Recent reviews by Marble

The game is alright but extremely broken.
For the game itself, I would have recommended it, if it weren't falling apart at the seams.

It's close but the technical issues mean I can't recommend it.
It definitely looks like it was designed to be a tech demo first and a game second.

Firstly, there are two aspects of the game that exceeded my expectations and kept it somewhat enjoyable.

1) The combat. Many games that give you a lot of weapon variety will usually fall into the mistake of having the player stick to the one they know best and never switching it up. This game avoids this by having very limited (but easy to replenish) ammo, which forces you to switch and experiment. The weapons are all fun and interesting and you quickly learn the best ones for each scenario.
2) The presentation. There's a lot of high-quality character animations, intricately designed worlds, an epic soundtrack and top voice talent (including an utterly unhinged Richard Horvitz performance) on display here. This game was designed to be a showcase piece for the launch of the PS5 and you can see it flexing its graphics tech in many areas, from the lighting and reflections, to the fur effects, to physics of small objects. It may not always work so well but it's all very impressive.

Aside from the weapons, the rest of the gameplay is rather mid. It's a short game with not much in the way of replayability or side content. The controls are tight and you get plenty of traversal abilities to work with, but it never offers up a platforming challenge that lets you put any of it to good use.
I might appreciate the story and characters more if I knew who they were, but this is the first and only game in the series to come out on PC and I never played the rest, so a lot of references probably just went over my head.

And I enjoyed the above, but I can't recommend it because the game is just so utterly broken. All your favorite issues are along for the ride!
~Spontaneous deaths
~Things not being interactable without restarting
~Selecting a weapon on the wheel doesn't actually change the weapon sometimes
~Framerate randomly tanks until restart
~Graphics settings not applying
~Character suddenly flagged as being in water when actually not
~Falling through the floor
~Broken RT shadows (lots of shimmer from foliage, also one time I was completely flat colored!)
~Very unclear in many places what is a solid wall and what isn't
~Sometimes character model animations just spaz out

The only thing I've never had is a hard crash to desktop. But yeah, this is such a janky game, I would probably hate it a lot more if it were challenging because there were so many cases of unfair deaths that would have made progression loss far more painful.

TLDR; Short game with decent gunplay, tries harder to look pretty than it does to be engaging. A technical mess that feels like it's constantly on the verge of breaking down.

Super addictive, left me wanting more but wouldn't give it to me.

Let me preface this by saying I had a lot of fun and I'd highly recommend this, but it has some massive issues that hold it back from being truly great.

For the first 20 or so hours, the game is a blast! You send a bunch of characters with their own unique abilities against waves of enemies, knocking them down with balls like Breakout/Alleyway, earning temporary and permanent upgrades. You get an expandable home base to construct buildings to unlock more stuff. The majority of upgrades all feel substantial and feel like they have a tangible impact on progression.

The issues start when you run out of things to unlock, and it happens very suddenly. For me around the 20-25 hour mark. The only thing you can do at that point is replay the old levels but they run faster and the enemies have significantly more HP. Without the promise of rewards, the gameplay just isn't that compelling to make you want to redo the whole thing with bullet sponge foes. It's mostly just standing around and occasionally adjusting your aim, hoping your stats and the temporary random upgrades you get will be enough to win with.

Basically, progression pacing just smashes itself into a brick wall rather than gradually taper off. Had it been balanced better it could have easily doubled the longevity of the game. Put some of the building blueprints behind the Fast mode or New Game+ modes, because these modes don't have any rewards and therefore I have no reason to play them!

Also had many glitches happen, including enemies that don't leave the board after dying, menu's getting stuck and not letting me leave them and also hard crashing to desktop. The base building part is also frustrating, it does a lot of things where certain buildings need to be in close proximity to others to boost their effect, making it like a jigsaw puzzle and you're constantly moving pieces around temporarily to be used where needed, with no sort of template or undo options to streamline this.

As said, still do highly recommend this. It scratched an itch, but was over far earlier than I'd have liked. If you've seen the gameplay footage and have an idea of what to expect, it's all that and a bag of chips! Just don't expect it to be something you can keep plugging away at on and off over a long period.

