LogFAQs > #932401730

#64





Years of release: 2018 (PC/XB1/PS4/Switch)
Beaten?: Yes, not 100%

I have just two words for you guys:

Pinball. Metroidvania.

Look, if those two words aren't enough to get you to what to play this game then I'm not sure what else will. You play as a cute little beetle! You have yourself tied to a pinball and you roll it around and launch yourself by hitting flippers! I was immediately in love with the concept as soon as I played it and the game didn't disappoint. Okay, well, it disappointed a little, but it still delivered.

Like every damn indie game on the market nowadays I swear, this game is absolutely gorgeous. It's got this charming sort of like pop-up book quality to it, and as I said previously in my writeup of Pokemon Sun and Moon, tropical, Polynesian islands are pretty much my favorite place you could possibly set a game. My god, I just want to live in this world forever. I want to be a cute little dung beetle and flip myself around somehow naturally-occurring pinball tables for all eternity. Did I mention you're a mail carrier? A mail carrying beetle. And you have to deliver mail to all of the equally cute citizens of the island. Fuck, it's so wholesome my heart hurts.

There's a mix of realized and missed potential in this whole game. The areas that exist are really well-designed and some of the secrets are very cleverly hidden. But I do wish this game was a little bit longer, and some of the secrets are a bit TOO cleverly hidden - a couple of times I really had trouble figuring out where to go and it was just because I missed a very little thing. There was some really annoying backtracking in the beginning, too, because I was trying to figure out where to go, and there's a few parts where you have to hit some very, very precise pinball shots just to advance even if you're only walking back to where you've already been. I forgive it, though. It always feels like so much fun to move around that it never felt like a burden to me to walk around the island a little bit more.

I do think the game didn't quite explore the possible design space as much as it could have - I was expecting some more weird tricks and gimmicks to the pinball mechanics but it was more straightforward than I was expecting the whole way through. The boss fights were pretty cool, but there weren't that many and they weren't especially threatening. Damage in this game seems to be only a suggestion, it seems like the only thing that happens is after you take a certain number of hits you get a completely unexplained cutscene in which a number in a room somewhere else in the game ticks up, but after beating the game I still have no idea what it meant. I've been meaning to go back and 100% this game just because I kind of want to figure out what's going on with some of the weird secrets - I kind of got the sense after beating the game that I actually haven't gotten the full story here and that there might be a little bit more to this game that I left unexplored. I definitely want to go back and do it though, even if some of those secrets are going to be a pain in the ass to find, which is a testament to how much I love the concept of PINBALL METROIDVANIA.

I just can't get over how wholesome this damn game is. At one point, a cute rabbit offers you a wallet upgrade for some fruit (this game's currency), and if you say yes but you don't have enough, they give you the wallet upgrade anyway, and just tell you to pay them back later, because they know money can be tight sometimes. If you go and pay them back later, they thank you, and there is no further reward for having been an honest person. Being thanked is the reward. I adore this game.

Finally, I just want to say that this game has the single most strange plot twist I have ever encountered in a video game, ever. Not the best, not the most interesting, just... the weirdest.

I think I want a sequel of this game more than any other game on this list. It's great, but there are a few flaws here and a lot of unexplored potential that could be smoothed out with another attempt at it.