Recent reviews by Anadian

A delightfully charming little (about three hours) action-adventure game that embraces its simple premise and executes it near flawlessly.

A terrific experience. Ara Fell shows just how effective the classic "JRPG" formula can be when done right and modernised in some intelligent ways.

My word is: 'fairness'.
The Test is a reasonably enjoyable little experiment. It takes about twenty minutes but doesn't have much in the way of payoff. Unfortunately, I can't say that that's enough to justify the price. I can't give it a full-hearted recommendation but that may change if the experience does actually lead to something bigger as the ending suggested.

Don't play this game: just don't. The game itself is an agonisingly repetitive slog: it's an idle game alright but the claim that it makes you "want to actively keep playing" couldn't be further from the truth. The game is thrown together in Game Maker Studio so it's pretty under-performing and very buggy. Worse yet the game is full of trollishly poor design and beginner's traps including one structure in the game which exist purely to irrevocably ruin you savefile: seriously, it's not a bug; it was deliberately designed to permanently destroy unsuspecting players' save files, without warning, and potential waste dozens of hours of their life. None of this is helped by the fact that the developer is a sleazy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you really shouldn't give your money to. Playing Forager has genuinely been one of the worst game experiences I've had; at its heart, it's a troll game actively trying to make you miserable. This is one of the few games I've taken the time to review because I now feel the only worthwhile thing I can take away from my experience is if I manage to dissuade others from wasting their time and money on this game, so yeah. This game is absolutely horrible: you've been warned.

An absolute joy!
The developer got everything right:
The controls are spot on; the game always feels perfectly responsive.
The new artwork and animations are gorgeous (plus, you can switch to the original graphics seamlessly during gameplay).
The soundtrack and sound design are also on point (and you can switch to the original sound seamlessly during gameplay).
The PC port is very well optimised; I one-hundred percented the game and I can't recall encountering a single dropped frame: a perfect 60 FPS the whole way through. Plus, it features all the options a PC game should have. (Of course, there's no reason a simple 2D platformer should have issues with framerate or lacking options yet numerous other metroidvania games suffer from erratic framerate or lacking options.)
Brilliant design; Wonder Boy 3 is a truly-timeless classic that remains an outstanding metroidvania and is perfectly recaptured in this game.
The only real criticism is something it technically inherited from the original: it's rather short; it only took me about four hours to beat the game, and another two to clean up and get one-hundred percent, and I was taking my time.
I was honestly skeptical as there have been so many lazy, crappy, and rushed remakes and remasterings of old games lately but thankfully the devs took the time to do things right and, man, it shows!!

