Until I Have You

my eyes!

God Game.

Don't be fooled by the somewhat derivative synthwave aesthetic and pretentious emo storyline stuff the game has going on, it's literally one of the coolest 2D sidescrollers for exciting setpiece driven stages and variety I've ever seen. The first 2 chapters are very normal, but things get very crazy and unbelievably cool right after that.

Absolutely recommended for someone wanting aspects like that in a game like this.

If you asked your 11 years old little cousin and his friends to make a video game, you'd get something like this. Terrible controls, laughably bad animations, cringe voice acting, and a veeery edgy protagonist.

I can see the appeal of this game. The dystopian cyberpunk style is done well, with the music and voice acting being very fitting. The pixel art graphics range from practical (in the levels) to downright beautiful (in some still images). If this were a point & click adventure, I'd be all over it.

Alas, it is a platformer. An unforgiving platformer at that, with one-hit death mechanics and a contrarian gameplay approach where you are encouraged to go super sonic speeds but you actually shouldn't unless you have studied the level layout and are a master at pixel-perfect platforming. I have/am neither one or the other, so what I am left with is (at least in the first 4 of 12 stages) a really mediocre 2D side scrolling shooter with boring enemies (except for the boss fights, who all have some sort of puzzle mechanic, where you need to find the right approach to the fight and stick to it for several minutes). It's really not engaging and for me personally a detriment to my enjoyment of the dark story. I will look up an LP to get the story at some point, but I do not want to slog through the rest of the game.

This is just my personal take due to how bad I am at these types of games, so if you do enjoy fast-paced platformers, then this might just be the game for you.

Pretentious, clunky, derivative, overpriced... but on sale, there is enough here to warrant play.

There are nods here to some great games and movies. It's clearly been done out of passion for the genre and that is valuable.

But just be warned it is rough and that clearly has upset some who couldn't get past it and negatively reviewed.

In terms of the style, the 'p*** on their carpet' script is enjoyable to me - there is many a great game with terrible writing which can't even be ironically enjoyed.

Here, if you have an iffy script and a rough game, why the thumbs up? It's because you just want to get 100% on the levels, not because the levels or the gameplay or the narrative are perfect.

But if that button is pressed, where I want to get the stages right, then a game is clicking. And we've all known plenty where it has everything down, but it just doesn't make you want to play it - there's no itch.

Here, I want to come back. And for the price paid, that is excellent. Have wishlisted other titles by the developer and hope to play some of those.

Bottom line: slickness isn't everything, fun comes in different forms :)

Really cool atmosphere and music that you can tell care was put into. The controls however, are unforgivably bad at times, leading to many deaths immediately after respawning, and moments of just sheer "What?! What even happened?" If you're patient, go ahead, otherwise don't get this.

Platforming is a big part of this game and the controls are clunky to say the least. I finished the game in hardcore mode in 4 hours with a lot of restarting to get 100% completion on all of the levels. Even without doing 100% there's a lot of restarting on the hardcore mode as You'll fall to death many times and will have to remember some level layouts to pass through them. If you're not turned off by the fact You'll die often then You should definitely give it a try. The story and soundtrack is great and each chapter tries to add more variety to the game. You start with a pistol and a bat and as You progress You get access to other weapons and an ability to dash. Chapters introduce new stuff and bossfights according to the upgrades You get. In some boss fights You don't have to fight with the boss but chase them or dodge their attacks until the end of the fight. Voice acting is good enough though the Doctor VA sounded a bit weird and made the game a bit awkward. For the price it might be annoying with clunky controls and a lot of falling but on a discount it's definitely worth a try.

Can't quite recommend it - I expected something entirely different, namely, a 2D platformer/action shooter, etc... this is a game where every level I've encountered so far, takes less than 12 seconds to complete. You basically speed up in your exoskeleton suit, and you do some precision/timed jumping to get to the end. There are enemies along the level, and you do have weapons - but in first 8 levels the easiest way was to just bypass them all since you can run so fast.

There are some basic upgrades, and some interesting story... but this game could've worked without it, no problem.

