Solus Machina Reviews

Warning, this review contains vague spoilers about game elements and areas. A friend and I got this game and raced against one another for our first playthrough of the game, aiming for 100% achievements. Going through the game we discussed a lot of our likes and dislikes, making me realise I could probably summarise them in a review and help boost the game on Steam. So, for starters, the things I really liked about the game! The atmosphere and graphics were amazing, I absolutely loved the subtle world building shown too. The rooms were very pretty and the art style did it wonders. The sound design was interesting, a whole game with pretty much no music, only the ambience of the current room and the environment. It helped give a sense of something being wrong with the world. Gameplay was great, although suffered from a few issues I'll discuss a bit later in the review. The progressive linear difficulty was great, with the game getting harder as it went on. New gimmicks were introduced fairly frequently, to help avoid the gameplay getting stale, and there were always Power Cells for you to challenge yourself with. I managed to get all the Power Cells on my first playthrough, but my friend missed 3 of them. (mainly due to ambiguous screen transitions in the sky area) Now... for the cons. The game was a buggy mess that needs a decent amount of polish. The gameplay was fun enough to overcome this, but I suspect plenty of others might give up due to these bugs. (most of the achievements were at 0% when my friend and I played, suggesting nobody else got beyond the collapsing area? They show as 0.1% now) No controller support! I had to manually bind keyboard buttons to my controller to make the game work, and the keys in game are NOT rebindable. TRIPPING! The robots 'falling over' animation served no purpose in game and just wasted time, especially bad when it would constantly trip upon respawn. The only time I felt this had any gameplay significance was during the Domed City sequence where you had to avoid tripping around the robot guards. Being able to Dash Cancel with the jump button is something that casuals will probably think is a bug, and speedrunners would love. It took me about two hours to get used to this, but my friend enjoyed it right away. Maybe make this an option in the settings. At the start, so many of my up dashes were cancelled due to releasing jump. Weird non-intuitive design in my opinion. Although I admit they became useful once you got the hang of it. In no particular order, here are the bugs and issues we encountered when playing: 1) When you die you can still dash, usually causing the camera to change into different rooms, oftentimes inaccessible ones. Thankfully merely a visual bug, but occasionally this would cause you to die upon respawn or trip over, wasting time. 2) Dying to the bottom of the lift in the Ruined Factory makes you invincible. I don't know why it does, but it would consistently do so. You have to open the settings and turn on and off invincibility mode to fix it. Thankfully the eyes let you know if the glitch has activated (they go pink). 3) You can somehow glitch inside of walls, and then this misaligns you from the grid by about half a block. Dying does not fix this, but leaving and re-entering a room does. 4) The game gradually gets choppier the longer you play, causing us both to have to quit and fully close the game about 3 or 4 times throughout our playthrough. Possibly a memory leak? It happens gradually, but when you go from choppy to smooth the difference is insane. 5) The growing thorns in the Domed City area can spawn invisible, making the parts very unfair. Luckily this glitch usually fixes itself upon dying, but triggered about 1/5 attempts. 6) Doing a frame 1 jump would result in a max height jump (so instead of doing the smallest jump it does the largest). This is more egregious for keyboard players, since it is unlikely you'll achieve this on controller. 7) The final Power Cell's secret room was entirely black for me, and I only knew it was there thanks to a friend who had just gotten it. It was visible for him. (the one in the big mech) 8) Sometimes you can just stand on spikes and not die, usually only happening if the robot landed and 'tripped' on it. This actuallu was helpful and let you collect certain Power Cells, but is still a bug so I wanted to list it here. 9) Respawn points sometimes just don't work. I suspect that certain rooms intentionally didn't give checkpoints, but sometimes I would go through a room and not get a checkpoint, and sometimes that same room would respawn me somewhere else. During the Domed City area it even twice respawned me BEYOND where I had died. Thankfully no Power Cells missed because of it. Hope this review helps!

Love the art style. A very challenging precision platformer with a fun atmosphere. Can be a bit difficult, but has a nice "Invincibility" mode to make it a bit more fair. Even with the no dying, can give you an unique challenge and some fun.

