izigame.me

I was SO excited for this game - in fact, I might have been the very first person who bought it as soon as it was available! The idea of a Metroidvania (my favorite genre) inspired by Bulgarian mythology made me salivate as a Bulgarian gamer. But although I think the game of my dreams is in there somewhere, it's definitely not the product that was released. Instead, the product you guys are charging 20 bucks for is a broken, janky mess that barely feels like it's gone through any play testing at all.
Just getting the game to work properly was an ordeal. My Steam Deck couldn't even launch it (it was stuck at the black screen in the beginning of the game), so I had to give up and play it on PC instead - and there, it was a struggle to get my controller inputs to work (a problem I ultimately resolved thanks to Steam Input, despite Steam assuring me the game has built-in controller support). But that was a very minor struggle compared to what came next.
The game is just SO janky. Even after only 25 minutes of play, I kept running into all sorts of issues. Some of them were from the game's design (such as enemies hidden behind foreground objects), but most of them were purely technical. For example, some jumps felt much longer/higher than others, with no rhyme or reason to the difference - which I assume is due to an inertia system being implemented which is completely busted and unable to determine when your jump should be longer and when not. Hitboxes were also completely broken - sometimes I couldn't hit enemies that were right in front of me, and sometimes I got hit despite the fact that there was absolutely no connection. In the mines there's a section where you need to dodge some moving obstacles, and I swear I got hit and killed by the one moving BELOW the platform I was standing on.
And speaking of, I really don't think the enemies should be doing as much damage as they are - even just touching an enemy is enough to immediately drain all 5 of your health tokens, insta-killing you and sending you back to the very beginning of the zone (or your last save point). And that normally would have been fine, I don't mind a challenging game, but when an enemy can insta-kill you without even touching you (due to the aforementioned broken hitboxes), it stops being challenging and becomes frustrating instead. Like I'm fighting the game itself rather than the challenges posed by it.
I feel terrible writing such a negative review, not only because I was so excited for this game, but also because I know the dev team is small and very passionate. But that's why I have to be honest and detailed - so that the team can learn from their mistakes and improve. Right now, their biggest mistake is releasing the game in a borderline unplayable state, which should never have happened, it clearly needed at least a few more months of extensive playtesting and debugging. I have no doubt that the game will receive patches, but as it is right now, day 1, it's simply not worth the money. Unfortunately.