feels too 'quick', if that makes sense.)

Other than the main villain introduced during the first few minutes, none of the interactions mattered between any of the NPCs in the beginning, and the lore makes absolutely zero sense/is dumped without any frame of reference as to the founding of the world/who or what our character is (Like, what is with the whole Time motif?) Nothing is explained out rightly, not even subtly hinted at for me to speculate (unless I'm blind to it?).

3.4/10 (was going to rate it a 2/10, but the music was really nice, the main character was voiced when she attacked, and the color-scheme of the pixels fit sorta well.)

Good game overall. Has some performance issues here and there for some reason. Not to crazy hard and will not make you over think anything.

I'm glad I finally got around to playing this game when my metroidvania itch came back up. timespinner was very mechanically (and honestly emotionally) satisfying to play through, and I can't wait to play the sequel.

the game wears its inspiration on its forehead; it's like a mix of mostly Castlevania order of ecclesia and some of the other ig-vania games. satisfying progression, story choices, quests, characters, writing, the whole shabang. I'll admit that the difficulty was on the lower end, but that's not a detractor for me personally. once again, cannot wait for the sequel.

A delightful metroidvania - tight combat, a sprawling world, and a solid map system. I enjoyed it immensely. :)

Great game

Timespinner misses the mark for me. Its a fine game but not very good, just lukewarm. It commits hard to a dialog heavy story, but fails to get me invested in the world or characters, so I found myself just mashing through the dialog. It has a fun time freeze mechanic, but isn't used nearly enough for how cool it is. The game is also so easy it is boring, progressing through the game doesn't feel like you're improving your skills, just feels like time passing since it is so easy. I see some people like this game so maybe its just not my cup of tea, I love metroidvanias, but this I don't.

It's a tossup. I can't give it a great recommendation. It's not bad either.

It's serviceable and short. Not bad for a sale at this point. Suffers from a common writer syndrome of every character having an extremely similar voice/dialogue style that largely contrasts the atmosphere at a lot of times. When good characters talk it is essentially the writer agreeing with themselves over and over again, not helped by the aforementioned 'voice' issue. It makes its points feel juvenile and utterly simplistic.

But metroidvanias usually aren't played much for story anyway. Again, this isn't a bad game by any stretch. Controls are solid, mechanics are solid if a bit unexplored, map design is alright, so on and so forth.

However, steam says 'Would you recommend this game to other players' and....I can't say yes to it without caveats like sales. Part of it is just because we have so many other options that I'd argue are superior investments for your time and dollar.

I hear the randomizer for it is quite good and pretty easy to get going if you're interested in that - might be worth taking a peek. Also, it DOES have some quite good music, I gotta give props there.

Ultimately if we still lived in the 80s-00s, this would be a good contender for a weekend rental, if that helps give an idea.

Amazing little metroidvania, really reminded me of some of the older Castlevania games.

The crowbaring in of LGBTQIA+ does nothing to enrich the game. Just feels as if jumping on a band wagon. Time zone aspects are fun. Orbs finding the way forward does get a little hard.
If it is wearing its rainbow colors it needs to wear them proudly not covertly. Also

Polygamy???

An excellent metroidvania with a solid story and enjoyable combat. Easy to get lost, and sometimes confused which way to go, but fun exploration, and talking to NPCs helps.

A delightful 2D metroidvania in a classic old-school art style that feels like a forgotten SNES or Genesis classic. Much like Axiom Verge before it, Timespinner borrows wholesale from its influences (gameplay feels like Castlevania, art style draws a bit from Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana) and expands on them in fun and interesting ways that never detract from what makes the metroidvania genre so damn appealing in the first place!

Combat is particularly fun in this game, as it's all close-to-mid range attacks, with a variety of unlockable weapon types and modifiers depending on how you like to play. I only had to use a guide once (maybe twice?) to help me get 100% map completion, and at 10-12 hours (I play very casual and explore a lot), it felt like exactly the right length to satisfy the itch.