[h1] A solid precision platformer that unfortunately comes with some annoyances [/h1] [h3] Played on Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon, via Proton 8.0-5. Proton 9.0-2 crashes on startup. [/h3] Before I say anything about this game, if you like Celeste and how that plays, you will (probably) like this game. Solus Machina clearly takes inspiration from Celeste and games similar to that (which isn't a bad thing, of course). You got a dash ability, you can climb on walls and jump off them, there's even an equivalent to Celeste's strawberry collectibles in the form of batteries(?) that you can collect. So if this is your thing, or you even speedrun Celeste, then you will most definitely have a fun time here (and I did have fun for quite a while). But... just to preface here, it's not a carbon copy of Celeste with a coat of paint on it. It's really it's own thing here, and you can see that the passion oozing from this developer. It does some things different than Celeste, for better or for worse (we'll talk about that later). But for now, I'll talk about my main criticism of this game, which is it's too "precision-y." It's like each jump you make is near pixel perfect, which is incredibly frustrating. This is caused by the obstacles (spikes, wires(?), blades, etc) hitboxes being literally perfect, and not in the good way. It's hitbox is huge. There are times that I jump over a spike and not even come close to grazing the spike texture, yet I die. There is no leeway with these hitboxes. It gets especially bad when you have to jump into one-gap wide holes. You tap barely--and I mean barely--left or right, you die. It's an incredibly frustrating experience because there are times where I think a section is borderline impossible because the precision required is so massive. It just doesn't feel like I should be dying there. It gets even worse when you realize that this game has you jump blind-jumps. There are times in the game where you cannot see where you are jumping because of the level switching/page switching mechanic. For context, this game takes up your entire screen real estate, which makes sense. When you get to the end of the page, the game transitions to the next "level" by doing a sweeping motion to it, so there are no load screens here (the entire game is interconnected with each other, aka each level is connected to each other seamlessly). Great. But what's not great, is in the latter half of the game, there is a city you enter where there are these robot-like enemies walking about on the roofs of the buildings. You have to jump from building-to-building, descending and ascending these buildings while dodging these enemies. There's a problem though, because there are points where you are on the top of a building--which is on a completely different page than the lower building you're expected to jump to--which leads to the player just "hoping for the best" and praying that they land somewhere safe. It leads to a game of guessing, which is not something I'd imagine fits a precision platformer well. One of the big differences movement wise between the robot you play as and Madeline from Celeste, is that you cannot dash diagonally; only in cardinal directions. This doesn't seem bad at first glance, but this seemingly arbitrary limitation leads to a bunch of levels to be even more precision-y. There are jumps you make in this game that make you wish you had diagonal dashes, and definitely makes it harder than it needs to be. Another major difference in this game is that the robot you play as has a "falling animation" so to speak. If you dropped from a high height, your character will face plant on the ground, taking a second or two to get back up. This does no damage to the player. So what's the point of this? That's what I thought during my session with this game. All it did was pose to be an annoyance, since your dash ability can cause you to fall over all the time since you can go pretty high with it. It seemed like a gimmick, until I reached a part of the game where there are these aircrafts that shine light and are looking for you. These aircrafts pan across the screen periodically, and if you step into the light, they catch you and you die. This (and the boss fight at the end of the game) made this mechanic make sense, since if you face plant in these levels, you will most certainly die. It leads to the player having to not have harsh falls and to play diligently, which I thought was cool and well thought out. But that's it. For two levels this mechanic makes sense, the rest it just becomes an annoyance. The same can be said for the stamina mechanic. Yes, there is stamina in this game. Stamina only affects how long you are able to hang on a wall. Once your stamina bar runs out, you fall. This really didn't pose much of a challenge throughout the entire game; it moreso posed a huge annoyance. With this stamina mechanic, you can't just climb on a wall and scope out the area. There are times where you go onto the next page (and there is no checkpoint available) and just want to scope out the place. But it's very difficult to because there are blades, obstacles and enemies about, which naturally lead you to hang on the wall because if you hop up, you might die and would have to repeat a whole section again. But this stamina mechanic punishes this, and forces you to just "go with it" and speedrun through it, which is frightening because these jumps are practically pixel perfect, meaning if I miss it, I'll have to go back to the previous checkpoint which can be far away. Basically, I'd like to catch-up on my breath and scope out the place before jutting my way in there. This unironically caused me to find an exploit to not lose stamina so I could catch up my breath and scope the place out (the exploit is to spam climb while tapping up very fast; you don't lose stamina this way). Again, like how I was saying, the stamina mechanic didn't really pose much of a threat (especially after my stamina exploit) but there were times where sections of the game looked like they were made for stamina, and I really appreciated that. It was actually really fun. One section that I really loved was the girder section. That used the stamina mechanic really well, and I really appreciated the design philosophy for that. But like the faceplant mechanic, it was only really used to the best of its ability in a handful of levels, which I thought was a bit of a waste. Lastly, the last main criticism I have for this game is the variance jumping (idk the name of it). Basically, the longer you hold the jump button, the higher you jump. Sounds cool, right? It's pretty common amongst platformers, but here it feels terrible. This 'variance jumping' leads the levels to be designed for absolute *perfect* jumps. For example, there are times where you need to dash through a line of spikes above and below you, but the jump required needs like a half jump, or even less than that. Any higher or lower you die. I mean, I get why this is a thing. It makes the levels harder, and allows you to design more deep, rich levels. But it's soooo hard to gauge whether or not your jump is high or low enough. You will die multiple times to this, and I can't shake the feeling off that this game would be much better without it. Even after all of this criticism, I still enjoyed & had fun with this game and can recommend it (if you can handle dying a lot!). It's a good game--with great aesthetics & art--just a little bumpy. 7.5/10.

This is a fairly well designed-alike Celeste platformer. I'm recommending based on the knowledge poured into the game by a singular developer. The game is pretty precise in what inputs you do which is fine. It's pretty gimmicky and hard, but the main concern is that it might just be too precise? A more accurate rating would be 'Mixed', but I'm more towards positive atm. Some of the things the game could also be improved is key binds, I'm sorry, Z/X/C is kind of awful. No controller supports makes also this way more challenging than it should be since pretty much almost all modern platformers are designed with it in mind. So with these issues, it also means the jumps are fairly inconsistent from my gameplay experience, it's fun that you have more 'opening' to it, but the stamina bar seems extremely annoying since it stresses your gameplay to be speedran. The game also suffers some bugs, one of which allows your character to jump with the falloff animation and also you can get stuck inside falling blocks with locks your game. Another thing that could be improved is showing a better pathing on where to go next. I had no idea you had to go up until I noticed skeletons that led to it. But if you account for all of that, it's actually not that bad, but unfortunately I am quite incapable to play the game Z/X/C bindings atm. The game's issue doesn't affect much its platforming, but I'd rate at most a 6/10. It's got the ideas right, but an extreme level of annoyance. But despite that, remains enjoyable enough to be played.