izigame.me

This was the first game I decided to play after my father passed away. Honestly, I don't know what I was looking for... a distraction for my pain, maybe... leisure, perhaps?... or a sheer attempt to carry on with my regular life, and that includes keeping my gaming habit to bring me a smile or two.
When I saw Downward in my Steam Library, I knew I had it for quite some time, among many others I couldn't find the right timing to sit down and play.
Again, I don't know what I was looking for. I needed to have the sensation of flying, jumping, as if was trying to reach the sky or something. I needed to have a sample of what heaven was like, unlike the types of games I usually play.
Well, getting down to business, Downward is a short entertaining game with fantasy and exploration aspects, but the main feature is the parkour. You boost for high jumps, touch the sky, fall, rebound, hook up, and all the rest. I mean, if you played and liked "A Story About My Uncle" this would be another nice option for you. I recommend this game, all in a nutshell. It brought me a bit of peace at least.

Played just a little so far and here are my observations.
- The Mark mechanic says you can use it as many times as you like, until after the first 'boss' then you only get 2 charges.. so that's a lie.
- I used the Mark to get behind the first boss but it instant turns 180 degrees making the mechanic completely useless with anything that can turn to face you.
- The upgrades screen doesn't explain what anything is except health, so you're upgrading whatever?
- Much of the items in the upgrade menu are in Spanish.
- The wall mechanic says how to wall-run and jump off, but then the next 2 wall sections have a bouncing auto-jump added to them.
- Much of the items in the upgrade menu are in Spanish.
- There's a climb animation but no animation for picking up, using a lever or drinking.
- Falling (dying) doesn't cost anything, until it suddenly does.
- There's an invisible 'killbox' when you fall too far, except in areas where there isn't.
With all things considered within the first few minutes of gameplay, I still recommend it for the platforming and world detail.

Starting positive: Landscapes are gorgeous. The mechanics of parkour and unlocked "powers" are better than I expected, but still jank. Voice acting is great, and the story isn't painfully bad. At no point did anything fail to respond to my input. Giant tortoise. Though I nearly got softlocked once, I never did, and if I had been using the Mark like I was told to then I'd have nothing to worry about. The base-building mechanic feels out-of-place. The epilogue was a bit tedious. Switching planets(?) is a fine mechanic, but it's not clear what actually changes when you do so. Skill tree / economy is poorly balanced. On several occasions, I accidentally pulled myself up through a ceiling. Combat is trivial AND repetitive, a deadly combo. It was hard to see some "double-jump" pads against blue sky/water, and I'm not colourblind.
But my main criticism, and why I'm rating down, is that this is sold as a parkour game but the parkour element isn't quite there. If I didn't know better I'd say this was a different game with wall-running tacked on. By the end of the game, I felt confident in getting around, but had learned to avoid straying from the beaten path, and heaven forbid I landed in water. The choice to have a 'dash' (which doesn't work half the time) rather than a more traditional 'sprint' I think contributed to the general sluggish feeling of the movement. And then there's what I'll generously call a difficulty spike when you switch over to the challenges. There's no way I'm grinding for gold times when simply finishing them seems to require inhuman precision.