I'll go back and do a few more achievements and then that's me done.

Had a wonderful time with this game, 100% completion, beautiful and atmospheric with tight controls and endearing characters, absolutely worth the price of admission!
How much you enjoy this game will depend on your patience and how willing to practice you are. Those who like being coddled should avoid, this game does not hold your hand and it will be tough. There are no pity wins, no friction easing or difficulty scalers, if you get stuck then the only way to proceed is to get better until you get unstuck.
Taking 2 hearts of contact damage from a stunned boss though, that's some bad design right there. There's a few cases of things like this I think with more robust play-testing could have been identified these issues before release. Solid 9/10 though, if you like this sort of game and liked the original I'm sure you'll work through the VERY minor frustrations.

Went down to floor 6, entire area was a black void. Tried going back up a floor, game crashed. Tried loading autosave, didn't work and just takes me back to the main menu.
Also, got stuck in a room after a candelabra got warped in front of the entrance and I couldn't get around it.
Most time spent micro managing inventory.
Game keeps hitching for a second all the time.
Thinks it's charming and funny when it isn't.
Maybe mods make it good? Who knows, I thought it was awful. Would not recommend.

Depending on what you're looking for, this may not be the right choice for you.

You're probably considering buying it based on the visuals. This is by far its biggest strength, the animation is superb throughout and there's a lot of it! The dialogue is also well-written, it doesn't take itself too seriously, but still has room for some high-stakes moments. A lot of it is witty banter and one-liners, a lot of Dad jokes and frequent jabs at Gen Z. This was definitely made for millennials.

The gameplay aspect, however, is much more disappointing. It could be that the presentation set my expectations too high, but currently most gameplay elements are either under-baked or have severe problems.

1) The combat is awkward, with spotty hit-detection. The weapon only attacks directly in front of you, so you will often either miss and get hit, or get animation locked while attacking and be hit by something else coming from a different angle. Boss difficulty is also inconsistent, with some feeling very unfair and with poorly telegraphed attacks. Enemies also give nothing upon defeat, so there is zero incentive to actually fight and just walk by everything (and you walk so damn slow it makes progression a chore).

2) Stuff is poorly explained, especially the Grimoire. You unlock entries in this book like recipes, spells and such, but I have no idea what (if anything) they're supposed to do. I am going under the assumption that these are just non-functional collectables laid out in such a way as to make you think it's going to be "something" when it's actually not. Like trying to subvert my expectations but doing a bad job at it.

3) The weapon has rune slots, but as far as I can tell all they do is change the animation of the attacks sometimes. Not sure, as it's never explained what these do.

4) There's a ton of sequence breaking you can do by going to areas it doesn't want you to be in yet. For example, entering a specific area from one direction will have an NPC tell you that you can't leave during the tutorial, but you already did that tutorial ages ago and they just didn't remove the trigger.

5) Bugs galore! Plenty of places to get stuck. Nothing more annoying than solving a puzzle and collecting the item at the end of it, only to realise they meant for you to use your hookshot to grab the item and you're now stuck. Or when you use the blood machine after already doing that particular part of the story, you just get locked in place. Some enemy types transform into bigger ones. When I'd beaten one (and it should turn into a big spiky flesh abomination on defeat) I went into a door while it was transforming, and when I came back the enemy was still there but invisible. Also stuff like enemies not coming through the portals and they just hang there indefinitely, soft-locked myself in the hospital because I did the bridge puzzle in a way it wasn't expecting and locked myself on the wrong side.

Essentially, the disappointments mount the further in you get.
"Oh! Are they going to {insert cool thing from adventure games here}"
"Nope, actually it's something less cool."

