izigame.me

Games that are challenging because the controls are very hard to make your character go where you want them to are not fun. Redactem is unfortunately one of those games. The character is very slippery and is very hard to accurately control within the game world. Many times, you will accidentally run into traps because your character is constantly slipping on ice cubes and bananas. A little bit of slipperiness and momentum are good, but this game takes it to the extreme, an extreme which is very unsatisfying to play with when a lot of the jumps in later levels of this game are so precise.
As for the starting levels, you are explicitly told the controls for how to move, jump, wall jump, sprint, reverse gravity, and reverse time. It is up to the player to use these controls to complete various puzzles within the world. For the most part, the puzzles are actually pretty decent, minus the missile ones. I'm looking at you, world 2, level 6. For this level, you have to reverse gravity to land an item on a missile and thread a needle to get this item to fall onto a switch. Does that sound incredibly precise? It's because it is. It makes it all the worse due to the game having physics entirely dependent on frame rate, which makes certain levels COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE unless the user goes into their NVIDIA Control Panel (or whatever the AMD equivalent is) and caps the game's frame rate. I found that the game is completable on 60 FPS, so if anyone is reading this, this is how you beat the levels and get those achievements. I have seen videos of others with missiles moving faster, so it might be achievable with a higher frame rate as well, but a frame rate in the hundreds will render this game infeasible. This game really should've came with some kind of frame control set at 60 by default or found in the settings somewhere. One more level I have a gripe about is 3-3. In this level, you have to travel within a sort of S-path between a myriad of sawblades and small platforms sandwiching an opening within the walls of saw blades. On paper, this sounds challenging but not too bad. The problem I have is that the solution to this level is to reverse gravity and then to perform an upside-down wall jump. No where else in the game is there any telegraphing or tutorializing on upside-down wall jumps allowing you to travel further than regular wall jumps. I threw my head at a wall for quite a bit of time until I watched a few videos of this game, with only one of them showing the proper solution. One video had someone stuck on this level for around 30 minutes, never figuring this movement tech out. Placing a little bit of text at the beginning of this level (similar to the beginning of the tutorial world) or if the player dies a lot of times in this level would've helped to alleviate this issue.
Overall, the game seems like some beginner or even intermediary game developer project. It's quite evident that the developer is also quite a decent programmer since all the mechanics work pretty well, but the game design as a whole is quite lacking. It's a decent starting or midway project, but as a final product, it falls short. There could've been so much charm within the world of Redactem and some hidden story behind game design and the character's powers. If the game was kept simple without this, it should've had its movement more properly developed. If both of those were present, this would be a much more positive review, but as the game stands, this is much more frustrating than rewarding to play.