I just hit my first difficulty spike: the watcher boss. It's quite frustrating. I had a good time with the game until then.
What's worse is that I need to go to the boss room to get my shadow back. This is when I really started to notice the game flaws.
Some game mechanics are poorly explained. I had to check online to know that the "witch" near the first village can retrieve your soul.
Then I checked to see how to upgrade my needle. I needed ore, luckily I had one, but no money. So I learnt online a merchant in the city of tears buys old relics at a good price.
I managed to upgrade my sword, but the boss is still giving me trouble. Should I just give up, get my soul back from the witch and explore elsewhere?
So yeah it's disappointing to need to check online to know what NPCs does what.
- The map should have been clearer, with the NPCs face and role displayed. Too many useless NPCs. Difficult to keep track of where the vendors are as a result.
- The map upgrades (Quill, pins...) should have been standard features from the start. I bought all of them as soon as possible anyway.
- Retrieving your soul when you die is mostly a waste of time and doesn't bring anything of value except more stress. You are punished twice from dying.
- Unfair difficulty spikes. You're never quite sure if you are at the correct level to tackle an area or a boss.
- The power-ups have been done to death and are not very exciting. They are also too few and far between.
- Your power progression is very slow. You never feel like a badass.
- Lack of direction. It's never clear what the ultimate goal or destination are. There isn't enough landmarks that make an impression on you, making a spot in the back of your mind you'll need to return there.
Super Metroid hadn't any of those problems. That said, it's still an excellent and very atmosperic metroid-like indie game so far.