Everything about the gameplay just feels so half-arsed. I've seen people say its setting gives Earthbound vibes, but it lacks the scale of a world for it to have the same impact. I've seen it compared to games like Tunic, but the combat is just too clunky and dull. There's areas you can only access after certain abilities or items have been unlocked like in Zelda, but they're so few and do not yield anything interesting.
You're basically slogging through, hoping and expecting something new to be introduced that shakes things up and besides getting a shield (way too late in, in my opinion) there's just nothing. It feels so barebones. It makes you fondly remember the games it's taking its mechanics from while simultaneously not delivering anything but the bare minimum on any of them. The abilities are boring, the "dungeons" are boring, and after shuffling from place to place over and over to make sure not to miss the MISSABLE QUESTS the town also became boring.

So it was a really hard choice but I had to give it a thumbs down. The ending really cemented that for me, it just ends so abruptly and gives you nothing else to do.
The presentation elevates it somewhat to make it a not-awful experience, but the tedious gameplay, lack of satisfying rewards and laundry list of glitches make it more frustrating than fun.

I'm genuinely shocked I was able to finish the game at all with all the possible ways it could have glitched out and softlocked my progress, something other unfortunate players seem to have experienced.

And the menu UI is a nightmare to navigate too.

Very addictive gameplay loop but perhaps a little overrated and set my expectations a little too high.

In the game, you take on the role of a border control agent in a fictional country, reminiscent of Cold War-era Europe. As the game progresses, the complexity of the required checks for visitors escalates, yet you receive minimal additional support. Your income depends on maintaining the pace of clearing individuals in the queue. The gameplay involves examining documents, cross-referencing them, and investigating any discrepancies.

The job presents challenges such as dealing with individuals who attempt to bribe their way in or evoke sympathy to gain entry. You must consider if the potential reduction in pay (and the effect that will have on your family's health!) is worth allowing entry to someone's spouse who lacks the proper documentation, for example.

My main source of disappointment is the lack of replay value. After memorizing the nations, cities, seal designs, and document layouts, the challenge diminishes. The game lacks variation; non-standard visitors appear at scripted times. It would be interesting if these events were more frequent and randomized. There's enormous potential for expanding on the premise! The standard visitors get too samey, it's a randomly chosen person with randomly chosen documents issues, the dialogue isn't unique for any of them.
Also, I think a lot of reviewers maybe put too much emphasis on the empathetic and "thought-provoking" elements. There wasn't really any event where I genuinely felt bad for an individual, maybe I just have no soul...

Anyway, very addictive game until it has nothing left to offer, but makes my brain hurt! If a sequel or spiritual successor took this formula and expanded it, it'd be a winner for sure!

An OK port of an OK game with some OK quality of life improvements. 👍

Some things to note:

1) Going higher than 60fps breaks things and also introduces stutter.
2) "Hardcore" mode is exactly the same as the normal game, except with 1 life perma-death. Make sure you practice the bosses in normal mode and collect all the rainbow shells before starting the final level and you'll be fine.
3) The FMV cutscenes were not redone in 4K.

Scam game.

Fully funded in 2015, it's been over 8 years and crowdfunding rewards still have not been sent out and all questions on progress are ignored, or passed to someone else who ignores them. The most you will get is "it's being worked on"... Again, this was crowdfunded back in 2015!

Sold itself originally on being endorsed by and mimicking the art style of Lauren Faust, who to my knowledge never fulfilled her side of the crowdfunding rewards either.

During this 8 years, all that's happened is additional DLC. No story mode that was promised. Developers sold themselves to a publisher who has since fired everyone.

Do not buy anything from Mane6, do not buy anything headed by anyone who ever worked at Mane6, do not buy anything from Modus. What a total spectacle...

It's alright...

The main gimmick of the eight characters fulfilling their stories and travelling together is detrimental to the storytelling, in my opinion.

Each characters chapter plays out as though the rest of your party doesn't even exist, so it feels weird that the cutscenes show the character for that chapter doing everything alone. There's no camaraderie here at all, other than some random banter you might get. They totally could have put in the effort to make these extra cutscenes and dialogue lines for your party members, it would have made the stories far more interesting.

Also has some difficulty pacing issues, going on to finish the first chapter of the second character I met, the difficulty ramped up really high, then got trivial as I finished the first chapter for all the characters, then another massive ramp up as the second chapter began and the enemy levels increased exponentially. Expect to do some grinding.

