Recent reviews by Times

A thrilling start to a story I've waited years to read! Finally, after so long, I'll get to experience a deeper telling of this emotional story! I really, really hope that all of the volumes will be translated, because I wish to read them all!

This program is abandonware now. Luckily it installs the 1.0 version by default, which is at least functional. The 2.0 version is a toggle in the Steam properties menu, and it's completely unusable in its basic functions. The 1.0 version does work, but it's incredibly clunky and poorly thought out. If you want to install custom assets, you have to upload every single one of them one. at. a. time. I hope you didn't have a 100+ tile set you wanted to install. Said assets are laid out in folders that are locked to specific tools. Wall folders for the wall tool, floor folders for the floor tool, etc. This is fine and makes sense, but once you actually open a folder to browse the tiles inside, they're listed in one looooooong menu that you have to scrub through manually, as this program does not support scroll wheels. There's no way to shorten these menus either, because the program does not support sub-folders. It's all or nothing.
Finally, when actually drawing in map assets, there is absolutely no smart tiling whatsoever. If you draw a wall, you have to manually switch to the end-cap or corner tile and stick it on the end. If you're drawing a pool of water that isn't a perfect rectangle, you'll have to manually pick every edge tile. It's tedious.

This is sad since DPS had some promising features. Steam Workshop support was a huge one, plus its actual functions are pretty easy to grasp in and of themselves, being much less obtuse and having a shallower learning curve than something like DungeonDraft. Doubly sadly, it looks like this wouldn't have remained true if the dev had kept working on the project, since the 2.0 version swaps out the floor and wall tools for things like a "glade" tool. What the hell is a glade tool? I just want to draw a wall.

OVERALL
Fun, but feels unfinished. Like is so often true with the series that inspired Spark, this one could have done with another year in the oven. The stages are cool and interesting, the music is really good (even when it re-uses tracks from the first game), and Fark's controls feel very smooth and satisfying. It plays more like a proof of concept or demo than a full game, so I'd recommend picking it up on sale.

PROS
The game looks very good and feels good to run around in. The levels are pretty huge and very interesting, though unfortunately there's not a ton of reason to explore them. The animations are really excellent, and the boss fights are fairly cool to look at even if you end up fighting them all in basically the same way. The final boss, in particular, is very visually exciting.

The music, too, is really well done. The stage music is catchy and fun, and I'll probably be adding some of the tracks to my playlists. The boss themes are different from the stage themes in that they have vocals and have a more organic feel. They really manage to evoke a certain other series' iconic music style while also having their own personality. Unfortunate, then, that there isn't enough music for all of the stages and bosses to have unique tracks, and several stages re-use tracks from the first game completely unchanged. If this were put out under a publisher I'd say they ran out of time, but it's self-produced so the lack of a fully fleshed out soundtrack is a bit confusing.

CONS
The places it falls down are in the story and the combat variety. The story is thrown at you in sudden bursts and many times it feels like you've missed large chunks of it and the characters feel both flat and incomplete. E.J, for example, is clearly supposed to have some sort of impish rival to tragically used fool story, but you never actually see that arc. He just shows up a few times, gets clowned on (heh), and then dies near the end after undergoing a revelation that mean pretty much nothing to the audience. It's very sad that we didn't get to see what the story wanted us to. All of the characters end up with this same problem to varying degrees.

On the combat variety side, while the controls for combat feel good, there's practically no variety to them and they feel much simpler than the fist game. Outside of boss battles there's pretty much no reason to fight enemies other than getting points, and the only thing points get you is medals which eventually let you buy Fark's super form to play in levels. By that point, though, you've already mastered all the levels so why bother? The fighting, when you do need to do it, is pretty much just mashing the attack button and holding block whenever an enemy winds up their strikes, meaning that aside from memorizing certain attack patterns of bosses there's not a lot of room for interesting gameplay. In addition, the power-ups are so simplified, in fact, that I don't actually know if the different forms you can pick up are anything other than cosmetic changes. They all control and animate exactly the same. This makes the fact that you can buy these power-ups with the BITs you pick up in levels kinda funny, in a sad way. On the bright side, Edgy Fark has a certain black hedgehog's jet shoes and actually has a different run animation for them, which is really cool.

After brief reflection, I realized my original review did not emphasize just how good the music in this game is. You have to re contextualize the entire experience around it. Point of fact: This is not a game with a good soundtrack, it is an amazing album that comes with a game attached to it.