I dig the artstyle, but levels are soooooo sparse. Its as spartan as it can get.

Anyway... it is still a complete game, and it has its niche I suppose, but I doubt that many people would find it entertaining enough to finish it. I for sure won't.

Played the tutorial. Plenty of little bugs. Worst default controller bindings I have ever seen. Gameplay is quite awkward as well. Like it's a game that was made by someone who has never played a decent platformer.

I'll start this review off with why I don't recommend the game:

If you develop a game that bases the player's mechanics on how far away the cursor is, DO NOT HAVE MOUSE ACCELERATION PLEASE. This *extremely* p***ed me off to the point where I had to switch over to controller. Alas, controller was great but still not the same experience for dodging. Please, please, please! At least allow an option that turns mouse acceleration on and off. The only way I was able to "turn it off" was to run the game in Windowed Mode but then the cursor wasn't locked within the window, so I kept clicking outside the window. You have absolutely no idea how frustrating that is. If these things were patched up, I'd happily try this game again.

Positives:

I love the art, the voice acting, the music and the atmosphere. The levels and bosses are challenging enough to get me through the stages to figure out where this is leading. Some bosses are absolutely unforgiving when you miss which can be both a source of annoyance and a source of pleasure when you finally beat the boss.

The game is decent overall. For what it lacks in game design and mechanics, it makes up for in stylish visuals and nicely written plot. If you want to dive into the cyberpunk adventure for a few hours, then "Until I Have You" would be a good pick.

Do you know why “idea guys” are so useless in the game industry? It’s because the concept for a game is just the beginning of the long road to greatness. A great game is made from mechanics and content that build off of the concept into experiences that challenge and enthrall the player. Wormwood Studios absolutely proved they could do that with Primordia, but their showing in Until I Have You suggests that their talents for design may not extend past point-and-click adventures. As much as I might want to enjoy an emotional cyberpunk noir action thriller, frustrating platforming and awful enemies make that nearly impossible.

Your hero is the classic assassin with a heart of gold, a brutal killer who wants out of the game and sees his beloved wife snatched up as revenge for his insolence. Instead of giving in like no protagonist ever did, he finds himself an exoskeleton that makes him even deadlier than he was to begin with. Armed with his newfound metal bones, a baseball bat, and a little pea-shooter of a gun, he’s on a mission to kill his way up the chain until he finally wrenches his woman from the hands of his masters. But there’s a lot of blood to spill along the way, and if that doesn’t take its toll on him then the strange side effects of the exoskeleton might.

Until I Have You is absolutely steeped in navel-gazing noir, the kind where every neon light reminds him of the sparkle in her eye and every portrait on the wall ignites a simmering rage in his soul. It’s the kind of overwrought drama that’s hilarious unless played straight, and here it’s played woefully straight with some amateur voice acting to give the awkward brooding some life. It gets harder to cope with when you find yourself battling cyber samurai cosplayers unironically, and even moreso when your character grumbles about cuts deeper than any samurai sword. You’re either going to be chuckling and shaking your head at the cutscenes, or skipping them outright to get back to the action.

Then again, you might not find yourself so eager to get back to the action. Until I Have You is split into twelve stages, each containing about half a dozen scenes. These scenes are the actual levels of the game, short platforming challenges that last less than a minute when executed correctly. Most of the time they’re simply a matter of going all the way to the right, leaping bottomless pits and clubbing enemies to death along the way. Your murderdude can get a real head of steam going, and will need to when the platforms get scarce enough that you’re making leaps of faith off the side of the screen. And that’s just a warm-up for when you have to time those jumps to speeding trains or security guards that can kill you in one hit with their seemingly random attacks.

There’s nothing wrong with a good challenge platformer but this one is way too stiff and unforgiving to make your progress gratifying. Your basic attacks are a bat swung in a tiny, canned arc and a pistol that glows like a child’s toy when you fire it. Movement is slippery, and while your jump is functional just running into the side of a platform can glitch it out. You simply won’t ever feel like you’re properly equipped for the challenges you face, and that goes double for the awful, awful boss fights. Each has an extremely obvious pattern that you’re still going to die to because the controls won’t do what you want them to or the hitboxes decide that standing slightly behind the cyber-samurai is deserving of death off a forward-lunging swing.

