- Exceptional quality puzzle adventure Metroidvania
- Excellent humor and appealing visuals
- Strong Metroidvania exploration and mechanics
- Challenging physics-based puzzles
- Poor performance and optimization issues
- Limited content in early access
Emotions
Players expressed satisfaction primarily due to the high quality of the game's puzzles, finding them challenging, rewarding, and well-designed. The overall polish, performance, and consistent quality of the game, including its humor and exploration, also contributed significantly to this positive emotion. Many felt the game met or exceeded their expectations as a worthy successor.
Excitement stemmed from the game's overall high quality, its creative atmosphere, and the anticipation for future content and the full release. Players were also excited by new abilities, puzzle concepts, and improvements over previous titles, indicating a strong positive outlook on the game's potential.
Disappointment was largely driven by the game's technical issues, particularly poor optimization and performance problems on various hardware. A perceived lack of content, missing key elements from previous games, and the absence of certain language options (e.g., German) also contributed to players' unmet expectations.
Frustration was a direct result of significant technical problems, including low frame rates, poor optimization, frequent crashes, and buggy visuals. Players also experienced frustration with unclear puzzle solutions, poor in-game guidance, and issues with game physics, hindering smooth progression.
Enjoyment was consistently linked to the game's overall quality, its unique and engaging puzzles, and its distinctive humor. Players found the gameplay mechanics fun and addictive, appreciating the mental challenge the puzzles provided.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 80% · Negative 20%. Score: 20 / 100
Positives:
- Players overwhelmingly praise the game's overall quality, finding it highly enjoyable, addictive, and a strong successor to previous titles in the series. Many highlight its polished state even in Early Access and its ability to exceed expectations.
- The game's humor, including jokes, puns, and fourth-wall breaks, is a significant highlight for players. It's noted for being consistently good, often better than previous entries, and contributing positively to the overall experience.
- The Metroidvania elements are highly praised, contributing to a sense of discovery and making the game feel like a well-designed platformer. This aspect is seen as a core strength, enhancing gameplay and replayability.
- The first act of the game is noted for being fully functional, polished, and well-prepared for an Early Access title. Players appreciate the significant amount of content (10-15 hours) available from the start, with no major bugs.
- The game's visuals, atmosphere, and world design receive positive feedback. Specific mentions include impressive global illumination, a new art style, and inviting, well-sized areas that encourage exploration.
Negatives:
- Many players report severe performance issues, poor optimization, and high hardware requirements, especially on older or mid-range PCs. The game struggles to maintain smooth frame rates even on low settings, and specific technologies like Lumen and AI frame generation are cited as problematic.
- Players feel the game lacks sufficient content, originality, and a sense of openness compared to previous titles in the series. The early access state is noted as a reason for hitting content walls quickly, and some feel the world is empty despite characters.
- Players find the puzzle guidance lacking, leading to frustration and difficulty in identifying intended solutions or even finding relevant puzzles. Some puzzles are described as tedious or excessively hidden, making progression challenging.
- Players note the absence of German and Turkish language support in the early access version, which is a barrier for some users.
- Feedback suggests that combat is a weak point, lacking depth in fighting mechanics. Additionally, the villain is described as annoying and uninteresting.
Gameplay:
- The game is heavily focused on challenging, physics-based puzzles that require significant thought and exploration. Players often get stuck but solutions feel obvious once discovered, though some puzzles may feel restrictive in their intended solutions.
- The game is a first-person Metroidvania with intuitive mechanics and a rewarding progression system. It encourages exploration and offers new ideas and upgrades that enhance gameplay.
- The game features 'puzzle police' and 'glitch police' mechanics, which prevent players from bypassing puzzles or using unintended solutions.
- Reading in-game text and dialogue is important for understanding the game and progressing.
- The game is noted to be quite difficult, especially compared to previous titles in the series, featuring challenging fights.
Performance:
- Some players experience smooth gameplay with stable frame rates, particularly on specific setups like the RTX 3070 Ti laptop or Steam Deck, where the game runs well out of the box.
- Frame generation technology is noted as a viable, though not ideal, solution to improve playability for some users struggling with performance.
- The game's rendering appears to be CPU-intensive, with the GPU primarily handling rasterization. There's also a mention of a special mode allowing the game to run on lower-spec PCs.
- One player observed that the game's textures are not high-resolution, which could impact visual fidelity.
Recommendations:
- Many players highly recommend the game, especially for fans of puzzle and adventure genres, citing its clever puzzles, exploration, and humorous storyline. Despite being in early access, many find it already worth the price and a must-buy.
- Players suggest that new players to the series should play previous Supraland titles first to better understand the universe and avoid feeling overwhelmed. This game is seen as a continuation that benefits from prior knowledge.
- Some players advise waiting for the full release due to current issues like crashing and optimization problems. They feel the game is not yet worth the price in its current state and hope future updates will resolve these concerns.
- One reviewer noted the absence of a third-person perspective, indicating a potential desire for this feature or a point of difference from other games.
- A reviewer expressed interest in attempting to 'sequence break' again, suggesting a desire for non-linear progression or exploiting game mechanics.
Miscellaneous:
- Many players, especially Kickstarter backers, have been waiting for this game for a very long time, some for as long as 6 years. This indicates a high level of anticipation and long-term engagement from the community.
- Players are looking forward to future updates, particularly the addition of more content and localization options, especially Polish. The lack of language support is a barrier for some players.
- A player praised the game's art style and theme, describing them as wonderfully chaotic, indicating a strong visual identity.
- One review mentioned purchasing the game specifically to support the developers, indicating community goodwill.
- A reviewer found the game's price to be fair, especially when adjusted for currency exchange rates, suggesting good value.
