izigame.me

I forget where I first spotted this, but I've had it on the watch-list for a while now, waiting to grab it once it finally released. Didn't know much going into it beyond a singular fixation on ducks, but having played it quite thoroughly, I can say I enjoyed my time with it! About my biggest criticism with this is the difficulty with regards to getting the endings isn't as high as I was expecting from the outset.
The core of the game involves bringing Quark the duck back to the start of the level, the time machine where the game's plot originates. Exploration tools are explained clearly enough, and players are challenged to explore to find lives, duck eggs, and devices that change Quark, affecting where the portal will land them on the next level. Duck eggs give you ducklings, which can give you power boosts, regenerating shields, piercing shots, improved time-stop capabilities and so on - generally a good help to find. On top of that are shields, which are your one saving grace against the enemy; anything and everything can kill you, including your own bullets. Any shots you fire MUST hit something to dissipate, and they don't care if that something is your character.
Dying restarts the level, minus one life - lose all your lives and the run ends. Simple as. But lives scattered around the level regenerate when you die; know where the lives are, and it's very easy to stay equal whilst you learn a level's layout. At that point, a run can be very difficult to lose short of exiting out of the game. Heck, one achievement ties to having 20 lives, so this isn't unexpected behaviour.
The aforementioned changing of Quark lets you access different level types - the Disco and Bathroom stages. The former has you playing bat-and-ball with a glitter-ball whilst doing your best to avoid the chunkier enemies flying around, whilst the latter changes up gameplay by letting you control a duck for a short while! The aim as a duck is to bypass areas that your human self can't access, whilst bringing a time-shifted version of yourself to the same station that changed you to a duck without being hurt or dragged back to the start of the level. It's a fun little change on what's been established, though controlling the duck might be a little finicky at first.
The boss fights... that might be the weak point of the game, I think? One of them simply spawns guys to bother you whilst following a strict path; a second is more of a challenge on a platforming level as the ground beneath you starts to dissipate if you want to blunt its offence. The third boss works with the usual gameplay model of pitting you against an exponentially-growing horde of horrid waterfowl. Completing these fights gives you unlockable toggles for your gun, either offering traversal or greater power without being tied to the upgrades.
These upgrades are key to completing the game's "Impossible" mode, which disables duckling upgrades. You get no extra defences or offences; simply reach the end of the game with your starting energy and the tools you have to unlock on each run (with the game's one kindness being to let you start with the boss drops, so you only need to get their respective component parts with the standard methods). I expected this to take me a while; I got it on my first run. This DOES do more than just act as a challenge, so I recommend giving that a go if you grab this game.
The meat of the game's challenge lies in the Survival mode. Shooting gives points, and the Kronits (energy points) the horde drops give points too, IF you're at full time-slowing juice. Points let you buy shielding, duckling eggs, and support ducks with their own firing modes, but the prices go up as you buy them from different areas. Face as many waves of weird ducks as you can before they finally overwhelm you. This is the mode that let me realise I'm not as good at this game as I thought, because my best progress still didn't reach Wave 20...
So in summary: there's some good fun to this game, but the main challenge lies outside of the standard gameplay mode, which can feel like a bit of a cakewalk once you get a proper handle on the controls.
(also I like Quark's little "I'm over here! ;_;" sounds)
EDIT: Forgot to mention, the settings seem quite sparse, and the game doesn't seem to have a frame-rate cap. I don't think this adversely affected my computer as Steam believed it was trying to render over two thousand frames a second, but it seems odd that the extent of this game's graphical settings are whether it was full-screen or not.