I approached Until I Have You with plenty of optimism, eager to see what the folks behind Primordia could do with an intense cyberpunk setting. But it all feels so wasted, even the grim neon city that feels relegated to backdrops and curious vistas I would rather hear about than my character’s constant lamentations. The mechanics simply aren’t there to keep the action engaging, even as they add cool-sounding stuff like time dilation and a hysteria meter. I toughed my way through four stages of frustrating platforming and infuriating bosses and it only got worse, not better. Maybe if you’ve tired of better platformers you can try tackling this one, but you’re going to have to run through a lot before I can believe this is the best that’s left.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

Super retro platformer. This is straight off my 386 CD-ROM drive. Some of the gameplay is weird, but in a way that seems to be right from 30 years ago. There is a demo, so you can try it out and see what you think. At least watch the steam community videos, the gameplay is really quite different than other platformers. I strongly recommend researching the gameplay. (It could be called so-bad-it's-good by some!) The purchase price also includes a lengthy soundtrack with MP3 and FLAC files.
It is working fairly good on ubuntu linux with a controller. There was one fix where I had to remap the sprint key.

Authentic cyberpunk atmosphere created through thrilling plot, exellent synth-based soundtrack and well-detailed pixel graphic, combined with original gameplay makes this game totally perfect. Small dose of dementia and interesting characters are nice bonus.
The only minus is voiceovers. You can easily hear the difference between VO actors skills. Especially for females.

I picked up this game because I dearly love all things cyberpunk. I'll keep it short and simple.

Pros:
-Okay story
-Decent music
-Decent aesthetics

Cons:
-Controls are awful (with the mouse, gamepad was better)
-Some levels are poorly designed with very tight tolerances (low margin of error). A particular subway level comes to mind.

I got it on sale but it still didn't seem worth it sadly.

Until I Have You is a fast-paced, energized platforming game. You control a very skilled professional thief, known as The Artist, now outfitted with a poweful exoskeleton, who's out for the blood of his former clients. With this exoskeleton, he's extremely fast, has enough strength to crush through walls and military robots, can block projectiles with a force field, and can slow his time perception to react to any threat.This, however, costs him his physical and mental health, and his time is limited, so he's got to kill all his targets as soon as possible.

The gameplay allows various approaches to the levels. You can carefully check enemy timings and pass behind them when they don't see you. You can unleash your deadly arsenal on them - and by the way, there's much more than the bat and the pistol you start with. And the most exciting option is just run as fast as you can, timing you jumps, force-field blocks and precise attacks to rush through the level in minimal time possible. This really goes on with the feeling of urgency the plot imposes on you.

Each level brings something new to the gameplay, by adding new environmental mechanics, giving you new weapons and unlocking your abilities. Some levels will require you to be either exclusively stealthy, murderous or quick, but most of the time you can use a combined approach. The game rewards the consistency of your style: for example, you get bonus points for either not killing at all or killing everything, preferably without changing your weapon.

And at the end of each chapter there's a boss - one of your targets. The boss fights are some kind of a puzzle: each boss is not like the other, and you have to do a lot of different actions to survive and kill them, for example using your exoskeleton-induced hallucinations to point out targets, or literally jumping through hoops.

For this kind of a game, controls are pretty important. I played through the whole game with an Xbox controller, which was pretty comfortable. Then, for the sake of a complete review, I played some levels using keyboard, and that was, surprisingly, also good. The default layout looks a bit chaotic (Shooting with the A button? Seriously?), but actually it's really suitable for the game and will feel natural right after the tutorial.

