izigame.me

I'm about to tear into this game something fierce. It doesn't matter how good you think your writing is, hire an editor, hire some QA people. It's alright fun, but I'm left groaning at the end.
The Good
I'll start with the positives, though. The gameplay is fine. Being 2D, a common problem is enemies just flipping without any frames to attack, and this is not one of those instances. There's an okay variety to how you end up building your Deadsuit. But there is also only objectively one good way to progress through levels. This is where the positives end.
The Bad
Continuing from gameplay, if you don't focus most of your levels into GunPower, you quickly feel the burn of spongey enemies. As you progress through the story, enemies also all level up, too. If you aren't careful, you might be shooting some electric sponges for far too long and leveling is becoming tedious. Thankfully, I changed courses very fast early on. I can see how some people could also fall into that trap... It would be okay if you could respec and learn the error of your ways, but if you invested even two hours, you might not wanna restart.
Contact damage is an archaic idea, and while it wasn't an issue for most of the game, there was one boss in particular, Ogre, that made it particularly frustrating. Even if you were to have contact damage, having the damage be the same amount as a full attack is just egregious. It can make some fights feel completely unfair. I'm in power armor, why isn't a BUG being hurt?
Fast Travel feels like a late addition, and one added in reluctantly. There are story points where you can't use fast travel, and that's fine. But when you CAN use fast travel, there are so few points available on the map that you'll end up running a quarter of the map any time you need to get anywhere. And if you need to backtrack for something, that becomes a bit more tedious...
Fast Travel seems like it could have been an easy fix, so why wasn't it? Well, that's because of Dark Souls style NPC quests. Souls generally has NPCs in your path that you need to go to to continue their quests. Not Ghost Song. In fact, there's two times you need to revisit one specific room that is in the starting area that you will enter one more time for sure, but a second time is really pushing it unless you're just... wandering for no reason. And these places are random as fuck, too. There's even an entirely out of the way room that I ran into on a whim while just re-exploring because of this that I would have never entered if I just was focusing on what paths I missed or loot I missed.
Speaking of paths, some hidden walls are too hidden. At the start, there's some hinting with little plants here and there, or you walk on something and it shakes... That's dropped almost completely later on. In fact, one of the only extra charges for healing is under a floor that doesn't shake and blends PERFECTLY into the rest of the floor. Am I expected to just run around shooting every wall and floor?
The indistinguishability also comes from the fact so much of the world is just flat blobs, uninteresting landscape. I'm gonna shamelessly compare this to Hollow Knight and Super Metroid and just say treat every room like you would an actual room and decorate it to have some purpose, not slag filled hallway with more slag.
The Worst
The writing.
In the fourth stage, I just started mashing through some of the dialogue with the crew. "Bloat" does not begin to describe it. So the characters all love talking. At length. Conversations are mostly one sided, driven by Deadsuit being generally curious. And they go on and on and on about whatever's plaguing them. Imagine scrolling through a white girl's twitter feed. I can understand their problems, but the lengths to which it's hammered in.
Not only that, but dialogue will flip between text and voice. Text you can mash past at least, but once voice starts, then you have to listen through it all, even if it's dull, all in favor of completionism, but what a chore. And what is with the ship characters? So much of Gamber's dialogue comes off like a failed liberal arts degree's best attempt at being whimsical. And why is a ship even talking like that?
And like I mentioned before, quests are all over the place. Make sure you catch everyone as their next location every time.
Finally, the actual plot: The entire premise of what's going on is laid out to the character after a point. Some flowery dialogue is added but otherwise 'this is exactly why all this is happening'. There isn't room for any kind of interpretation, there is just something in the sun and also there's forces above sun worm gods that can just set bounties and send bug dudes. So the most bizarre things are just explained outright to you.
But the most frustrating is the inconsistency. Deadsuit is consistently shown as curious, helpful, inquisitive... But knows nothing about herself. And when presented, time and time again with opportunities to do so, refuses to look inward. Why is this the one thing someone so curious is not at all curious about? One boss even yells 'deadsuits aren't real' at one point even though you ARE one and what the fuck a deadsuit even is is never explained at all.
And to top it off, spoilers mind you, Deadsuit is alluded to being possessed by Charley, Pasha's sister but that only ends up creating more questions, like why is the Deadsuit childsized? Was it empty? Did a totally unrelated child just fucking die in another suit and Charley's ghost come over? Why is everyone else so god damn tall? Nothing satisfying ever comes from the mystery of the Deadsuit and is entirely unexplained, while the entire premise of the world is in turn, which could have been more interesting. But it's just *thrown* at you.

Skip all the dialogue, you'll have a better experience. I'm not exaggerating. Do buy it on sale, level up GunPower primarily, and if you want completionism, there's a 100% map for all the quest markers and other stuff if you need.