izigame.me

Although there were many fun aspects to this game, unfortunately, it's hard to actually recommend it, due to the at least as many really, really annoying aspects.

Honestly, this feels like a studio's first game, with ideas and concepts that sound awesome on paper, but not so much when actually done. I have looked, though, seems like this is their 2nd game, although their first is a different genre.

Anyway, one of the prime examples is the traveling peddler, who has campsites near each of the major towns: He's only available from 9 am to 5 pm... based on the player's device clock. Thus, if the player is also a 9 to 5 working stiff, who plays after getting home from work, they'll never see this guy. There'll only be a "Closed" sign, without any hint in game that it's not something which is later game content, but is based on the player's time, there's not even any mention of available hours at all. This is kind of a problem as this guy is the source of 2 of the heart pieces, and is the 2nd to last step of a decent-length quest chain rewarding a full heart at the end. Although I didn't have to try it myself, presumably, changing your device's time zone for a bit would be enough to get around this issue, though even having to futz with your system clock for any reason is already pretty annoying.

Another big one, in my opinion, was the Simon-Says puzzles. Most games, the sequences to be copied, start at 3, and cap out at 5 or 6. Here, the sequences start at 3, and cap out at 8 or 9. Personally, I can do up to 5 with no trouble, but at the 4th sequence in a row (6-length), my brain apparently says "I'm done!". Now, most of these puzzles are for collectibles, heart pieces and the like, but there's a 3 to 8 length sequence in the final dungeon, so even if you're not a collector, you'll still need to be able to complete puzzles that long in order to finish the game. Fortunately, other players have since figured out a workaround: you can pause/bring up the menu after every step of the sequence, which allows you to take notes on something, the recommended notation method being a 4-function calculator for ease of use and clearing after each sequence.

The room designers also seem to have been addicted to looong one tile width paths, most of which crumble after being walked on, with flying obstacles of one manner or another. Needless, to say, if you mess up, you not only take some damage, you also have to start from the beginning and wait for the path the reappear.

While those are, by far, the major annoyances, there's a decent list of minor annoyances, including things like barriers which can sometimes be shot over with the bow, but sometimes not, depending on location. Switches that have to be triggered by boomerang, which can ignore most obstacles, but whenever a switch is hit, your motion is paused to temporarily drag your view over to the changed obstacle, which then makes it hard to move in time to not retrigger the same switch on the return path. There's also several references to an item that allows normal movement on ice, and where it could be found... an item that, by all indications, does not actually exist in the game.

I ended up getting this game, having played and enjoyed the sequel. To be fair, I did have some fun playing this too, completing it with all achieves. However, I'm pretty sure that if I had played this first, I would probably not have tried my hand at the sequel.