Story and balance issues aside, it looks and sounds good, and the combat system is top notch and is what really carries this game. If you want a pure JRPG experience you'll probably have a good time with it. Just don't expect much more than shallow, tropey mush when it comes to storytelling.
Still a solid 7/10 if you like JRPG's, it's basically a less interesting LIVE A LIVE.

It took a while for the game to click with me, but once it did I grew to enjoy it even more than the first game which I already liked a lot! It's basically just more Freedom Planet, everything cranked up a notch, as any good sequel should strive to do.

It's a big, BIG game. Almost 30 full stages with a smattering of towns, boss stages and optional challenges. I reached a point where I assumed it was the end of the game and didn't realize I wasn't even halfway done! The levels are huge and the pixel art is gorgeous to look at, all the levels have their own quirks and gimmicks, like one being entirely progressed vertically, one having you collect keys to proceed, yes there's even a water level but don't worry because it's not a slog like a lot of other games, there's a lot of boosters and the ability to swim to keep this sort of level from slowing things down.

There's a few stages that are purely just long boss encounters, and the side-scrolling horizontal shooter stage makes a return here too. There are some arena gauntlet style challenges unlocked as you progress that have you do things like navigate a maze, defeat waves of enemies in a particularly cumbersome arena and basically show a mastery of the mechanics introduced in all the levels you've finished so far.

Currency earned can be spent on items you can equip that either help or hinder your progress. The more hindrance you have, the higher your completion rank will be on the stage results and the more currency you earn. So for example, you could equip an item that gives you only 1 life, but doing so would give you more rewards at the end, which is a neat idea. There's also a museum you can spend currency in to unlock dioramas of all the bosses in the game, it doesn't serve any functional purpose other than being just something else you can work to collect. Some equippable items can only be found in hidden areas in stages, the stages with items unfound are marked which is helpful so you know what you're missing from where. The last collectible worth mentioning are the vinyl records which unlock music tracks.

And on the subject of music, the soundtrack in this game slaps hard.

Easily one of the best 2D platformers ever made, you won't regret picking it up if those sorts of games are your thing.

The issues I do have are quite nitpicky and I fully acknowledge it's just me being a whiner and don't much detract from the overall enjoyment, but the three things I personally felt didn't work...

1) The story. At best it's a serviceable way of tying all the stages together, but it's just not that interesting as a story and there's too much of it. As someone who is very susceptible to emotional storytelling and grows attached to endearing characters, I felt absolutely nothing here. It's not that it's a small part of the game, either. A lot of time and effort goes into the cutscenes which just makes it all the more grating because I see what they're trying to do and falling flat. Also, "classic mode" for playing without cutscenes is only unlocked after beating the game.
Edit: Thinking about it more, it's probably less to do with the actual story being bad and just the way it's presented. It's way too dialogue-heavy and would have worked better with a show-don't-tell approach, because it's not an overly complicated plot once you trim the fat and cut the threads that don't lead anywhere.

2) The main characters. I'm not big on their designs even in the first game, but even less so for their redesigns. What makes this worse is that pretty much every new NPC added in this game looks far better than all the returning characters. I imagine the idea was to try and distance the series from Sonic games by making the characters taller and without the big heads, which worked great for all these original characters designed from the ground up with this new style in mind, but makes the original characters stand out in a bad way.

3) Lilac gameplay. This is more of a me-problem I guess, but I really dislike her cyclone ability. It's a double-jump that makes her spin like a tornado and cause damage as she goes and I have three gripes here. One, the tornado will keep spinning for a short while after landing on ground and if you try to jump before the spin animation stops, you only jump at around half the height as usual. Two, the constant voice sample when using a skill that you'll be using most of the time becomes annoying and there's no option to turn it off without disabling all voices in the game entirely. Three, it also seems to be the strongest attack you have and I spent a good portion of my first playthrough assuming that the super attack and melee combos would be the biggest damage dealers on bosses when I should have just been spamming double-jump.