Story was excellent too, and I'm not usually a fan of time travel or alternate universe stories! Really enjoyed the political intrigue and questions of morality, and having a cast absolutely stacked with gays and bisexuals was a very nice bonus. Can't wait to play the sequel now!

A fun metroidvania that works well with the steam deck.

Timespinner is a visually stunning metroidvania that offers a solid gameplay experience but struggles to build upon its unique mechanics. While it provides a fun, nostalgic journey, it often leaves you wondering about the untapped potential of its core features.

🎮 Gameplay: 7.5/10
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The core gameplay loop is enjoyable, with responsive controls and engaging exploration. Movement is mostly smooth, and vertical flying is a standout feature. However, double-jump occasionally feels inconsistent. The time-stop mechanic starts strong but never evolves meaningfully, often reduced to tedious enemy platforming.

⚔️ Combat: 6.5/10
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Combat feels great initially, with satisfying weapon choices and fluid animations. However, the difficulty balance is off—you often feel overpowered, even on Nightmare mode. Consumables are plentiful, eliminating any real challenge. Bosses have cool designs, but their mechanics are hit-or-miss, with most fights devolving into brute force over strategy.

🎨 Pixel Art & Aesthetic: 10/10
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The art is absolutely breathtaking. Each area is meticulously crafted and thematically rich, capturing a sense of wonder and nostalgia. This is easily one of the game's strongest points.

🛠️ Mechanics & Power-ups: 6/10
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Timespinner introduces several intriguing mechanics, but many are underutilized or restricted to single-use zones. Swimming is mostly for collectibles, and certain power-ups feel like missed opportunities for larger exploration or gameplay challenges. The time-stop feature could have been leveraged for more creative combat and puzzle interactions.

📜 Narrative: 5/10
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The story starts with promise but fizzles out quickly. While the LGBTQ+ themes are a commendable effort, the characters lack depth, and the writing often comes off as cringy or indifferent. The protagonist's detached attitude and dismissive dialogue make it hard to care about their cause. The time-travel mechanic has its moments, but its impact on the narrative is minimal and underutilized.

🗺️ Replayability & Extras: 4/10
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The repeatable dungeon is lackluster, with monotonous design and little incentive beyond loot grinding. Once you've completed the main game, there's little reason to return unless you're a completionist.

Pros & Cons
Pros:

🌟 Gorgeous pixel art and atmospheric areas.
🎮 Smooth movement and combat mechanics.
🕰️ Time-travel has some cool moments.
🎵 Great soundtrack that complements the mood.
Cons:

🤷‍♂️ Underdeveloped core mechanics (time-stop, power-ups).
🛡️ Lacks difficulty, even on higher modes.
📝 Narrative and character depth fall flat.
🔄 Repetitive dungeon design. (Final zone)

Final Thoughts
Timespinner is a beautiful and enjoyable metroidvania that succeeds in creating a nostalgic vibe but stumbles in its execution of innovative mechanics and storytelling. If you’re looking for a basic metroidvania with gorgeous art and solid gameplay, it’s worth your time. However, if you crave substantial depth and challenge, you might come away disappointed.

Overall Rating: 7/10
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Timespinner is like a beautiful painting with some missing brushstrokes—it’s fun to look at and experience, but you can’t help but wonder what it could’ve been with a bit more polish.

Great art AND great gameplay, that's a rare combo in pixel art platformers.

I enjoyed the 6 hours or so that it took to beat the game. It's very easy if you spend 30 minutes grinding levels early on. I never died once in the game but still had fun navigating the levels and following the story.

The story is interesting and focused, the gameplay is responsive, and the bosses are well designed.

The only complaints I have is that it isn't very Metroidvania like with minimal backtracking and that you really only swap between two levels. It isn't as large and meaty as something like Alwa's Awakening.

Overall it's worth buying when it is on sale for 5 dollars or less.

Lunar Gay Game

Great Metroidvania! Lots of unlockable weapons, secrets, backtracking with new abilities, and all the things you'd want in a good Metroidvania. Enemy variety is excellent and there are a surprising number of bosses to battle, many optional. Graphics are amazing pixel-art with parallax scrolling effects, bringing you back to the SNES days but at a much higher detail than would have been possible then.

