Finished Transmute with 17 hours and 98 % clocked in.
It's pretty good. A fucking huge map on par with Hollow Knight, a lot of backtracking, upgrades. Huge amounts of influences from Hollow Knight, (Super) Metroid and Axiom Verge. I expected a fairly short 5-6 hours metroidvania.
It ain't perfect and has here and there unfinished or stupid stuff
- useless items that you can sell but clearly meant for something which is not in the game (yet?)
- not much explanation how the controls work, what you can do with your abilities. You basically have to try stuff out a lot. There is no real double jump ability! Don't wait for that.
- very difficult obstacle gauntlet rooms which lead to said useless item or just some money
- abrupt ending
- there are like 6 or maybe 7 batteries in the game (used to add more perks aka hollow knight charms) and 4(!) of them are in a single room
- 2 certain charms are pretty op with not enough drawback that trivilize later fights including the final boss
- Markers to pin some stuff on the map are not available until later (second area)
- There are 3-4 rooms where you hop on many enemies to reach an item but can't go back, because the enemies are dead now. Only way back now is to die (there is a quick setting for that in the menu)
- It also doesn't help that there is a charm that gives you little flying robot guys that attack enemies for you and also pinpoint hidden stuff (cool), but they attack sometimes crucial enemies, which you need alive to hop on them (not cool)
- There are a couple (mostly optional) rooms which want some precise plattforming action from you. Most of them are bullshit honestly. Only the ones where you have to swim with high velocity are pretty cool.
But overall that's like 5 % of the full game that I don't enjoy. The rest is metroidvania perfection. The content is insane. There is so much to explore.
You have to mark a lot because you will be backtracking a lot. There is a lot of stuff you will pass by because you can't reach that shit yet.
There allready have been 3 or 4 hotfixes/patches from the dev, so I am confident, they are still working on it and complete the game and fix some stuff.
Like I said it has its weaknesses and you can clearly see hollow knight influence in there (enemies and bosses pattern are more or less copy pasted).
But it's not a lazy clone like some other shit.
And its done by 1 single person afaik. Besides testers, translation and stuff.
Good stuff.
