Songbringer

Just going to drop a few notes here. This game is wonderful, and I've had an absolute blast playing it so far. (I'm about 15 hours in as I've been scouring every screen for every secret I can find.) There is just so much to find in this game. Tons of equipment, cool upgrades, cool locations, interesting and funny characters to interact with. To give a very rough idea, it would be like combining Hyper Light Drifter, Zelda: Link to the Past, and Super Brothers: Swords & Sworcery. It has a cool, yet light-hearted story that unfolds the further you go. I'd call it more of an action adventure than action RPG, though it has plenty of RPG-Lite elements to it. The combat feels good too. It's not quite as tight as Hyper Light Drifter, but it feels very good, if a bit looser overall. The visuals are incredible. I already love pixel art games, but the way this games blends cool effects, excellent dynamic lighting, and tons of animation into a low-def-pixel image really left an impression on me. The music is cool too. It's just low-key enough to be ambient and non-distracting, but it changes with context, and has a nice electronic pulse at the same time. It definitely blends well with the onscreen action. All of this combines to pull one straight into the game world. The procedural generation occurs when you start your game, and enter a word to create the seed. It is entirely repeatable, and the world, once generated, stays consistent throughout your play. This means that you can use your memory to locate places. The map is fairly utilitarian, but gives just enough information to let you know where you've been, whether there are points of interest, and where key locations are. I can't recommend the game enough.

Lovely graphics and sound, and lots of other neat features such as being able to type in a world-generating seed. It made me want to explore. Downsides: the UI and controls. The game nagged me to use a controller (I think) on loading; I set my own controls but there were lots of confusing elements, e.g. picking up an item gave options to "use" (which I think would destroy the item if it was single use) or to go to the inventory - but in the inventory I had trouble quitting back out, so often was just moving a cursor between a map and equipment. I think I had to press escape but it only worked on the map? It seemed clunky. A sword powerup appeared as a piece of equipment separate from the sword (and it seemed to disappear later). Those kind of things left me scratching my head and wanting to avoid picking anything up just to avoid the inventory interface. All that stuff is easily fixable, but at present it made the first experiences of the game more painful than they should be. I'm sure I'll give it another go at a later date.

I love this game. Some of the things that go into my love for this game are: Randomized, explorable environments. I really feel like I am exploring some place with a purpose. Great gameplay. This is a tribute to The Legend of Zelda (the original and possibly Link to the Past) and it really shows but it is modern as well. The attacking is tight but simple, the enemies are varied but have predictable attack patterns. There are iconic enemies that when you see them you think "oh crud, not those..." (the lizard guys with knives for example). Feeling of progression. At the beginning, I was getting trashed by the later dungeons but as you grow in skill and learn the use of items and enemy behaviors then you do much better. This is an item progression game rather than a stat progression game with XP and arbitrary strength upgrades (again, see tribute to The Legend of Zelda above). Amazing style, music, and graphics. These combined make for a really memorable experience. I've played a ton of modern retro games that just don't do it right. This one did it right. There is a lot of expression in the simplicity of the graphics and the environment feels alive but made up also. The music is great and minimal, almost reminds me of Night Stalker on Intellivision with it's repeated drum beats. The sounds and visual splashes are perfect. There is only one thing I dislike about this game and that is the screen shaking when many things occur: killing enemies, finding secrets, blowing up bombs, etc. This is common in many games these days and I wish it would stop because it makes me dizzy. If that can be disabled in a new version, this could very well be my favorite game since The Legend of Zelda or Metroid (the originals).

Very nice game, buy and play it!