Finished Pseudoregalia. It’s 7/10

Let’s start with the stuff I liked.

The movement is obviously the star of the show and is really the entire point of the game. You’ve got a bunch of fairly simple movement abilities that you unlock throughout the game and the fun comes from learning to combine them together in creative ways. Traversing the levels is really fun and feels (mostly) effortless when you learn the movement. The feeling reminds of Mirrors Edge or Celeste. A good feeling to have.

Another great thing is the level design. The game is divided into these interconnected levels that you can traverse and explore in any order you want. The only thing that restricts you is the movement abilities you currenly have unlocked. Kinda feels like Dark Souls 1. I think people call this type of game “metroidvania”. Each level feels unique and memorable due to their music and different texturing work. Music in particular is very solid. And despite the game being stylised to look like something that could probably run on N64, some areas look legitimately beautiful.

spoiler

Also the deer-bunny girl is

Now the stuff I didn’t like.

First of all, despite how good the underlying movement systems are, I think the game does a poor job at taking full advantage of them. It is simply too short and has too few levels. On top of that, some of your best movement abilities with some of the highest sandbox potential(wall run, hit-bounce thing) are unlocked very late into the game and you barely get the chance to play around with them. Imagine if Celeste’s dash ability was unlocked in it’s final area. It would have served the game really well to have just one extra level specifically designed with all the movement in mind, something that would really tie the game together. In fact, there is even a perfect opportunity to place such a level. At one point you would come across a giant door with 5 key holes. Your job from then on becomes collecting these 5 keys in order to unlock the door. To get all the keys your character would need to have all their movement abilities unlocked. The game essentially asks you for the proof that you’ve unlocked and mastered all the mechanics it has to offer - a perfect opportunity for one final challenge, right? Instead, the door leads to a rather underwhelming final boos fight (more on that later). Very disappointing.

Level design is also not without it’s flaws. Since the game is a “metroidvania”, level designer(s) need to be very careful and make sure each path is designed with all possible movement combinations in mind. Unfortunately, I found a couple instances where with creative use of my available movement, I was able to progress into paths where I technically wasn’t supposed to be, until I hit an area where my current movement was clearly insufficient to progress any further. That would fine, except I also found myself unable to backtrack since this would require the abilities I currently didn’t have - it’s a softlock. This unfortunately discouraged me from trying to be creative about exploration and from that point on I would only try to progress through areas which I 100% knew I could beat. There is another way level design discouraged my careless exploration - most levels have paths that lead to some older areas, and there were cases where going down those paths would leave me unable to return to the area I actually wanted to explore (without making a huge circle around the entire game). This taught me to constantly check the map at every intersection to make sure I’m not going into areas where I don’t want to be.

A little paragraph on combat. It sure does exist. And it’s by far the weakest part of the game. It essentially amounts to running around the enemy and whacking it with a stick until it dies. It’s not very challenging or interesting in the first place but what makes it even worse is that your character unlocks new combat abilities throughout the game, which quickly makes her extremely overpowered. Making your character stronger makes sense in a game where combat becomes more difficult over time, however in this game you gonna be fighting the same 5 enemies from beginning to the end. I straight up think that combat is an unfinished aspect of the game because it only felt interesting or creative in the very beginning (there were couple of fun surprises with the knight enemy for example).

Now on to bosses. There are two of them! Two! There is one close to the beginning and one final boss at the very end. It’s probably too much to ask from a small indie game for each area to have it’s own thematically appropriate boss, but two? I think it would have been less strange if the game only had one final boss, but as it stands it feels like they made one boss for the beginning of the game, then completely forgot about this aspect for rest of the game, and then decided they needed one final challenge at the end. These bosses aren’t particularly interesting either - there are basically just normal enemies with beefier health bars. Both of them are combat challenges occurring on a flat, mostly featureless arena. This could be fine for the first boss (maybe it’s just teaching you the basics of combat) but focusing your final challenge of the game ENTIRELY around it’s weakest part is a terrible decision. The final boss is not much different from all other combat in the game - you run up to it, hit it a few times, it teleports away, rinse and repeat. Yes, the movement plays no part in this fight. One great way they could have improved it is by mixing combat and movement together - for example, you hit the boss a few times, it teleports away somewhere unreachable, then you have to parkour to it using all the movement abilities you have learned in order to hit it again. Or they could have removed the combat aspect altogether - just make it a long traversal challenge, kinda like what Braid did for it’s boss. Honestly if they did either of these, it might have alleviated most of the problems I had with not fully utilising the movement. Also the final boss was super easy due to the character being extremely overpowered, I beat it on my first try. Maybe if they at least made the boss a bit harder, this could have added a reason for all those combat upgrades to exist.

Another thing that soured my experience a bit is all the bugs. Most of the bugs are harmless. The menu system in particular is incredibly buggy for some reason - amateur stuff. But I also encountered two, more serious bugs where my character got stuck in an animation without any way to move - both times it happened on moving platforms. One of them caused me to lose significant amount of progress.

Also I don’t know if this is just a skill issue but some movement abilities feel weird to use. The “kick” ability sometimes activates when I don’t want it to and the wall run sometimes doesn’t activate when I do. I’m sure if spend another hour specifically practicing these abilities I could get them to work consistently but I believe basic movement should come naturally. The challenge of the movement has to be about how you combine these abilities in a clever way, not about fighting the controls.

Overall a good experience but it could have been so much better with some more time in the oven.

Also I’ve been going through the original Company of Heroes campaigns. I wish my infantry knew some parkour so they could jump over a fucking fence