Back to the original review.

Definitely a fun little arcadey shooter. I don't usually go for this sort of thing, and the game's really difficult, but something keeps drawing me back to try again. I've managed Easy and Normal modes so far, and I'm trying for Hardcore, but my hopes aren't high. Still, the absolutely banging soundtrack, stunning visuals, and snappy gameplay were well worth what I got out of it.

The only downside so far I've noticed is that the plot is confusing. I thought I got the bad ending at first, but it seems that's actually the only ending. Not sure what I'm supposed to take away from that. Who is this masked man? What's he after? Why is his failure inevitable even though I went through all the effort of beating up the final boss? Very perplexing. Apparently the hardcore ending hints at something or other, but also apparently the original ended the same way, so I must ask what the point of it all was.

::SPOILERS AHEAD::

Really great fun for DLC, and absolutely worth the teeny tiny asking price. The new map, Mt. Moonspell, is very different from other maps in the game in that it has distinct areas and paths. You can't just walk in a straight line towards wherever you're going. You have to find it, and that's pretty cool. The new characters and weapons are fun and creative as well. Although some new passive items might have been cool, basing everything off of the original set and using those in clever ways is equally as fun. On top of that there are new unique enemies that even behave and attack in ways other than just walking into you, albeit only a few.

My only major complaint would be that "8 new characters" is a just a little misleading. There's really six new characters, plus two powered up versions of characters. You get to experience the powered up from just by playing the basic version, so the always powered up versions are just fun little bonus runs. The base game has similar things in it though, so I don't really mind. Definitely glad they were included. I don't say no to a little extra fun.

I recommend this game pretty highly. The combat is fun, the platforming is fluid, and the overall challenge is just about right. If you want to know if you should or should not buy this game, the answer is you should. You can stop reading here.

If you want to know my full opinion: This game is good, but flawed. This game has had corners cut, and the edges are still very sharp. The game is absolutely rife with allusions to content that it simply doesn't have. There's a ton of secret chests that are hard to find, but most of them are full of unique garbage items that are never used for anything. Tons of NPCs will highlight text in red to indicate it's important, but it references things that will never happen or characters that don't exist. The game showers you with valuable gems to sell for funds, but everything can be bought with the money you find by just walking around. Finally, and this is a fairly minor spoiler, the game has no after-care at all. You beat the final boss and BAM! Credits. I'm not asking for a full post-game scenario, but some indication of what just happened and what it meant would be nice.

It's a little tough to levy complaints like that against this game. I know for a fact that the developers put their hearts and souls into it, and it really does show. The game exudes a scrappy, inexperienced charm that I can't resist. I liked it enough that I went through the effort of finding nearly everything it had to offer. I'm still missing .25% away from full 130% though, and I fear it will stay that way forever because there's just not enough of a community to make exhaustive checklists and guides for it.

A really great experience that deserves so much more attention than its getting. I'm shocked this gem of a game isn't on everyone's mind. The witty writing, tight and challenging game play, and appealing visuals should rightfully be praised. The ability to fine-tune your difficulty on the fly is a fantastic idea, allowing a game that would be otherwise very difficult to be accessible to anyone.

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A thoroughly enjoyable game, but not without it's flaws. Big ones. It's very indie feeling, and not in a good way. There's an astounding amount of creativity and potential on display here, but the devs just don't have to muscle to back it up. Don't mistake that sentence though, I still absolutely recommend Overgrowth. The combat mechanics are satisfying and fun to learn, even if they are more than a little janky. You'd want consistency with a combat system like this, but unfortunately the game is just too jiggly for that. Moving around feels good too, but suffers from the same weird inconsistency.
The story really shines here though, or more accurately the worldbuilding. I legitimately want to know more about the world, because it feels like there's novels worth of story going on, but that most of it is just missing. Less like it's been mysteriously alluded to, and more like some pages are missing from the book. For every compliment I give this game, there's an equal and opposite criticism, and yet I still came away satisfied, which is the sort of thing only an indie game can pull off.
Overall, the potential for Overgrowth as a series is limited only by the budget and development team it's been given. I can only hope that any future games get the polish I believe the series deserves. Till then, play Overgrowth. It's four games in one and definitely worth the money.

Very cute and well put together, but a little too hard for while I'm in a relaxed mood. I might come back to this one, but if you like a tough platformer with an interesting auto scroll and jump mechanic, hit this one up. It's free, after all.