I had such high hopes for this game after seeing so many positive reviews and enjoying the demo but, alas, I found Downward to ultimately be a staggeringly-incompetent, monotonous dirge of a game. The demo is a misrepresentation of what the game actually is; the demo presents the game as more of a tightly-knit action-adventure game when really, at its heart, Downward has the hollow skeleton of a shallow 3D platformer.
Once you pass the prologue/tutorial area you're, quite literally, dropped into a large, aimless, and mostly-empty area, with absolutely no direction or objective, save for a waypoint on your compass. You're free to wander the game's large areas and visit most of the games locations, well before you're intended to, but there's never anything meaningful to do there until you've advanced the completely-linear main questline to the point where you're actually instructed to go there.
As for story, there really isn't one; you play a nameless dude-bro who is incredibly slow to notice anything remarkable about his situation, who just goes along collecting Dry Artifacts (the games stand in for Power Stars, Shines, Jiggies, Bolts, or any other 3D platformer collectible) to open doors to new areas so he can collect more Dry Artifacts, all to gullibly help the villain with their blatantly-evil plan for no reason. That's it; that really is all the story you get; the game doesn't even have an ending: when the villain betrays, no surprise there, you quickly defeat her in a rule-of-three boss fight and then credits roll. There is the occasional small attempt a building up some lore about the game's generic, omniscient, ancient civilisation which destroyed itself with its own hubris (how original!) but, in effect, that's all pushed aside so that the game can shoehorn in as many "ironically" bad puns as possible into its corny, amateur dialogue.
Of course, the story and writing really wouldn't matter if the gameplay and design were at least competent but, unfortunately, they're not. The game provides the player with a handful large openworlds, accessible early on, but exploration is completely discouraged; nothing good comes from visiting these worlds before you're supposed to so ultimately free exploration is a complete waste of time. Not to mention how dull the worlds themselves are: specifically, the game gives you four main areas: a desert-ruins world (hub), desert-ruins world 2 (yeah there are two of them for some reason), ice world, and fire world. Even those unimaginative themes are worse than they sound because the differences between the worlds are entirely aesthetic: there are no unique gameplay mechanics to differentiate them making them all play exactly the same. I haven't even gotten to the worse part of the game yet: which is, the game's obsession with backtracking.
In addition to the game's worlds being bland, too big, and confusingly wrapping around themselves in nonsensical ways: a gimmick throughout the whole game is that there's four "variations" of each area referred to as planets. I stressed "variations" the way I did because the only immediate difference between the "planets" is a change in lighting; there is also an added platform, or anomaly, somewhere but you have no way of knowing where the changes are until you find them yourself and the game gives you absolutely no indication of what was added or removed for a specific planet or what would be added or removed if you switched to a different planet: essentially, the game forces you to backtrack, re-combing through 99% of the area, every centimetre, just to find that 1% difference of a single added platform allowing access to an area only accessible in that specific planet. To put it simply, even with optimal routing, the game requires you to retread through every area at least four times in order to find minute changes to progress. Worst of all, is how utterly apparent it is that this "mechanic" was only added to the game to pad out the play time of an otherwise extremely short game; it took me about 10 hours to finish the game and get almost every achievement (I'll explain the ones I didn't get in a bit*) and, of that time, only two hours were spent actually exploring or progressing; the rest was all just soul-deadening, mandatory, excessive backtracking!
On a technical level, the game doesn't fair much better. For a game all about fluid first-person parkour it is way too easy to softlock yourself, most commonly, by climbing up onto a ledge, inadvertently clipping through the world geometry in the process. Fortunately, the game does allow you to access the console which can, sometimes, save you from the game's own ineptness.
Graphically, the game's mostly underwhelming: it has average Unreal Engine 4 graphics with an over reliance on post-processing and circumstantially-imperfect frame pacing; strangely, using the double-jump anomaly always causes a sharp stutter despite the rest of the game running reasonably smoothly. The real graphical problems stems from its, quite frankly, terrible lighting/gamma-correction model: the game loves putting you through scenes that are either pitch black or extremely washed out; there is no brightness setting that offers a nice medium between these two extremes. This is probably the only time I've ever complained that a game was too bright (bright to the point it literally washes out bright colours and light textures making certain areas impossible to navigate if the brightness setting is too high; like with the pale-blue texture used to indicate that a surface is wall-run-able which is often place on a solid-white slate of rock, effectively becoming impossible to discern on higher brightness levels.) and it's definitely the only game to have that problem while also being guilty of having many large maze-like interiors that aren't lit at all, requiring an amped brightness level just to make out even a slight silhouette of the walls and floors. It's absurd.
On the audio side, the game is fine: the music is nothing impressive and the sound design relies on a few too little sound effects for the whole game but it's really not that big of an issues; the voice acting isn't great but I'm willing to chalk that up to mostly the horrible writing.
*Regarding the achievements: I got every one except for a four achievements which are all just variations of "Use <Move> 5000 times." Even with liberal backtracking over the course of a normal playthrough, you'll get nowhere near the 5000 number required for this meaning you'll effectively just have to find a place you can use the move and grind it out for three hours each! Well, that's certainly one way to add an additional 12 hours of playtime to the game....

Pros:
- Core movement mechanics are reasonably fun.
- Controls are responsive if, always, a little unintuitive.
- Okay UE4 graphics

Cons:
- Expansive but horribly-bland, unimaginatively-themed, and thoughtlessly-designed worlds.
- A disgusting amount of forced backtracking which comprises +80% of the game's playtime.
- Lack of any story or motivation.
- Terrible lighting with every scene either being pitch black or completely washed out, without any compromise inbetween. Seriously, it's worse than you can imagine.
- Shallow, simplistic 3D platformer design.
- Terrible dialogue.
- Frequent softlocking.
- Extremely short main quest padded out by excessive backtracking.
- Falls short of its high ambitions in most every area.
- A ubiquitous lack of direction from when you end the prologue through to the end of the game.
- Have I mentioned the backtracking 'cause like, seriously, it's insane; they make you retread every step of every area at least four times if you're interested in any sort of completion!

Conclusion: Downward has the scaffolding of a potentially good game but, once past the prologue, the game's tedious design, many poor choices, and often-frustrating implementation make it an absolute slog!