The plot, while managing to impose a feeling of urgency, looks sort of haphazard. You don't really understand why The Artist prioritizes killing his former clients over rescuing his wife, why would they even kidnap his wife, why does the doctor who provided him with the exoskeleton continues to help and support him, even putting herself at risk sometimes. It all comes together nicely in the ending, though, and the final cutscene is just perfect. And, as interludes between chapters, there're holo-recorded episodes from The Artist's family life (which are kinda boring) and TV news reporting his latest exploits (which are grimly hilarious).

All this is accompanied by a good soundtrack, which comes with the game freely. While retrowave music is a standard for pixel-art cyberpunk games and pixel-art fast-and-violent games, the game's composer managed to make it sound fresh by using some instruments and patterns unconventional for this genre. It is also mastered in intentional lo-fi, and that adds a nice touch and goes well with the art style, the plot's atmosphere and in-game sound effects.

Only about 2.5k people have bought this game as of today. For its price, Until I Have You is definitely worth your attention.

P.S. For more hidden gems, follow the steam CRIMINALLY Low Sales curator.

Interesting story told in a so so way. Great setting can't say the same about the platforming even with the gamepad. The demo is there for you to try, but after one hour. I had enough of "Until I have you" frustrating gameplay and bored of the chain of pit falls. The levels I played seemed to rely on trial and error play, the train level was a good example of this where you wouldn't even know that in order to pass a high speed run was required. The combat isn't up to much, there is little to keep me playing. Overall I'm starting to wonder if what I have played is even the same game that is currently sitting at positive reviews.

Until I Have You is a decent game for its price, though it has a few problems in it that prevent the game from being a definite recommendation.

The basic gameplay is action platformer, with various weapons to defeat your enemies with. The variety in the weapons is fun for most of the experience, but starts to drag a little towards the end as you stop getting new toys to try out. Two more advanced mechanics are the ability to slow down time and rewind when you die, which are cool features that add to the experience. I feel the slow down mechanic is underutilized, as I myself never used it once, but it is nonetheless a nice addition to your repetoire.

The stages have interesting designs, but while their concepts are interesting the execution of the ideas sometimes drags and can quickly become annoying. There is what seems to be an over-reliance on pits in some of the later stages, which, combined with the somewhat slippery edges to platforms and a speed system that sometimes doesn't quite speed you up enough, can lead to a frustrating chain of falls. I won't spoil the specialized mechanics of each stage here, but I would say around 30% of them are irritating to deal with over a 4-6 stage chapter. They only get annoying toward the end of the chapters, however, so it is not so bad, as you can get through them quickly and move on to something new.

The story of the game starts out alright, and remains relatively interesting throughout, but was confusing at points, and ultimately left me feeling unfulfilled. The ending of the game was not satisfying (though that is of course subjective), and left me wanting. I am unsure if there are multiple endings based on what percentage you achieve, but the structure of the later stages makes it unnapealing to try for a higher percentage (I got a final % of 92).

To conclude, the game is fun to start, but at about chapter seven begins to drag. If you are willing to accept precision platforming over many pits, and a few awkward stage mechanics, the overall gameplay is decently fun and in some stages very rewarding. If I had to give this a score out of ten, I would give it a mid to high 7/10. I cautiously recommend this game, as some of the mechanics can be frustrating, but the game is fun in the end and has enjoyable neon/techno themed visuals.

Review: Until I have You

Introduction

Getting Started

Dying is for free - Game Mechanics

Atmosphere

Conclusion

With no controller on hand, I played the game with keyboard controls. It handled well, but your character continues to move a bit after you release the button, giving you some undeserved deaths during the game's platforming sections. Levels are short and same-y, and the first boss was tedious and just all in all disappointing. There are also severe issues with screen-tearing, and an irritating bug I had that caused the dialogue to auto-skip even with my hands off of the controls. In a story-based game, that's just not acceptable.

