This is a game I knew basically nothing about until a bit before it came out on Switch/PS4/Xbone. It was a bit of a random buy on my side, and it ended up being a decent pickup for just before Famicom Detective Club came out. I never even noticed it on PC when it came out last year.

It looked pretty fun, so I figure I’d grab it… in-between like 6 other games… so it took a backseat and I’m only able to review it now. Let’s go!

Developer: Cascadia Games
Publisher: Drageus Games
Release date: September 10th 2020 on PC, April 23nd 2021 on consoles
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer

The story is pretty simple. Dude goes to the moon (without a spacesuit), eventually gets attacked by the moon people (except for the queen), so he escapes the moon with the queen in tow. I guess they get married and have a daughter. The queen gets sick, so the daughter whose name I forgot must raid the moon to get a cure for the illness. She has to find these special square gems, 200 of them. That’s the plot.

This is a 2D platformer, that gives a bit of a classic PC platformer feel actually. There’s several zones. Each zone has a bunch of rooms, with some side-rooms (you can tell it’s a side-room if you pause and see that it has the number of the world followed by a letter rather than a number, those always loop back to the room you started up from). These rooms have enemies, things to break and gems to find, as well as switches to open up doors and such. At the end of the series of rooms is a usually-pretty-easy boss battle, then it’s down to the next zone.

The controls are a bit messy because you jump with B and shoot with A. This works for a Game Boy that has only those 2 buttons (though in that case A should be jump), but all modern controllers use a SNES-style button setup, in which case B should still be jump, but the main attack should be on Y, not A. That’s been common sense since Super Mario World but I still see devs messing it up. These controls can’t be remapped either which is bad for accessibility. You get used to it pretty quick, but it is awkward.

You jump pretty nicely and you can double jump. It’s not too floaty and doesn’t drop you too harshly, feels fairly good. Your gun sucks a bit, as it doesn’t even reach the end of the screen (which is fine, I think it’s good design to have some limitation), and you generally just hold the button to semi-rapid fire. Oh and you can shoot up. But not while moving. And also not down (nor can you duck). And you can only shoot up when on the ground. And if you double jump you can’t shoot in the air at all until you come back to the ground. Weird.

Quick enough in the game you get the special bar, which you fill with gems, which are dropped by enemies and from breaking things in the environment. The special bar (shown as a percentage) can be used in 2 ways. Pressing Y does a dash, which lets you fly in the air in 4 directions. This dash also makes you mostly-invincible and kills most enemies in one hit, and also busts through any breakable obstacles (some require it). Also the special bar allows you to increase your firepower, just hold the shoot button for a few seconds and it makes your bullets better (stronger, also longer-range) as long as you’re still holding the button. One thing I noticed with killing enemies is that they drop these crystals, but those crystals have a hitbox, so they might block you from killing more than one enemy at a time. It’s really strange. At first I thought the enemy hitbox lingered after killing them, but it’s definitely the crystal drops. Why?

So that’s pretty much it as far as what you can do. Kill enemies, get crystal drops, use the dash when needed. Some parts of the rooms are hidden behind doors that you need to open. There’s 2 ways for this. There’s switches. Just get on them and press X. This moves the camera around to show you what’s being open. During that time enemies can still hit you though, but you can move so… not a huge problem generally. The other way is that doors are locked using these weird lightbulb things. These strangely don’t work the same as the switches. I noted the switches let you move after you activate them. The lightbulbs need to be shot. About a second after they’re shot, you get the same camera movement to show what’s being open. The issues is that this camera movement, unlike the one with the switches, actually does stop your movement. So you can still get hit, and if your movement is paused when you’re over lava, you can literally just fall in the lava and die. Dying isn’t a HUGE deal in this game, but it does respawn you from the last door you entered, so most of the time that means re-doing the entire room again.

One thing that really weirded me out is that I thought this game was gonna be a bit longer. I fought a boss, who claimed to be the king. And it was a decently tough boss compared to most in the game, he killed me twice. During the fight I was looking at my gem count and I was at 148 our of 200. So I figured I probably still had a world or 2 left to do to get to 200. So I kill that boss, get the thing he drops, and suddenly my gem total was 200. That thing gave me at least 52. I’m really curious about what happened there. I think I had fully cleared every room before then, I’m pretty sure. So I don’t know if that thing just puts you at 200 no matter what, or if it specifically gives you 52. If it gives you specifically 52, why? If it pushes you to 200 no matter what, why? Neither option makes any sense. Why say you need 200 when there’s seemingly not that many in the game? Really weird.

I guess the last few things to note is upgrades. Each world has one hidden upgrade. There’s one wall somewhere in each world you can go through. Those walls are identified by an alien head symbol. Those increase your max capacity for gems, your heal, or your damage. The max gem capacity one just feels weird because it’s displayed in a percentage rather than a meter, so you don’t really know what the full effect of it is.. Also there’s these weird animals you can save in several of the rooms. That’s a thing. They pop up again at the end, not sure why. Not sure what this is for.  See when you have a gameplay element in your game, it should be there for a reason. Was it just for the visual? Maybe?

Overall

This game is pretty fun, but also pretty flawed and a bit weird in its design. I know this review looks a bit negative, but it is a game I had fun with for the short time it lasted.

What I find weird is that this game has these weird issues with hitboxes on crystals spawned from dead enemies and the switches/lightbulbs being inconsistent/broken in their functionality, but I wonder why… because it came out in September on PC, they had literally 7 months to fix the issues that I’m sure someone would’ve noticed before the console release, so how are these still here?

I don’t really recommend this one, unless you’re into these classic PC platformer style games, and get it at a discount.