Super Owlboy Reviews

The game's basically what you'd expect it to be from looking at the screenshots and video, i.e. a generic platformer game. Platformers have an inherent amount of fun in them and so this is probably worth its small price tag. However, it lacks some mechanical polish (e.g. no input buffering) and the difficulty gets a bit too high. I'll discuss these two points in detail but if you just want a review score, then maybe 4/10? [hr][/hr] This section's more of a feedback thing for the developers - more like "this is how it could be improved" rather than "should you buy this?". But you're welcome to continue reading regardless - maybe you want more detail or are seeking confirmation bias or something. Let's look at the mechanical polish first. I've found the biggest source of frustration to be jumping off a wall. Scaling a wall via jumping works fine, but if I want to leap off the wall in the opposite direction, there are some problems. Let's suppose the wall is to my right, and I want to jump to a far away platform on the left. If I let go of the movement keys and just jump, air resistance slows me down and I don't go very far. That's fair - I have to hold the left key to move left. But if I press the left key before jumping, I move off the wall and so the jump doesn't register, causing me to fall. And because I'm instinctively pressing the right key to hug the wall, if I delay pressing left then I get a small jump. So jumping the farthest possible distance is difficult, but not in a way I find fun. Maybe a controller alleviates this. I mentioned that there's no input buffering in the first paragraph. If anyone reading's unfamiliar with the term, it's best illustrated via an example. Let's suppose you jump and land on one of those platforms that falls after a couple of seconds. So perhaps you want to jump again as soon as you land. If you mistime it and press jump just as you're about to land, the game thinks you're still in the air and doesn't let you jump - but from the player's perspective, they're on the ground, they pressed the jump button, and they didn't jump. Input buffering is the practice of queuing up the jump button so that they'll jump when they land. The purpose of input buffering is often to protect the player from themselves. There have absolutely been deaths because I thought I jumped and I didn't. I also feel like the character doesn't decelerate quickly enough on land. There are plenty of times where I've landed on a one-block tile and slid off it. Let's now take a look at the game's difficulty. Whether a game's hard or easy doesn't necessarily mean it's good or bad, but a hard game demands tight game design in order to not seem frustrating. The game needs to play fair, and the aforementioned control issues don't feel fair. I put the game down on level 28, which a tower of unstable blocks that felt like it was luck whether I'd land on the top block or whether it would fall. Then at the end of the level, just before the exit portal, I was shot by a cannon I couldn't see. I didn't quit out of frustration, more that the levels were getting longer and that there wasn't much point in continuing. At time of writing, 0.1% of other players have the achievement for reaching level 20 while 33.3% reached level 10. This might not be a fair comparison because I'm writing this the day after release, so maybe Steam's achievements haven't updated properly or people just haven't had a chance to play. And I don't want to discourage people from buying the game, which is partly why I'm mentioning it down here. But this could be worth analysing. There's more analysis work that could be done (e.g. theming) but the review's already long enough and the nature of this sort of critique focuses more on the negatives than the positives. And some points of feedback could just boil down to "do more stuff" which could easily be out of scope.