I found the story very enjoyable, a pleasant blend of sci-fi and fantasy with some political-cultural metaphors tying thinga together. And appropriately for a time-travel game, there are 4 separate endings for the game.

I highly recommend Timespinner to any fan of Metroidvania action games!

solid metroidvania with really strong spritework. feels like the snes game i wished had come out back then.

having played farther in, this is really an extremely well made metroidvania, its got solid variety of weapons(similar to cv:order of ecclesia) a very consistently paced outflow of mew abilities and solid hidden items with ways to find items outside of blind guesswork. the lengthe is around 10 hrs for diligent searching and thats great for people with a job/life. the story is ok but not obtrusive, they do a bit of jargon dumps on you, but outside of remembering which location is which, it flows well, and the combat starts limited but grows exponentially. given the price, id say this is a extremely solid value for the time, its not so long that its daunting, but it rewards thorough play. very solid game.

Timespinner is a perfectly cromulent castlevania clone. That's not derogatory, this game's love of the metroidvania era of castlevania is worn on it's sleeve, and there are worse things to be than a just ok castlevania. But there are so many games in this mold that when one doesn't hit on all cylinders it makes makes me wish I was playing one of the many other similar games that's a better version of this.

Timespinner is a fantastic "Vania-styled" Metroidvania game despite seemingly generally forgetting about one of its core mechanics: time. Early on in the game, you gain the ability to freeze time. However, outside of a couple of mandatory uses, you can basically forget about that mechanic existing for the rest of a playthrough. I guess it could be used as a defensive option to dodge attacks if you thought you were about to get hit my something or wanted to reposition yourself around an enemy, but the game was never difficult enough that I ever felt the need to stop time for any of these purposes. That's not to say that every boss was a pushover (most were, but a few key exceptions were very much tough challenges), but rather that it felt (to me at least) that just learning how to navigate a traditional fight without any time-stopping felt very much viable. Perhaps other players used the time-stopping mechanic quite a bit, but I never saw the need for it, and it felt like a missed opportunity. I think incorporating more mandatory (or near-mandatory) uses for it would have enhanced a great game to even higher heights and would have set it apart as something more unique.

One thing that I feel needs to be mentioned in any review of this game is that the narrative is fiercely liberal with its portrayal of the sexualities and gender identities of the main characters. If that's something that triggers you (for lack of a better term) and will ruin your experience, you unfortunately should probably pass on this one.

Overall, Timespinner is a must-have for fans of "Vania-styled" Metroidvanias. I personally think it should have been a tad more difficult (hard mode is locked behind New Game+ unfortunately) because I was able to steamroll most bosses with a full aggro approach despite not grinding for experience (I just simply defeated random enemies that I encountered during world traversal). I also am not thrilled with learning that I cannot 100% the game on a single playthrough (you will have a choice between two bosses at the end of the game and cannot go back to fight the other in the same save file, so therefore your enemy logbook will always be missing 1 entry no matter what you do unless you play through the whole game again on New Game+ and pick the other boss at that point). Despite those gripes, I had a very enjoyable experience with the game and would consider it to fall in the "strong recommendation" category of games I've played.

Great metroidvania!

Difficulty: easy-medium
100 % achievement difficulty: easy
Graphics: beautiful pixel art
Music: very good

I've played a few Metroidvania games, but I'm a casual participant in the genre. In particular, I very much enjoyed Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the original Playstation. Of all of the games I have played since, Timespinner most closely captures the feel and style of that excellent game. It feels like an impossibly good Super Nintendo game that has mysteriously held up for thirty years. And, in the best traditions of SotN, it has multiple endings, some of which involve whole extra areas of exploration.

It also has a time mechanic and a time travel-based storyline; I'm a sucker for those. :)

An amazing game that deserves a lot of praise for how well it manages to pull off not only it's own setting, lore, aesthetics and mechanics, but also for how well it really captures that feeling of the GBA and NDS era of castlevania games.

