Recent reviews by Mina Valentina

Incredible game, exemplary of the metroidvania genre. Fantastic exploration, tons of upgrades, a solid challenge for platforming sections, and fun boss fights. Story is pretty good too. Audio is fantastic and matches the vibe of each area perfectly. Combat is fun, controls are responsive and tight. No complaints to note, just a really enjoyable time.

I would rank this on par with Hollow Knight - it's that good (albeit a bit shorter).

My word, this is quite the gem of a game.

I've previously played the demo and greatly enjoyed it, and the finished product is even better. This is truly a masterpiece in Metroidvania game design, and nearly every facet of the genre is captured to perfection in Zapling Bygone. The upgrade system, the map design, the art, sound, bosses, the story and dialogue, movement, combat, everything is just wonderful to experience.

From the very beginning of the game, the player movement is tight and responsive. The character is quick and agile while still being easy to precisely control. Once you unlock the first movement ability a few minutes in, things really start to shine and the character's movement throughout the levels becomes a complete joy. Stumbling upon an optional platforming challenge doesn't feel like a chore as it does in other games, but rather feels like a reward itself before you even complete it.

The sound design is just perfect, with the music being the right levels of subdued or intense when the gameplay calls for it. The sound effects feel punchy, timed well with the animations used to trigger them.

The pixel art is gorgeous, with the hand-animated details showing a high level of passion for the visual design of the game. Artwork styles are consistent yet diverse, and each area feels unique on its own while also making sense as part of a larger world.

Combat is super fun, with the responsive controls again shining here. The UI elements (e.g. HP bars, abilities slotted) are well-defined, easily understood, and unobtrusive enough to allow you to get absorbed in the actions of the characters. Bosses are well-designed and have attack patterns that provide just the right amount of challenge without being too frustrating. Normal enemies are also designed well, and their placement and density within levels feels perfect for both the gameplay and each level's lore.

Speaking of lore, the story is phenomenal, with well-written dialogue, lots of fun surprises, and more than a few funny moments that manage to pull off comedy in a video game without it feeling forced. The presentation of the optional collectible comics is fantastic, and I felt compelled to immediately seek out as many collectibles as I could once I saw the first comic panel unlock.

Bugs are minimal and so far not game-breaking, with only minor visual glitches or the occasional stuck enemy. Nothing that can't easily be ironed out with a quick patch or two, and nothing that affects the enjoyment of the game.

This is by far my favorite Metroidvania of 2022, and the developer should be immensely proud to have created a game that is exemplary of the genre in every way. Bravo!

Edit: Instead of accepting constructive criticism for the same points many, many other reviews are raising, the developers have decided to instead publicly bash all the negative reviews on their discord and insult players. Real class act. Avoid this game and development studio like the plague, they don't care about their players at all.

I was really looking forward to this game, and really, really wanted to give it more of a chance. But I've now refunded it with less than an hour played. The flaws are glaringly apparent before you even get to the first boss, and I had no sense of enjoyment whatsoever while playing.


Some points: 
Story/Characters

• The introduction felt unpolished and rough, as if it was a first draft. Plain white text with a bunch of exposition word salad while listening to the same repeated fake voiceover did not particularly make me excited for the game or care about its story.
  
• The one NPC I encountered before getting tired of the game had zero personality, felt like a generic "quirky helpful initial NPC" archetype, and had the bonus of his character model clipping through the terrain while the camera jumped around without any easing.

Movement

• The movement is super unresponsive, clunky, and feels like the character is on rails at times.
  
• You have zero aerial control - once you jump, you're going that way until you land.
  
• Running feels slow, but not in the sense that you're wearing armor (which was probably the intended effect). Instead, it feels like you're moving through a thick layer of molasses.
  
• There's no real impact to your footsteps and there's a slight slippery feeling to everything as well.

Combat

• I'll speak plainly: Combat straight up feels boring and uninspired, with limited opportunities for mobility or defensive actions.
  
• Once you begin an attack, you're locked into that attack until it's finished or you're interrupted by damage. This removes any skill from the combat system and instantly reduces it to pure luck and button mashing in the hopes that you can either dodge or attack before you're hit by the next barrage of uninterruptable attacks.
  
• You can't cancel into a dodge, and enemies are able to continue attacking you without a problem even as your weapon strikes through their bodies.
  
• There's a lot of input lag before an action registers, which makes the above issues even more obvious.

Art Style

• This is where some of the game's biggest flaws are, IMO.
  
• To start with, almost nothing in the game is actual hand-animated pixel art. Instead, the developers chose to draw a series of static parts and artificially animate them with a tool called Spine. While this works great for other types of digital art, it has no place in pixel art and is considered to be a lazy shortcut versus hand-animated pixel art. To call this a "pixel-based" game is to call Elden Ring a pixel-based game because they both involve showing pixels on your screen.
  
• As a result of this animation choice, everything feels blurry and distorted when in motion, including the player character model. Even the player character's idle animation isn't animated by hand, and that's the easiest sprite-based character animation there is.
  
• Even the static pixel art is often of low quality, with jaggies prominently displayed, hard corners, and unclear / contradicting light sources reflected in the shading. Lots of repeating textures as well.
  
• There's a mix of pixel-based particle effects combined with more realistic particle effects, and it does not feel naturally blended when these appear together.
  
• As with the item/character/enemy models, the pixel-based particle effects are artificially rotated using Spine, not by hand-animating the sprite rotation for each individual frame.

Music / Sound Effects

• Again continuing with the theme of boring and uninspiring, none of the combat sound effects had any real "crunch" to them, and they often didn't match the timing of the actual attacks being made.
  
• It doesn't appear that there's any music beyond basic generic background ambient sounds, but given that I got bored so early into the game, maybe this changes later. Not a good sign to a fresh player though if everything feels and sounds bland right in the beginning.

Misc

• For a game that has been in development by multiple people for years, the level of marketing felt surprisingly limited. Splitting the audience across two discord servers was also a mistake, and many of the discord server invites found on the official pages for the game appear have been expired for months. That speaks again to the lack of final polish and attention given to the game.
  
• This is a game that would have benefited from being released as an Early Access title to gather more player feedback before releasing what feels like an unfinished and unfun product.

Biggest game disappointment since Cyberpunk 2077.

The entire game is one giant QTE. You're a cat, one of the most nimble and agile creatures alive, yet you can only jump at predetermined points in the game. It makes the game feel boring and unengaging. Yet another example of an overhyped game with a community rushing to give it praise for no good reason. I'll be refunding this and I don't recommend buying this.

I'm only a few hours in, but I can already confidently say that this is a fantastic metroidvania, and one that truly captures all the best parts of the genre. I'd honestly put it on the same level as Hollow Knight in terms of quality and polish, even despite not being finished yet - it feels THAT good to play.

Great platforming, challenging-but-fair puzzles, tons of secrets to discover already. Bosses are well-designed (and continuing to improve), areas flow well together and it's very easy to understand where you are on the map (without actually looking at said map). Character movement is incredibly responsive and it's truly a joy to traverse the rooms as you bounce and dash around.

Early Access-wise, the developer is incredibly responsive to feedback and very engaged with the community. It's clear that there's tons of passion behind this game, and it deserves every bit of support and praise it can get.

Developers abandoned everything fun about the game and decided to focus on a boring story that no one asked for. The entire game has half a dozen ships, that's it. Every promise they've made from the roadmap has been broken. No mod support, and the developers refuse to add it. Communication between the developers and players has also been nonexistent.

♥♥♥♥ this game, spend your money elsewhere.