Bitter Belief Reviews

Short game. Finished with 69 minutes of playtime (nice). Linear progression all the way through. It's less a metroidvania, and more a precision platformer. Got it on sale for $0.89 and I'm happy with it.

It's just almost passable as a good game, but in reality, it's not

first, i like the art 然后，手感不太行，特别是扒墙跳真的令人难受 可能是我技术太差以至于到现在还没通关owo 但还是想给个好评支持下作者，毕竟是第一作嘛 期待作者做新游戏~

I wanted to like this game but I can't. It is frustrating not fun and the little bits of good in it just make me want to replay Celeste.

Not a metroidvania, more of a precision platformer. HP system seems largely tacked on, since most obstacles will kill you in a single hit, but which spikes do or do not are always clearly telegraphed. Save point placement is a little awkward, given the playstyle, but can be planned around. Art style appears to be from several artists mashed together, but in all still looks fairly pleasant. The game is rough, unpolished, but is also the result of a single person, and I think that deserves some credit. I cannot fully recommend it, but the price for what you get is fair, and it's very clearly an honest attempt at making something of value. If you want something like Super Meat Boy, or They Bleed Pixels, this should scratch a similar itch. Bitter Belief is not great, but it's a decent C-. I hope to see more from this developer. Also, please note that the developer does not tag the game as such, but it IS xbox controller compatible.

This is a game in progress it seems There are no other controls I can figure out other than run and jump. I can't progress much in this game and don't know how to shoot. Best of luck on your game development

So... This game just kind of exists to be honest. It's not terribly bad to play or anything like that, but whatever positive qualities it has, like the controls and visuals, quickly get thrown out by how horrid the level design ends up being. This level design is absolutely all over the place with how constantly insta-death happy it is at just about every turn, including the intro area before the main three levels. Special mention goes straight to the one singular boss this game has, which is exclusively trial and error with a gigantic hitbox that's way too easy to touch, and a health-bar that either takes forever to defeat, leading to an easy death, or you'll accidentally delete the entire bar and thus end the game, like I did. At most, for this singular dollar, you're getting roughly and hour to and hour and a half of really awkwardly designed platforming and basically nothing else. Oh, and also, this game is straight up not a metroidvania, because that implies that there's actual level design that allows you to branch out from the main path, of with there is literally NONE whatsoever in this game. Literally none.

This game is unfinished, or possibly just broken in its current state I got this game since I'm a fan of Metroidvanias. It kind of fits into that genre since you get abilities that help you unlock other areas, but there isn't a lot of exploration beyond that. The gameplay is pretty linear. You play as a girl who encounters her dead father's spirit. In some very slow, unskippable, and broken English, he tells you to fetch three eyes for a statue to bring him back. The game from then on is more like a puzzle platformer, similar to something like Super Meat Boy where you dodge environmental obstacles like lava streams, spiked walls, buzzsaws, and an angry storm cloud. Some of these puzzles require a lot of trial-and-error where you have to observe complicated patterns before you can make the right moves to survive, particularly in a buzzsaw room. Thankfully, checkpoints are placed pretty generously, so a death won't keep you back for long The attack mechanic is interesting: you hold down the attack button which slows down time. If you're close to an enemy, an arrow appears pointing at it. When you let go, you shoot towards the enemy and kill it. It seems like it's set up to do some complicated jumping, but it's seldom used that way in the game After you collect the three eyes, which takes about 30 minutes to do, you are rewarded by gaining access to the tomb which is an empty room that you can't pause in, can't escape from, and the floor inexplicably kills you. You can get here within about half an hour of gamplay. The trailer shows that the player enters the tomb (see 0:47 where they say "Let me see inside"), but it appears that there's an evil three-eyed cat head that you presumably fight. Again, this doesn't appear in the game because the room is empty If you skip the tomb, you can backtrack and jump out of bounds in various ways. This, the sudden and quick ending, the poor/misspelled dialog, and the fact that a major update was made only a few days ago to add controller support suggest to me that this game is still in development. Maybe there was a bugged update that wasn't tested. But the game itself is already short beyond that. With the exception of the three-eyed cat head, there isn't anything in the trailer that I haven't seen in the whole 30 minutes of gameplay that I've experienced I recently got GoldFish Brain which is also a Metroidvania. It was less than half the price of this with 8x the length of gameplay. So maybe wait on this one

Updated, since the final boss was patched and you can actually finish the game now. I was lured by the promise of a 2D pixel art metroidvania, but while that is technically true, Bitter Belief is more a precision platformer. That doesn't mean it's bad, just that you probably need to go in with different expectations. The game itself is still somewhat rough. It's also pretty short, you can probably finish the game in an hour You play as a girl, who visits her father’s grave and meets his spirit. He then gives you a quest to collect three orbs, that take you to three different areas, and every orb also grants you a new power. It's pretty basic stuff, like wall climbing, double jump and pushing blocks. While that does sound like something a metroidvania would do, it's also kinda where it ends. Yes, you can technically revisit old areas, but there's no need to do so, there are no secrets, no new paths you can take, anything like that. The story is told through slow, timed, one-liners, that have a bunch of typos and grammar issues. By chance I found out you can speed it up by holding down X, but there is no hint or prompt for this. I was just mashing buttons and got lucky. While the platforming is the most important part of the game, there are also enemies, that can get in your way, but you have an attack to deal with them. It's a bit weird though. When you get it, you are told to hold X to attack, but when you do nothing really happens. Time slows down and you hear a buzzing sound, but that's it. Only when you get near an enemy do you get a red arrow towards the enemy and letting go of X flings you in that direction, you bump into them, and they die. While uncommon, it could be neat if it's used to slingshot of enemies and reach new areas, but that's not how it works. Bumping into an enemy kills all your momentum and you stop. When there are two enemies close together (which happens like three times) you can chain your attack and sometimes get this slingshot effect, but it's inconsistent and feels more like a bug, rather than a feature. When you first get your attack, there's also a book that floats around and when you pick it up, you are told your power increases, but it's not really clear what it does. If it does anything, I guess it increases the range where your attack works, but I don't really know. Saving is done through checkpoints, which aren't too rare, but there are times I wish it saved every time you entered a new screen. Depending on how often you die, you might have to go through the same one or two rooms 10-20 times, until you get to the next checkpoint, which is always a lot of fun. At least the reloads after death are quick. Originally the ending was bugged, but that was patched after a few days and you can actually finish the game. The boss fight is a real disapointment though. It doesn't really fit with the rest of the game, and the text (there's a lot) needs much more proofreading. The base game definitely has potential and it's fun enough for the most part (except maybe one or two sections that I found frustrating). Too bad the ending leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth. There are a lot of much better platformers around, so play those before you try out Bitter Belief. After that you could probably give this game a shot, once it's on sale.