Dormant World Reviews

Slow paced, sluggish control, boring combat, ear piercing music, hideous graphics that look like they were drawn by a 1st grader, uses a password feature instead of a save because that makes sense in 2018. This game has no redeeming qualities at all, avoid it even if it is on sale.

[h1]SUMMARY[/h1] A Zelda 2 clone, and a bad one. I wanted to like this game. It had a quirky little pixelated art style that's semi-realistic in its dimensions of characters, it has a good deal of adventuring and upgrades to health and regen, and it progresses nicely. There are brick-walls of design though, that HAVE to be addressed. FIRST; it uses maze-like design to make up for its short length. Around 10 to 15 minutes of each level will be figuring out the proper order in which to take paths off screen and walk through certain doors, and it will re-orient you and take you in loops, disorienting you and making things much harder than they should be. I don't care what this was skimmed from, it's trash design. It's fine to have 1 section like this, maybe 2 in a game, but that's it, and for a game as short as this one seems to be, it has zero excuse for having it as much as it does. SECONDLY; abusing pixel-perfect jumps over insta-kill death pits, and just in general. The only time a pixel-perfect jump should be required is towards the end of the game, when the player has spent plenty of time familiarizing themselves with the controls and mastering the mechanics of the game. Here, they become abundant very quickly. And this is not some complaint about difficult jumps, this literally requires you to jump at the exact, specific pixel-perfect frame in order to make jumps over death pits almost immediately after the first boss. Inexcusable. LASTLY; the checkpoint mechanic is garbage. So I don't know what decade this developer time traveled from, but it's not the 80's or 90's anymore. We don't use "password systems" to enter and come back to the game for later, we have nearly limitless save space thanks to terrabytes of hard drive space. Password systems were a way of recording progress without using up space on the hard drive, or saving money on the production of cartridges, where kilobytes of data were precious and people had, at most, around 100 megabytes in total on their computers in 1990. It is fucking GAFFE that an automatic save feature for checkpoints is not implemented. Nobody wants nor needs a password system. These three things combine to create an unholy trinity of bad game design that makes this other-wise charming game complete garbage. Then there's a bunch of smaller things that just annoyed the ever-loving shit out of me: -Very slow attack animations -Bad soundtrack -Lots of pointless dialogue -Resurrection costing way too much gold, making collecting coins almost irrelevant -The jumping feeling a bit floaty [h1]OVERALL SCORE[/h1] Not Recommended [h1]REPLAY VALUE[/h1] Average