Linked Mask Reviews

Looked like a fun game but it's just not for me, feels overly punishing with spikes just littered along the ground, tons of readability problems (even though the art _is_ nice to look at), and controls that felt unresponsive more often than not.

It's a kaizo platformer, so if you find surprise hidden blocks that punt you into an abyss as funny as I do, you'll have a great time. Death is more a part of the process rather than a punishment, so if you find dying 1000+ times by the end of your playthrough frustrating, this game might not be your cup of tea. (There is a death counter I'm not exaggerating here). Very important to note that the music is funky as hell, groovy even. The GB graphics are handled well, save for a few spots where it can be hard to see certain projectiles. Has some fantastic pixel art, especially during cutscenes. Biggest issue I had was with the numerous translation/localization errors in dialogue. They're a little too numerous to feel like a nostalgic throw back, and with the eloquent and cryptic speech you'll encounter it can make it a bit difficult to get invested in the story. There's also a few major bugs (Played on V1.0), most notably the game will sometimes get stuck on a transition screen and force you to restart, which can cost you some progress. All in all, I highly recommend it if you enjoy difficult platformers.

[h1]Summary[/h1] Linked Mask can best be described as untapped potential wrapped in a flawed skin. There is everything to love about this game but a few major flaws that unfortunately bring the experience way down. A player must give a game designer time to build their hook, and let them explain their idea through the game play. The downside of this is that either the player must have enough patience to reach that point, or the game has to be intrinsically fun enough to help the player reach that state. This is the games' ultimate downfall, as it fails to grab from the outset, however it's not a lost cause, a few tweaks could drastically improve the experience. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Control issues can cover a braod series of factors, controller mappings, physics weights, animations, timings, etc. All of these areas, and more, play an influence on how it feels to "control" the game. In a platformer you want to have the tightness to feel you are always in control, but also give the player real weight and make jumps feel as heavy to play as they would be to do yourself. Too much choice may make the player feel like they are just moving a square on a screen, too little will make the game feel too cheap and frustrating. Ultimately the player control is Linked Mask's downfall and the primary reason people will be dropping the game so fast. The character has immediate response to your inputs, both on the ground and while in air. This has the great benefit of allowing the player to make fast and immediate changes to their movement, however it removes all feel from the game. Releasing a movement key mid air causes the character to immediately stop moving, changing direction causes a "whiplash" effect, And jumping feels extremely floaty, yet and fast at the same time as there is very little hang time in the air. These are not direct criticisms if the game has been built around this idea, but the core mechanics seem to be at odds with this movement design, requiring you to release the movement keys on slops to gain momentum while sliding, but then resetting the players' velocity the moment you have left the ground, requiring the player to constantly switch between not inputting and quickly holding to ensure the momentum isn't lost after jumping after a slide. The other major contributor is the camera, which tries to follow the player fairly literally. The easing is not present, causing the camera to often move fast to try and catch up to the player, making the jumps hard to line up when going from a stand-still. Comparing to other games it seems that the "no-movement zone", the area where the camera won't move, even if the player does move, is too close to the center of the screen. It would be fine if the player gets 60% or so across the screen (from the center) before scrolling the camera, but this game feels closer to 20% or 30%. Switching to some positives for a moment however, I do think the levels and layout were well thought out, and spent a long time thinking about how the player will approach each platforming challenge, and find a few ways to use its existing mechanics to make the player think about solving their challenges. There is definitely some kaizo-esque elements to punish even very new players, but never presented in a way where a player could never have seen it coming. The level design however is ultimately let down by both the player input and its visual design. [h1]Graphics and Art[/h1] The game has a fantastic art-style, one that not only invokes the nostalgic Game Boy era of old, but takes influence from other works in different generations to present itself as a "lost Game Boy game that you forgot you owned". You'll find Super Mario World references, Mega-man stage selections, Castlevania inspired maps. Additionally it brings its own flavor of a hybrid ancient ruins mixed with mechs that wouldn't look out of place in Akira. However, there graphics, while pretty, fail to serve the game-play in a few key ways. Having only four colours to work with limits your potential to distinguish different objects in the game scene. Background and foreground elements often blend and aren't distinguished. Spikes and grass look almost identical, and are often dark and easy to miss, all attempts to pull them into the foreground with a "glistening" animation doesn't go far enough. Equally as confusing is how the player fails to be pulled out of the background with his flat colour choices, and dark thin outline. This point is especially confusing considering the enemies have a thick white and black outline that allows them to always pop, regardless of what background they are placed on. Same goes for the characters' "weapon", which has the same treatment. Inversely, some items pop that really don't need to. Breaking blocks or killing enemies with the weapon results in an explosion particle effect that has had the same popping treatment as the enemies, adding a lot of visual noise to a normally muted screen. I spent a while going back and fourth on whether this was intentional or not, it seems like the art style may have changed here part way through development, I don't know how else to describe the, pun intended, contrast in visual designs. [h1]Music and Sounds[/h1] Possibly the best part of the game is it's fantastic soundtrack with nice quiet moments, good mood setters, and a series of blood-pumping action hits. The composer made a good choice to omit the limitations of the 4 Channel Game Boy hardware and go with a full modern OST with no limitations to breath modern life into the classic art style. Seeing as the music chose to go modern, it is a bit questionable why the sound effects did not get the same treatment. Hearing nice music is juxtaposed with 8 bit bleeps and bloops for attacks, effects, enemies, UI sound effects, etc. It's not that the sound effects don't fit the visuals, but it is extremely contrasting compared to the rest of the sound design. The limitations used for the sound effects keep them fairly generic, simple sound effects with no real "charm" added to them, don't expect any Super Mario styled power-ups, power-downs, deaths, etc jingles. [h1]Wrapup[/h1] I think Linked Mask is close, one or two small changes could bring it back, and I really look forward to seeing what the team does over the next few updates, I will be coming back when some of these issues are corrected to play again and update my review for sure.