It very much reminds me of Order of Ecclesia in terms of how it handles combat and equipment, and overall the combat experience is very smooth. The way that the different orbs, spells and passives function and how they interact is very fun to play around with, and while there is obviously a feeling of weaponry "sets" as it were due to spells and passives being linked to a certain orb and it's level, and thus have effects that might play into an identity of the set as a whole, they all function well enough on their own that it's very easy to just mix and match without having to worry that a certain orb, spell or passive isn't pulling its weight.

The setting and graphics of the game are amazing as well, the environments are beautiful no matter area you are in, and enemy designs range from intimidating to interesting to really cute. I particularly like how we get to see mechanically similar enemies in both the past & present, seeing how the world has changed between those two time periods.

The story is good, albeit a bit basic and somewhat predictable, but it has some cute moments here and there and i quite like having the quests from the characters in the camp in the past. It gives a good reason to continuously explore the map, and it even led me to constantly clear as much of the map as i could so i could make sure i had all quests i could do entirely done before i did the next major boss or story event.

I do have some minor gripes with some small mechanics here and there, but due to how most of these things go a little bit more in depth i'll spoiler mark them.

!!!THIS IS YOUR WARNING FOR POTENTIAL SPOILERS!!!

The first thing i ran into is how it takes a decent amount of time for the game to give any real new ways to traverse the map. You'll fairly quickly get access to the fast travel system after you make it to the past, and after that it doesn't take too long to get the double jump, but after that the game hits a little bit of a dry spell, only really giving you some new key cards and the water mask, which in itself moreso acts like a key to new areas than it does as a new traversal tool. The dash only becomes available after gaining access to the military hangar and asmodeus' lab in the present, and the super jump that allows you to gain height infinitely as long as there's no ceiling above you is quite literally in the last area of the game before the final boss. There's a budget version to get to high spots by finishing Haristel's questline, and using the orb you get for fighting the optional boss in Haristel's final quest to craft a spell that creates a pillar you can stand on, allowing you to cast it in the air and build upwards as long as you have aura, but it's a bit of a pain.

I personally did go a bit overboard with trying to clear each nook and cranny of the map before each major boss fight, but i do genuinely think it would have been a lot more fun to get these tools slightly earlier (moreso the dash than the superjump, if anything). The time stop mechanic is also fairly fun, but having sections where you are very reliant on guiding an enemy that is hellbent on taking you down into a spot where you can stop time and then having to use that enemy as a stepping stone to progress gets quite tedious, and it's not really used often enough to be warranted. In the end what could have been a really interesting mechanic for traversal and problem solving becomes more of a "i don't wanna deal with this" button for when i wanna rush through a room without having to either damage-boost or just kill everything.

The map also has some puzzles and fake walls that aren't necessarily too obvious. The main things i ran into that i felt a bit confused by were the vines in the lake area, and the gate door with the pink crystals in the royal towers. The vines are fairly straightforward, just needing you to burn them with the fire orb in the past to prevent them from fossilizing in the present, and the door in the royal tower is a bit obvious in hindsight as well, requiring you to approach while having the plasma orbs you get for beating aelana equipped (the crystals in the door mimic the orbs, and thus have the same color). These puzzles are fairly simple, and fit the theming and genre that the game has placed itself in, but both puzzles are pretty much one-of-a-kind and do not return in any way. The thing about the fire orbs being able to burn through vines is indirectly and off-handedly mentioned in one line of dialogue, and there's no other forms of set dressing that can really be interacted with in the same way as far as i know, so it becomes a mystery that i only figured out by looking it up. Same with the special door in thee royal tower, it's an interesting puzzle with a relatively simple solution, but due to it being the only one of it's kind and it just looking like a gate door with it's normally blue crystals turned a pinkish red, i just assumed it was a locked door i had to unlock somehow.

The same issue also presists with the fake walls. They don't stand out too much and are somewhat scarce. The oculus ring allows you to detect them, but i found most of them by accident by running the scythe ring for pretty much most of the game. I feel like even after having found what i think is all of them, there is a litany of spots where i was certain a hidden room would be placed behind a fake wall, only for me to mash my face against a solid wall for a few seconds.

