This popped up at the recent Nintendo Partner direct, as a shadow drop (and a new announcement, as far as I can find). I thought it looked fun. So I picked it up.

That’s it. That’s the intro. Let’s see if it’s good!

Developer and publisher: Cygames
Release date: June 28, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Platforming roguelite

Review

The presentation doesn’t have TOO much to talk about. There is a plot, you play as Noah Little, who is an alchemist. Her airship crashes into some floating ruin place. She finds a cat there who she names Zipper. Zipper can talk and is trying to protect these ruins, though he has amnesia. There’s another person here trying to activate the ruins, which is meant to have some world-ending device in it, so Noah decides to stop him. There’s a bit of detail but really not much, the characters are okay but underdeveloped. But the one thing you’ll definitely notice is the art style, both the illustration and the 3D models being very reminiscent of the orginal Bravely Default, which makes sense considering the characters are designed by the same artist, Akihiko Yoshida, who I believe left Squeenix and this being his first foray with Cygames. It looks good, I like his style.

The gameplay is a roguelite platformer, with something people may call metroidvania style. The game is fairly short, with 3 areas. Each area has you going through 5 levels, 2 of which are boss battles, and some of the level exist branching out to alternate levels. The goal is simply to defeat the final boss in the third area, and that’s the end of the game.

The goal of every level is just to find the exit.  Some exits have 2 doors to choose from, they lead to different areas that may have different enemies to fight. When there’s one exit, a boss is next. A normal level will have a bunch of rooms linked in a semi-metroidvania style. When you first get into a room enemies will spawn. To escape the room, you must kill them. Killing all the enemies gets you some resources and spawns a treasure chest. Then you can go to the next room. There’s always some alternate paths to take, and a few special rooms. There’s shops where you can spend money. There’s special rooms with stronger enemies for better rewards. There’s rooms with just free upgrades like accessories or lilliputs, or chests that may have both. And yes, this is roguelite so map layouts are random (though rooms generally have set encounters based on their layout), and rewards for rooms and shop inventory are random.

Lilliputs are the core of combat. Lilliputs are some special type of Champions, which are, I guess, alchemic beings of some sort. You get 7 slots to assign these lilliputs. 5 are attack slots, and 2 are special slots. The special slots are attached to the A and X buttons, launching that lilliput’s special attack. The 5 attack slots are a bit different. They’re all used with the Y button, but attacks will always come out in the order you set them. With ~30 different lilliputs you may randomly find that’s 30 possible specials, and (according to MATH) over 24 million different attack combos you can build. There’s actually no limitation to how you set your attack combo. You can put 5 of the same lilliput if you want, if you can find that much in one run. And as far as setting up a combo, you can auto-set them (it will determine the best combination based on which lilliputs you have and accessories).

How attacks work is pretty cool. Since it’s not weapons, Noah actually basically orders the lilliput to attack, so it gets in front of her in spirit form to attack. That means you can move during certain attack if you want. With some specials that means you can set an attack in one spot and go attack enemies somewhere else. Pretty cool. Also, if you manage to find more of a lilliput you already have, in addition to being able to be added to your combo or special, it powers up every copy of that lilliput, up to 3 levels. And there’s a burst meter which goes up over time, when it’s full you can launch a super.

In addition to lilliputs, accessories are very important. You find those randomly in chests or in shops. They exist in 3 rarities and have a variety of effects. A few affect actual movement/combat, like some that give elemental effects to your dashes or enable for more jumps. Generally though they’ll be things like extra HP, more defense, stronger attack, and all sorts of boosts to different elements (I guess I didn’t mention that lilliputs and enemies had elements).

Oh, and since I don’t have anywhere else to mention that, you can dash to dodge attacks, and double jump. Yay.

When you die in a run, it brings you back to your airship. Any lilliput, accessory or crystal you found during that run is converted to mana (so you lose everything and restart every run from scratch, with a base set of lilliputs you will replace very quickly). So outside of the dungeon, there’s not TOO much to do. There’s a few NPCs on your airship that help you out in different ways. One is an achievement-counter that gives you statues and costumes. Costumes can be changed at another NPC, which changes your appearance, super attack, some minor stat change and powers up different slots in your attack combo. There’s an NPC where you can spend mana (gotten from items and lilliputs you gather in your run attempts) to buy and upgrade things on your ship. These can be new NPCs, new accessories that can appear in the dungeon, or just general stat boosts. One NPC lets you power up your lilliputs using gifts you find. The cat, if you give him gifts, gives you bonus stuff in your next run. There’s a chicken that gives you money before a run. There’s a blob thing that gives you a random accessory before a run. There’s another NPC that lets you place statues on pedestals, which give you stat boosts (those are the statues from the achievements). So as you fail runs, you kinda naturally get stronger and can more easily get further.

Overall

This was a fun game. It’s a pretty simple roguelite but the combat is fun. It is short though. I had 21 run attempts and that was it. I had 69% of the ship upgrades done (nice) I had a good time but see very little reason to play through this again. That said, it is a 15$ game so I think it’s very much worth checking out.

I’d give this a recommendation for a quick weekend game.