If you know what you're getting into, this game is exactly that. If you don't know what Kaizo is, do your research before buying. I personally don't like the bosses so far, I'd died to them repeatedly until I find the way to early cycle them, but the levels themselves are fun if you're into the repetition til perfection thing. The mask rewards make the game more interesting, but I see no value in the extra weapons other than for a reason to go after the extra challenge (since again this is mostly a platformer not a fighter). Then again having a reason to go for the coins is nice.

I'm unsure if this game will get improved upon or not, but unless it does I would not suggest you buy it. The art looks great, but makes it so that spikes seem invisible until you run through them. The platforming has somewhat unique behaviors with momentum and spinning but the tutorial says "check your buttons" when "teaching" you how to play. Heads up, B spin jumps. Not sure why there is normal jumping when all that jumping does is NOT allow you to spin off the sparse obstacles that need spinning. "Increasingly difficult twist" translates to "rage game style" and feels like maybe the creators really liked annoying flash games. As it stands this game is a super cool idea with unique graphics but someone takes the worst of these concepts.

I already got stuck in the first level with no clue on what to do next. A proper tutorial would have been nice. Looking at other Steam reviews this seems to be completely intentional by the game developers. I have little free time available for playing games and therefore no patience with games that try to be hardcore just by being optuse. Refunded. I truely think there is no audience for games like this. By the way, the game tried to fry my graphics card by opening in a teeny tiny window with a framerate of 3700+. I do not understand why full screen with V-sync on is not the default.

This could be a great game however the physics need consistency for the slide jump momentum and the bugs and soft locks need to be fixed. I lost so much progress due to soft locks with no self kill option. That it caused me to return the game. I may rebuy it again if it gets patched up cause I do love hard platformers.

Negative reviews are not fair to the game, and even less so if people don't play beyond 7 minutes, it's not a game that can be judged with so little play time, nor does the fact that people are unwilling to learn the game's mechanics make it a bad game. The art is beautiful, the soundtrack is beautiful, the game is beautifully difficult, it's not for every type of player as it's easy to get frustrated with certain things that require near-perfect moves. It is an ideal challenge for the most skilled players; The predominant green color as those of the classic gameboy are a very nice tribute, it is true that at certain times the movement of the camera and the monochromatic palette can play a trick on your vision and could become dizzy, but everything can be fixed in future updates. I feel that the publicity that is being given to the game is a bit wrong as it is being sold as a common platformer, when really it is a Kaizo game, but this is not the fault of the game itself and I feel that most of the negative reviews are due to this mistake, they should check that, because it brings players who are not the target of this game and that brings negative reviews for the same reason. It is a game that requires patience, it is based on failure and retrying until you understand how it works. I definitely recommend it ♥

After playing further through the game I'm changing my review because I understand the game better now, and it is both better and worse than I initially thought. Despite what the marketing implied, this is a kaizo game. Meaning that it's not only hard but purposely unfair. It's meant to feel like a practical joke, and while the early levels are lacking creative cruelty, it quickly ramps up to the levels of "I can't believe this bull shit" that you'd expect from the genre. The big problem with linked mask is not that it has unfair or hard levels, it's that you have to make your way through those levels with core mechanics that are janky and unreliable. The platforming is based on a physics system that seems completely random at times. You're supposed to slide down slopes to build speed and then press jump to launch yourself through the air, and when that works it feels great. But sometimes you do what feels like the exact same thing and your character just loses all momentum as soon you hit the air. And some other times, you fire off like a rocket and clip into the level geometry. Speaking of it's also very glitchy, I soft locked twice, and fell through the level multiple times. There was one screen that ate inputs like crazy. I accidentally skipped one of the bouncy ball sections by phasing through the wall and falling onto the next checkpoint. I want to like this game, it has a lot of creativity and some really great art. But as it is now it's simply just the worst platformer that i've played in years. That said, I have gotten some sort of enjoyment out of it and I am going to keep playing. Hopefully I'll eventually stockholm syndrome myself into liking it.

TL;DR This is a very difficult platformer with inpsiration from Kaizo games, such as 'I wanna be the guy'. If you still want to go into the game with that knowledge and expectation, I think you will have a great time. This is a Kaizo game, or platformer with emphasis on difficulty, and that difficulty may be alienating to most. If you enjoy very difficult platforming or are looking for an introduction to the genre, Then this game may be a great fit for you. Don't let the negative reviews thus far dismay you from giving it a try. I don't believe the store page accurately represents what type of game this is as of writing, and as a result some people may have bought the game with some false assumptions. From a first impression, I think the game is excellent. I haven't even unlocked any masks or upgrades yet, but i've seen enough that I feel invested and want to spend a lot more time playing. Also, it appears frame rate has an effect on gameplay. Too low and your inputs will have considerable delay, too high and boss patterns may not function as intended. Keep vsync on or limit the frame rate to somewhere in 60 - 144 fps follow up and minor spoilers: This is an absolute hidden gem. The movement abilities offered by the masks are very powerful and allow you to skip difficult platforming segments in other stages. If your having trouble on a stage, try another and come back to it later. Once you start getting masks the entire game becomes a lot easier. Would recommend trying stage 6 to start with. It's very tough, but if you can beat it the mask will be a HUGE help in all the other stages.