The combat is genuinely really smooth and confortable, and there are some genuinely really cool orbs and spells available throughout all of the game, so that's why it disappoints me so to see such wasted potential in orbs that felt like they could have had some more identity given to the, like the shattered and iron orb. Another option could have been to have orbs evolve as they leveled, making their attacks not only stronger, but also more visually impressive and maybe reach further or gain secondary effects every x amount of levels or something. It would have been fun to see these orbs get a chance to stand out more, but alas, i feel they were victims of an elemental damage system that was committed to before the weapons were designed.

It would have just been more fun to see Lunais really grow in strength and manoeuvrability more as we progressed through the game, and to see how even the things we start out with become more effectively used as time goes on if we're builtding off of the orb leveling system that's already in place.

But, with all that said i'll just hold out hope that the sequel will take some of these issues and improve upon them, and if the quality of this game is anything to go off of, i have high hopes that the sequel will be something to look forward to.

All in all, despite the nitpicks i have, the game is truly an amazing experience, and really does the metroidvania genre justice, so i HIGHLY recommend picking it up if you have any interest in those kinds of games.

I'm still trying to collect everything i can in my current save, but i'm really excited to see what nightmare mode and NG+ have in store for me, and i'm also really looking forward to the sequel.

My hat goes off to the dev, please keep doing what you're doing and i'm sure the sequel will be an amazing experience as well.

Fun comparatively short game. I'm pretty slow to beat most games, so 12 hours might be on the long side for most people. Good story, fun encounters, just an overall small game in the metroidvania genre.

While the visuals are often times nice and several zones have some serious OST bops, the content that lines the levels' halls tends to be boring and without much variety. The Metroidvania genre often can have corridors that make you fight the same enemies several times in a row, but many sections of this game felt like a looping Hannah-Barbara background.

The Amadeus' Laboratory level in particular had these laser-eyeball enemies on the walls which almost exclusively came in pairs with one on each side in a narrow vertical tube which wasn't particularly fun to fight even the first time cause you kind of just can't stand in their path at all and you fight them by just spamming some attack in a place they can't even interact with you, but this exact setup for this enemy type I swear happens like 5 more times throughout this section. And honestly? That's how I feel about this whole game: You face something that was either bland or outright not fun, have a mild disappointment but press on, and then realize that was their only idea and by the end of the level having a steadily rising "wait, was that it?" without a moment of payoff, which made me feel like I never understood the good qualities of the game's vision.

Tuning wasn't a priority at all. I do not feel I did much of anything to become overleveled, but I was often getting hit for 1-3 damage with a health pool of 500+ in later moments of the game and I was able to stand on top of bosses not even bothering to dodge most attacks and winning on the first try. The only boss and level that felt a bit more challenging was the very last with the final boss actually having deadly attacks that needed to be learned that made me wonder where this care was for the entire journey leading up to it.

The game's rather short, and that's even with padding quests that feel like the worst offenders of an MMORPG. The literal "go and kill X these guys" from a zone you just came back from or "farm dudes until you get Y item" with rewards that either feel completely missing or underwhelming due to the game's lack of challenge. And while I have no problem with short games (Momodora Reverie Under The Moonlight being one of my fav Metroidvanias!) when combined with uninspired content and a lack of variety in enemy placement, it just feels so empty.

The combat is maybe my biggest disappointment. I was excited as the game started and the tutorial hands you a main-hand and off-hand attack (Orbs) with a charge-up attack and a slot for a passive ability too which made me really wonder what kind of wild mixing & matching I was gonna experiment with, but all the main attacks really feel virtually identical. Or the enemies are so stiff that whatever variety the different attacks actually have doesn't feel like it exists or has much purpose. The Blood Orbs being one of the only ones that felt a bit different than the standard "hits something at a small distance directly in front of you" since the Blood Orbs allowed for semi-homing attacks all around you... which then quickly became my default not cause I thought they were cool but just cause it made me not bother anymore with the enemies that hardly did anything and never tried to put me in interesting positions to consider my build more strategically.