I left a review here last based on the initial response i had with this game, which was based on the control scheme you begin with in the tutorial. under the inlfuence that you have a choice between keyboard and mouse vs joystick, i assumed already that having a controller was obviously going to be ideal. not having a controller, i opted for the keyboard and mouse set up.

again my first impression was based on the movement and so on which was used by the mouse, and it initially turned me off completely. however the developer explained to me that the keyboard could be used on its own, which greatly improved the overall gameplay.

with that being said, it's obvious this game, like all side scrollers, should be played with a controller.

from the start, the game's visuals are fantastic. as an indie game you can expect indie-level voice acting and dialog, which isn't necessarily bad. it lets you know that someone worked on this game as an outlet for their creativity and something to share, and that should always be appreciated.

the world is cyberpunk, there's no denying it. and for cyberpunks like me and others like me, we tend to get pretty fickle on what is and isn't cyberpunk.

i look forward to trying out the game with controller input, but for now, keyboard layout (not the default one, don't use the mouse unless you're some kind of masochist) will suffice.

Quite a controversial game. It's ridiculously oldschool-looking but visual design is nice anyway. Story isn't that shocking but it was interesting to experience for sure. Music and atmosphere overall are great.

Game design feels unpolished though. There is enough content for all twelve areas. But levels within areas are similar and feel repetitive, followed by really easy bosses sometimes. I wish it was at least half shorter.

And a special shoutout to the hoverboard controls at the last area. I had to set keyboard keys and constantly switch between gamepad and keyboard just to pass that nonsense and see an ending.

I've never played Metroid or Castlevania, and I never finished Mario on NES -- so this game's ultra-fast pace and insta-death mechanics so popular in the days of yore should scare me. And they DID! But I love challenges. And big pixels! In fact, though it might not be immediately obvious, it made me think od Hotline Miami -- another game that I didn't feel I stood a chance against and yet tried anyway. Lo-res and intense gameplay aside, you'll find familiar themes of extreme violence and the protagonist's slow descent into madness, including terrifying hallucinations. It's dark, it's gritty, with just the right amount of tech-noir camp and dystopian grotesque. Just like HM, Until I Have You is hard. You'll die. A LOT! By level 4 of Chapter 1 you'll think: hey, I'm getting good at this! -- and for that level 5 will kick you in the shin. Repeatedly. I think I got my 1000 deaths achievement while battling Boss #1. And it'll only get crazier from there. Chapter 4 will have you wonder if it's humanly possible to get through. But you will. You'll learn that the right moment to jump up before an incoming wave of fire is when the flames start bursting right in front of you, and not before (because otherwise they'll burn you when you fall). You'll figure that the right moment to leap over enemies crawling up from below is not when they jump, it's when they're ALMOST in your face as you dash right at them at full speed. I'm currently on level 5.3 -- and needless to say it looks IMPOSSIBLE. Climbers AND divebombers?! :O Not to mention 5.2 gave me enough adrenaline for WEEK! So... enough for now. But I'll get back to it. Tomorrow! The tempo, the rhytm is just too exhilirating to resist. Sometimes it's like I'm seeing in slo-motion (without the actual slo-mo mode on). The rush is just crazy. You'll enjoy it, whether you're a seasoned platformer maniac or a timid sudoku enthusiast like myself!, Because yes, beating your record time in sudoku is ecstasy. But this is better!

Great platformer with a great atmosphere and great artwork. The artwork and story give the game an artsy touch, which I like. The pixel-graphics fit into the art style and the story fits to the pixel-graphics.
The gameplay is great, too. The controls are responive and accurate. You can play this game fast and slow just as you like, although there are some levels with a time limit, but the time limit was allways fair sofar.
During the two hours I have played I had two weapons. A baseball bat and a pistol. Both are requiered as some levels/parts of levels are easier to challenge with the right weapon, but if you are quick enough you can run past all of the enemys, but you need much skill for this in the later levels as the suroundings become more and more dangerous and it becomes easier to stand still, kill an enemy and look and wait until you know the movement patterns of the level (moving platforms, laser beams).
Both ways are equally fun: fast play and slow play.

And yes you will die alot, and this game might frustrate you at some point, but if you like platformers you are going to enjoy every single death as you learn from your death. You learn how to play the level step by step until you finished it and after finishing you want to try the level again just to reach a better score.