Li'l Red Reviews

felis is my goat

Cute Gameboy-styled platformer inspired by Kirby's Dreamland 1 & 2. Straightforward gameplay and a difficulty curve that feels just right. Also lets you swap between chiptune and modern soundfonts. Feels great to play!

I love it. It captures that nostalgic feeling that I had playing on my OG gameboy when i was a kid; the visuals, the sound, and the feel. It brought me back and made me smile. I'll definitely be continuing my play through. By the way, hard is hard. You will be challenged. I'm glad it's this way lol.

The game is too hard. I don't mind a bit of a challenge but this game is just too hard for you to even enjoy it. The controls are delayed, avoiding enemy attacks is almost impossible, and the knockback is ridiculous and makes you fall almost instantly. Not to mention, the weapon charging also sometimes doesn't work.

Cute art style. Pretty hardcore platforming, which is a plus imho Enjoyable boss fights Runs great on steam deck

Precision platforming that plays like old Mega Man and controls like it too. Easy to pick up, harder to master. Scoring system fairly detailed. Textbook variety of mobs and level progression in complexity.

An enjoyable action-platformer with a focus on combos and hard-counters. I'm not sure what Li'l Red did to piss off all these woodland creatures but you've got a wide variety of moves to help you best them. Alternatively, you can use Red's mobility to race through levels. It's certainly not "Kirby's Dream Land", but I wouldn't say its hard either. It does require a bit of cautious play and it rewards a player who uses all of Red's moves. My controller worked well and the controls themselves were fairly tight. If you're in the mood for a combat-heavy platformer you can't go wrong with Li'l Red.

Some people do retro well. This isn't it. - The music is horrid, - Avoiding attacks is difficult (and that's on easy mode). - Neither 'Enter' nor 'Space' nor 'Esc' work in the menu. I really don't know what the dev was thinking.

a great little game that references the Gameboy era of games. a fair challenge and in all mean accomplishes its goal. my only criticism is that it needed like a bonus level or something to break up the platforming to nail that gameboy ascetic.

I remember Kirby's Dream Land as the game that dared to make platformers accessible to everyone it possibly could. The visual style of Li'l Red had me hoping for something comparable, perhaps something that had been inspired to explore the concept further or take it in another direction. I'll admit that was foolish of me. The first thing I am greeted with upon starting the game is a fighting game-esque control scheme that seems to go against every platforming instinct I have ever developed from the first time I ever held a piece of gaming hardware. Let's start with jumping. You can jump almost as you would in any other platformer, but you will never find a good reason to do so. That's because the standard jump has been obsoleted by a spinning jump, which you can perform simply by holding up or down while pressing the jump button. Now your jump has improved height as well as some limited offensive and defensive capabilities. The spin jump essentially reverses the flow of contact damage, allowing you to damage enemies instead of taking damage from them, [i]but it only works in unspecified instances where the game allows it to[/i]. For instance, the first boss has one attack that causes its body to deal contact damage to you regardless of your own state, and you will not know when this can happen until it happens. Either way, there are absolutely no downsides to the spin jump other than the extra input it takes to perform. Moving on to attacking. You have a basic forward shockwave attack that can be charged up into a stronger version with slightly more range. At some point it occurred to me that using this attack, however essential it may have first seemed, was counterproductive in almost every scenario. First, there is a considerable amount of animation lock after attacking that prevents you from moving at all. Second, getting hit while charging will immediately reset the charge to zero. Third, attacking in the air cancels your spin jump into a regular jump, so unless your attack was charged up to begin with you're almost certainly going to be hit back by whatever you just attacked. With some careful consideration you might find a few situations (outside of boss fights) where the standard attack comes in handy, but those will surely be few and far between. Finally we have the dash maneuver. Unlike the spin jump, this one actually has a designated button, but you will find it works less like the sprint in Kirby and more like the dash in Mega Man X, which briefly enables a faster jump. The dash can also be used to cancel the animation lock after attacking, but don't expect that to do you any good. When you add all of these together, what are you looking at? A game where the optimal play is almost always right-B-upright-A. That's the minimum amount of inputs required to perform a dashing spin jump, and my thumb is still sore from it even as I type this. But keeping up that kind of momentum will work infinitely better than trying to internalize the exact moment a snail will decide to knock you into a pit. It will work better than slowing down to deal with enemies that explode, enemies whose projectiles aim straight for you, enemies who pile up if you let them follow you too closely through the level. None of them have any less than 3 HP, and so none of them can be disposed of as fast as they can be bypassed. Despite appearances, I would not compare this game to Kirby in the slightest. Nor would I compare it to Mario, Mega Man, Castlevania, or even Zelda II. While it may not be as difficult as any of those platformers to complete, Li'l Red has a certain obtuseness which makes it more difficult than any of those for me to simply play and enjoy. Maybe if you come from more of a fighting game background, you will find the appeal in this where I could not. At the end of the day though, I can tell I'm not the target audience in spite of the sheer influence retro platformers have had on me.