Which further got worse from the game's upgrade system. There's a rather rare upgrade material that lets you increase the power of your Orbs/Weapons and I was expecting maybe you can rank up an Orb once each so your favorite doesn't outright outscale the rest giving you basically no incentive to even look at your other Orbs anymore, but that's exactly what the game does. And what's weirder yet is each further upgrade doesn't cost more of said resource. So it's kind of a no-brainer to just all-in something and officially say "yeah, I don't need to strategize or look at my other options at all" anymore. Which doesn't matter since you're not missing much in terms of gameplay variety anyway.

There's an extremely generic feel to pretty much the entire game from the characters' talk sprites to the plot that made me almost confused when the game attempted loosely to have a joke or something resembling personality. Most of the game's story is delivered from scattered multi-page notes that I had a hard time getting into and felt like they could break up the game's pacing more than I liked.

OH YEAH! And ironically I forgot to even mention the "main" gimmick of the game. Why I say Ironic is cause it felt like the game forgot its own gimmick too. You can stop time. This freezes objects and enemies which you can then use as platforms temporarily. This has almost no use in combat except to reposition yourself rarely and it's used in only a small handful of platforming moments (most of which are optional and are always the same solution of: there's a single enemy nearby. Maybe freeze it to use as a platform? ;p ;D) that the game shoves in near the very end almost like "wait OH FUCK we didn't use our game's literal namesake gimmick at all!" like there's some stuff at the very start where you freeze a collapsing bridge or pogo off an enemy in the first level, and then needing to use the mechanic is just. Missing. For the entire game until the final moment for like a single room. This might be the most bizarre element of the entire game and, man, it just feels like there wasn't a lot of inspiration in figuring out what would be fun to do with this game and design the levels and bosses around that. The whole game just feels unrealized and plain, and as usual, with only one simple idea they use over and over instead of thinking of a variety of ideas for... the game's main gimmick.

If you completely turn your brain off and just want a Metroidvania-shaped-object to chew on for a few hours, this game is "fine" in that regard and unoffensive. But it's perhaps the least engaging MV experience I've ever had and feels like it kind of does everything wrong. I didn't even mention how lazy the game's Past/Future thing is either where the entire game has a Past/Future version of each level, and the enemies barely change in some of them. I actually laughed when the final level (which in the past is a medieval castle) had the same soldiers with almost the same exact mechanics and moves but now they wore future-y versions of their armor as if they all were standing there for 1,000 years just waiting for you to show up again but now they wore their legendary skins they pulled from a loot box. And sadly? THIS WAS THE MOST EFFORT in changing a zone mechanically, like the future versions actually did *SLIGHTLY* different things you had to be aware of and dodge. The entire rest of the game felt like I was fighting the same derpy bird enemy 50x in a row.

So full disclaimer: the game does point at additional content and a Good Ending path that, I'm gonna be honest, I just did not bother with. There's possibly a bunch of great content that fulfills the game's vision and tackles a lot of my frustrations in there... but the entire journey left me so unimpressed I just wanted to see the credits instead of dive into another sidequest. And if that extra content is in fact really great, I'd be left even more confused why it was optional and the rest of the game was like... This.

Fun first session but quickly lost interest

nice game

It as nice metroidvania game, but the story was a bit thin but all and all it was good

I had fun wit this one. The game play was solid and fun but maybe its just me I felt that the time stop ability was under utilized. The art it pretty good honestly. The story is a time travel story but it felt kind of simple and maybe a bit convoluted. characters were not the most interesting but none of that ruined the game for me.

It's boring. Boring map, boring bosses, boring enemies, also a stats-based metroidvania, which I usually never like. Too much talking for how bad the writing is. I like the main character's sprite, that's about it. Character portraits look like they were ran through a Vandal Hearts 2 filter, which is a very specific and weird feeling to inspire.

Reminded me of Touhou Luna Nights.
Enjoyable, nice attacks, good style, unique enemies and an OK story.