Angel's Gear

The characters were all really charming, and I found I cared about their fates towards the end.

Scumhead's visual style is clear and present as always, and in many ways is at its best here. i was surprised to even find a bit of whimsy in some of the ideas, like the main character animations and the way most of the NPCs seem to fall in love with you (giving the large skeletal blacksmith a blushing animation is a nice touch). in a lot of ways the gameplay plays second fiddle to this aesthetic, but the difficulty of the game is also meant to communicate aspects of the art you're experiencing, so it can't be written off. it's a shame, then, that the level design is full of these frustrating and bizarre choices, like jumps you can barely make and unseen hazards that can kill you instantly, while the enemy design would be extremely forgiving if not for the various insta-kill attacks. fortunately, it's rare that lots of progress is lost all at once (as long as you save liberally), and these complaints are relatively minor. it's the bugs that really kill it for me.

The art style is fantastic and I was super immersed in the characters and world.

There's some legitimately fun game fundamentals here with the unusual controls, and obviously the sound/character/visual design is amazing, but there's a whole list of rubbish to wade through...

While this game does support DInput natively, I was not able to get the in-game button rebinder (under the F1 options menu) to function, so I had to use a Gamepad config via Steam Input.

After sorting the frame rate out on my steam deck this game was so smooth.