Medusa Reviews

This is almost a yes. Decent metroidvania in many ways, with some points of creativity I really liked, such as being able to use items in unexpected ways (summoning the chariot just to stand on it, summoning hoplites and stoning them to build a wall that you can climb up as the snake, tapping the jetpack to go further with it, etc.) and the generally crude-but-charming art. The movement feels a little awkward at first but once you pick up the snake shift and (eventually) the jetpack things start to feel more intuitive and more fun. Things that pull it to a no: - The backtracking isn't fatal but it was a big negative. If the teleport relic were available very early on that would solve this 100%. - Slightly faster movement speed would have been nice, especially with all the backtracking. - Related QoL, needing to manually restore magic and HP by breaking jars endlessly... especially silly to have to waste 5 minutes doing this when you're right next to a portal anyway. Save points and portals should just restore magic and HP, don't waste my time so blatantly. Nothing in the game offers this sort of restoration. - Fatal softlocks when movement bugs result in getting stuck somewhere. What I don't understand is that sometimes the game catches these (esp with the chariot) and teleports you back to the room entrance (which is good), but sometimes it doesn't. It's extra annoying because you can die and still save your progress, but if you can't find a way to die and have to just quit, you lose all your progress. - Some of the rooms are well designed and creative. Others are pretty generic. The jars -- many varieties, distinguished solely by the odds of blue/green restoratives dropping -- were a very monolithic universal presence. - The ending is pretty abrupt, explains next to nothing, and as the game has no boss fights, everything you've collected is irrelevant. As refreshing as it is that there's no archenemy or revenge quest and Medusa is just into learning things... it's very "well I guess a game just happened here maybe" - After the ending you are deposited back in starting position. I can't tell if anything has changed -- is this a postgame? The one thing that definitely changes is that the teleport relic ceases to take you anywhere else. This is incredibly annoying if there was one little bit of the last area you hadn't explored (hi) thanks to finding the ending first. Now I will never know if the invisibility ring has an upgrade or what it does. - Somehow my display says 100% anyway despite having a piece of map missing... I think it's just set to say 100% after finding the ending to avoid player complaints, regardless of your actual completion... this feels bad. - Some promising mechanics that would have been fun with more or more options, like the shop. All in all, it was OK, but needs improvements to fully live up to the genre.