Recent reviews by flink

Enjoyed this more than I expected. While the video humor is a choice they went with, the written humor is cheeky fun, and the level design and traversal upgrades are quite engaging. I recommend this for 3d platforming fans.

What a fun game.

Given the flexibility of your moves (and infinite undo's), it leans more heavily into puzzle than pure tactics game. The game also lets you do some ridiculous overpowered combos if you line everything up right. Also, some abilities are really overpowered in ANY tactics game, which communicates to me that the devs want me to have fun doing crazy things, which I did. And it was a lot of fun.

Dialogue was fantastic, story was enjoyable, and great pacing.

Highly recommend.

So-so for me. It's a retro game like an old NES game and has a lot of the good and bad that those old games had.

I like:
- Art is great. Biomes are varied. A lot of impressive flourishes in many rooms that make me think it's "important" but it's actually just nice art.
- I enjoyed the music.
- Level design is quite varied and non-linear, which I generally find fun (but I sure got lost many times).
- Level design #2: New Game mode has a Remixed version of the main game map and playing NG after the main game is REALLY fun, as it's similar but with very different exploration and item upgrade paths. Bosses are hilariously underpowered but environmental traps and common enemies can still hurt a lot.
- I enjoy the upgrade upon death mechanic to help you as the game progresses.
- Map QoL: early on, you get an upgrade item that shows what rooms have available items, and is not locked to the very late game like many others.

I didn't like:
- Backtracking is so tedious. Rebirth always starts at the literal beginning of the tower, so you have to run quite a lot, depending what fast travel is unlocked and where you need to go. Character speed isn't the fastest, adding to the tedium, and almost every room has a fair amount of platforming.
- The manual save system is an oldie and ends up being barely useful. They're important for the character swap mechanic (more opinions on that below) until it's not. You can't travel or "go back to" a save point, as you end up in the beginning of the tower every time you die.
- Map lack-of-QoL: No legend, warp points have no detail to WHICH one you warp to (there are several sets), NG only: map entrances can lie, no map customizability in any way (e.g. placing custom markers).
- When spending orbs (currency) to buy upgrades upon death, upgrades have literally zero description. "Inner fire", "Lucky draw", "Poise". What the hell do those do and what am I getting for the orbs I'm spending? Try it and hope you don't regret what you bought! (Stuff like this is why pre-Internet game guides were published back in the day.)
- Character swap mechanic is really not fun to deal with in the first section of the game, compounding to the backtracking complaint. It's like that feeling where you go out and see someone and you realize you forgot their birthday gift and have to travel all the way home to pick it up and then go make it back to where you just were. Many other negative reviews harp on the early game simply being much fun at all.
- A side effect of the early game rigid swap mechanic is that I ended up sticking with one character for the vast majority of the game unless I needed the unique ability someone else had. Then I'd swap back, diluting the whole character swap mechanic in the first place.

I have no allegiance to these old retro games (despite growing up in the NES era) and compare it equally to other Metroidvanias I can play today, and this is not one of the ones I will remember with much positivity. But it's not anywhere near an objectively bad game, only a good game with frustrating design decisions. If you can get past the early slog, you may end up enjoying it quite a bit. So I recommend it, but barely.

Wow. Just incredible. Every part of it.

It's...fine?

If you're used to incremental games (numbers go up, increased automation over time) this feels like the first phase of an incremental game before it unfolds into the next phase with a new mechanic, except it just ends instead. The first 5 minutes of gameplay is not materially different than the last 5 - if you like it, then you'll like it. If not, you'll want to look for something else.

Fun game.

Good:

- combat
- movement options
- controls
- exploration
- pacing

Not great:
- story
- late-game backtracking, but the map will store "seen" secrets on the map so the primary challenge is trekking there
- zone (map sector) diversity, many enemies will re-appear in later areas and two large areas are exactly the same, so it felt like being stuck in a same area for a while

Solid 8/10

Great metroidvania. Map is huge, which means lots of explore (fun) and lots to traverse (not fun for backtracking). Fast travel is OK, only one per zone, and convenient fast travel (multiple points per zone) is restricted to a limited item (late game opens this up).

Combat felt good, lots of weapon types (only ever used one, honestly) and gear. Story is convoluted, primarily due to special terms used in this game. Dialogue is not great, but voice acting was pretty good. I didn't love the overall art style of the game, and the game has little animation (it uses a lot of static assets slightly rotated back and forth for movement), but individually the art was nice and clearly had effort spent on it.

Exploration and progress is generally non-linear, which is fun and also can be easy to get lost, as you will get a feel of what skill you need but don't know where to go to get it, and the huge map can lengthen that search. But there is so much to explore that the journey feels exquisite.

Depth is deep. Lots of quests, figuring out how to finish the quests, how to unlock certain areas, discovering a lot of areas are actually optional when completing the basic endings, discovering all the endings (like 10? had to read a guide), and wrapping your head around a lot of small secrets.

A few notes:
1. Inventory handling is kind of weird. It will keep an icon for items you do or don't have (it'll show 0), which really fluffs up your view. Plus you cannot sell the last copy of any weapon or outfit, which means that items that you ever get one of (like a special chest) will stay in your inventory forever. The only items of that kind that gets sold will be rare equipment drops from common enemies. So I never bothered trying to sell anything, basically.
2. The game will show a completion percentage (0 to 100%) per zone and is based on map uncovered, and NOT based on items obtained. You can obtain an afterimage late game that shows the actual number of items obtained vs available, which is what's actually helpful.

Anyway, this is a great game for MV fans.

Great platformer. Really enjoyed the level design and art, and the controls are tight.

A few achievements are a bit buggy (need to revisit every room to complete despite being "done"), and the game is unfriendly toward finding missing collectibles (no tracker or counter to help find them), so be careful with that if you plan to 100% everything.

Looking forward to more if they make any more!

Just terrific.

Oh my goodness, this game is so good as-is, but even more so as an Early Access game. Extremely polished, lots to do, great visuals and animations, and lots of flexibility as a factory-sim game on top of an endgame (build the sphere).

There are several established gameplay mechanics that the devs could take to expand this game in many many directions that it's exciting to see where DSP ends up 3/6/12/24 months from now. But the fact remains is that it's so good now and there is no need to wait.

If you like Factorio's and Satisfactory's gameplay but set in space and extended with new mechanics, then this is a must-have. No combat at time of writing, so it's pure spaghetti factory-sim bliss.