izigame.me

The base game is mostly good, it has a lot of great game design that takes 1 joystick + 1 button controls and does a ton with them. A lot of the items and their mechanics are pretty thoroughly explored. I found the puzzles interesting, and I was able to solve them at a fun pace where it wasn't too easy, and it wasn't too obscure. There is a lot of really smart game design here, and I remained pretty impressed with what they were able to do throughout the 2D game.
The "real" layer of the game is what drew me in, and I am a bit disappointed that it mostly boils down to just entering pretty obvious hints (often an NPC will very obviously say something about it to make it non subtle, or a real object will give you very direct instructions); also most of it is just cheap scares like a drawer opening or something randomly. I was a bit disappointed with the lack of depth with the real world mechanics, because they gathered a lot of creepy toys and things. Going in I was creeped out, and as the game went on I eventually just got a bit annoyed by a lot of the real world stuff after I realized it wasn't explored nearly as well as the game mechanics within the 2d game, and I realized how hand-holdy it was. Most of the real world segments during boss fights felt overly simplistic imo.
The end of the game quickly becomes a bit of a slog. To get to it, you have to do a lot of tedious travelling through the map. The game fully commits to the one button and one joystick thing, so there's no menus to take out items you've already unlocked. Instead, often I would figure out what was needed for a puzzle, and then be forced to spend a lot of time exiting the area, going to a different area, regrabbing an item, and then returning to the puzzle area. And if you use a warp, the game forgets where you placed objects. And if you die, you lose the item you were trying to retrieve and you have to re-get it again. I understand wanting to commit to this being an atari game or whatever, but would it have been such a big deal to allow the player to unlock a second controller at the end of the game that would let you access an inventory or something?
The ending is where this game really falls apart. There's the aformentioned excess travelling, especially when hunting for secrets. But also, one of the last items is a buggy mess. I can't tell you how many times I was using it and trying to find secrets with it, only for it to softlock me and forcing me to restart. Which means you have to go back to the last checkpoint, which means you lost your item and you have to fetch it yet again. Ugh. This only gets compounded with certain rooms requiring you to wait for enemies to pass by, a very slow process you have to do again and again as you explore. The auto-pickup system the game has also gets really annoying, there's tons of times where I accidentally picked something up I didn't want, or I didn't have it positioned correctly when I picked it up, or I'm surrounded by danger and need to exit the item's hitbox and re-enter it to pick it up, only to take damage from something nearby in the process. I've softlocked myself several times with the stupid item pickup system too. The final boss is good in concept, but the first phase involves a bunch of waiting around and it gets pretty annoying when you die and have to redo it.
I have a steam discussion thread outlining all the bugs I found while playing the game, there's a lot of them. It really feels like this was rushed to make it out before halloween this year.
I didn't find the story very interesting. Also, unless there are things outside the easter eggs and steam achievements, there's a decent number of fake clues I spent a decent chunk of time trying to figure out.
Some of the posters in the room are obvious parodies of things, but I have to wonder if some of it is traced. For instance, the zipper-man poster (spider-man parody) looks way too close to the original comic's art. Parody is fine, but tracing artists work is icky.
I had a good time with the 2d game, but there were so many bugs and issues (I have never gotten softlocked this many times in a game before) I've gotta give this one a thumbs down for now. At the time of this review, I think I played version 1.0. If you're reading this, I would say wait a bit and check out the patch notes to make sure some updates have happened. This game is definitely worth checking out, it's just really rough around the edges right now.