There's a PC demo available, and the game should end up on XBLA in the near future.
I love that color scheme, and with all the bizarre characters and the awesome boss fights, I really feel like I'm enjoying an SNES classic that somehow managed to elude me for the last two decades.
Granted, the resolution is a bit heftier and you use the mouse cursor to aim your shots, which is worlds apart from working a single D-pad like in the low-bit era, but that's irrelevant because Owlboy is a game with the design spirit of bygone days more than anything in recent memory.
Even the design flaws feel like something you'd expect in an older title. The dungeon I explored in the demo was beautiful, but I was constantly flying through corridors that all looked the same, and even worse, a lot of the tunnels doubled back on themselves, so you could end up flying down something you passed through ten minutes ago and not realize it until you're two-dozen screens deep.
And there are these enemies that look a lot like the mini-boss in Brinstar whose hit detection is really wonky. I get that they're covering their weak spot with a shell but the animation is so minimal that it's hard to visually distinguish protected from vulnerable.
And then there's the whole trying-to-interact-with-stuff-while-you're-holding-someone-who-falls-off-at-the-slightest-brush-with-the-ground thing, which makes more sense as a gripe once you've tried the game out for yourself.
The entire demo was a lot of fun, but the part with the gnomes was amazing.
And not because it was horribly innovative or horribly epic or horribly anything. It was just really cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment