3 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 5.7 hrs on record
Posted: 4 Feb @ 11:05pm

So, I got this as a part of a Humble Bundle, and in that context, the game was a good experience that was worthwhile. I don't think I would have felt the same way if I had paid full price, though.

In general, the game looks great, and I didn't experience any of the performance problems or softlocks that others mentioned. The world and the characters are colorful and endearing, and the core feeling of flying around on the broom is nice.

However, the story is still saccharine and hits predictable beats throughout. The writing isn't especially helped by the minimal voice acting, which is pretty much just a small series of grunts and "hey!"s that get fairly repetitive.

The main disappointment for me, though, was how much the game felt like a missed opportunity. Others have talked about how short the game is, but I was personally surprised at how little the game does with its own mechanics.

Flying around feels nice, but is mostly gliding. At first, you can only glide, losing altitude, but soon you gain the ability to boost yourself upwards vertically, sort of like a double jump. When I got this new ability, I was excited to see what else would unlock as the game progressed! Maybe a stronger vertical boost, or multiple boosts. Maybe a dash for a burst of forward speed! Maybe diving could start increasing your speed to give you better mobility. Maybe a button that lets you stall your speed and just drift to let you take tight corners more quickly.

But no, none of that ever happens. You get a little vertical boost, and future upgrades are pretty much just "you can carry more stuff at once". Most of the progression isn't gated behind movement abilities or flying better, but instead "turn on this machine that makes a wind stream that throws you over there". It doesn't help that some of these wind streams are somewhat inconsistent, too.

Another thing that doesn't help is the dungeons. I don't think these dungeons were a bad idea, but I don't think they were executed very well. They completely break the flow of the rest of the game, and feel out of place. But the biggest factor for that is that there's only three dungeons, and each dungeon is much too long for me. In the first dungeon, at the point I thought I was done, I was maybe a third to a half of the way through. After that I knew more what to expect, but it was still too much. The puzzles are time-consuming, often tedious, and sometimes not particularly clear about what they expect you to do. And it certainly doesn't help that leaving the dungeon means you'll need to start the entire thing over, so they really do grind the flow of the game to a halt. These dungeons would have worked much better if they were more spread out, maybe into three sets of five short dungeons instead of three dungeons that drag on.

Probably like a 6/10, I enjoyed it but the more I played, the more I felt like things were missing
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