Prodigal

*Note: my playtime was incredibly longer than others because I'm making a guide. An average first-time playthrough should last ~10h
My Playtime: 81.4h (100% achievement, finished the game 3+ times)
My First Playthrough: 58.5h
Grindy Achievement(s): No.
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (36 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No.
Intro
Prodigal is an action-adventure game with a lot of puzzle elements in it. It has many dungeons, with most being explored in any order that you want after a certain point.
Pros:
- Most content can be explored in any order that you want
- Unique boss fights
- Challenge runs for those who like it
- Multiple ways to solve the puzzles
Cons:
- It can be hard to figure out how to unlock certain content
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Should you buy this game?
If you like Zelda-like games in general, you should buy this game.
In-Depth Review
Visuals
Prodigal uses a limited color scheme, making it similar to Game Boy Color games, albeit with more color variety. Despite being made in this style, the game never tries to be cheap in its presentation. Most cutscenes are animated with sprites that are exclusive to those cutscenes.
Story
The story is a hard one to understand. To be honest, I'm still not sure about the full story even after playing it several times. You'll understand what the main character is doing, but there is something large underneath all of them in the works. That is the one that will make your head spin. It has a lot of lore in the form of secrets that you can find in the dungeons, which is told vaguely.
I enjoy the relationship between the characters. You can choose from several girls to marry, and talking to them will reveal their concerns and backgrounds. The ending will also reflect this choice, telling what happened to her after the game ends.
The Game
Gameplay
The game focuses on you having to go back and forth between dungeons and the town to run errands for the townsfolk. There won't be many dialogues that you get from these, although you'll get more cutscenes if you take your time to talk to the other residents. Some of them will give you a side quest, others will simply chat with you. The thing is, most of the residents are women, and in this game, you can romance most of them. This means that their dialogues are not those of normal NPCs since they will talk about themselves from time to time.
After a while, you'll be able to marry them. Some will require you to clear a dungeon or do other things, while others will simply be available after a few talks. You'll be able to get a marriage ring from that, which will boost a stat depending on who you marry. Some characters can even give you another perk.
The game spans 2 Acts, and although the game is linear in the first, it starts to be more open starting from Act 2. Moreover, most content is available in the post-game. Heck, I could even say that the game actually starts after you finish the game, since there is a lot of post-game content that you can access.
Dungeons
There are 17 dungeons in total, with some being visited more than once. Most dungeons are focused on puzzles, although there are also combat sections in them. If you played The Legend of Zelda before, the dungeons are pretty much like that. Rooms are square-shaped, and you need to explore the areas to find keys that can be used to unlock new areas.
Most puzzles in the game are easy, and for the harder ones, the game offers multiple ways to solve them. First is the intended way to solve it, and second is the "cheating" way to solve it by using a certain trick. These tricks are actually easy to implement, and you might even do them without knowing. The latter one can make the puzzles way easier than they should be, making the puzzles more approachable to casual players. Moreover, some puzzles have multiple solutions, and some can even be skipped with a certain upgrade.
There will be a boss fight at the end of the dungeon. This boss will have a unique attack pattern from regular enemies, with most can only be attacked when they are vulnerable. The attacks are telegraphed, so you can differentiate them easily. Although the early bosses can be very easily beaten, the latter ones can be problematic due to the number of bullets on the screen. Luckily, it doesn't go as extreme as bullet hell games, especially since the bullets are slower.
Length and Difficulty
I finished all of the game content in 58.5h. To be honest, I found that this time was too long since I spent my time making a guide. I think the normal playthrough should take ~10h, even less if you already know what to do. I had to replay the game two more times to get 100% achievements, and that only took 7.9h. The second playthrough was a full 100% completion, while the third playthrough was just a game completion. The rest of my playtime was spent on a fourth playthrough attempt, which I stopped midway due to a bug.
The game has a fixed difficulty, but you can make it easier or harder depending on your choice. Using buffs can make the game a cakewalk. However, after you beat the game once, it will unlock more modes, namely the altar run and chaos run. The former will make the game harder by giving you certain limitations, while the latter is the fun randomizer one, where items are shuffled. Moreover, the altar run is a permadeath mode where you can die in 2-4 hits, making the game significantly harder.
If you want more challenge, the game will open access to curses after you finish the altar run, which will add more restrictions on top of the altar run. To be honest, this is the only run I haven't finished. I also found this run to be unfair and practically impossible to do if you want to finish the game with all of the curses activated.
Issues
If you start a game with Winged Boots, trigger the Winged Boots quest and don't progress it until Act 2 starts, some NPCs will be locked from giving or receiving some items to get other power-ups. Also, during the boss rush, if you beat the lava boss too fast in a certain way, you'll get softlocked.
Conclusion
Honestly, I had so much fun playing Prodigal. It has so much content, and it was exciting to explore it all. Well, some puzzles can be complicated, and sometimes it can get boring when the game throws you one difficult puzzle after another, but the game actually is quite forgiving in that department since you can use certain tricks to make it easier. That being said, despite it being more heavy on the puzzle than the combat, it still has a decent amount of combat sections for you to finish. If you enjoy Zelda-likes, I'm sure you'll like this one too.

I like this game, but probably more for the potential it has and literally just the art. The artists and pixel artists who worked on this game have made a game that looks true to the GBC titles it is evoking that I honestly think carries this game far more than its gameplay. I wanna say something like "You'd be forgiven thinking this is a Yacht Club Games offering based on the visuals", but I fear that may come off wrong in some way.
The overall game is a fairly short affair. You will play through this game and go through the motions, defeat the big villain of this game in maybe less than a day (A previous review I wrote was done in about 8 hours). You can then go on to both get the true ending of this game and get the post-game content in a matter of maybe another day of play (it seems to have taken another eight hours to get through the content). At time of writing, I have 17 hours and 21 of 40 achievements in this game. This is an extremely short game made by what looks like an extremely small team of people (It's a shame the game doesn't have a Credits button).
This is a game that looks like a GBC Zelda game, plays a lot like a GBC Zelda game, but falls short in many aspects. I might be an outlier here, but I was personally fine with having to do a lot of back and forth with the inventory for a number of dungeons in the Oracle games (I barely touched Links Awakening as a kid and my copy of the game became lost, lol)
This is a difficult "thumbs up" of a game just because there's a lot of promise on display in this game, but that's about it. At times it feels fairly thin. The plot kind of rushes past me, details get introduced in passing that I sometimes feel as though I might have missed a detail or another early on. By the time the games villain appeared I felt a bit sidelined and wondering if I might have accidentally skipped a piece of dialogue with clear foreshadowing (and I may have given how often I accidentally skip the dialogue of some defeated bosses due to the text speed being maxed out by default I think)
I want to say that personally, I do find parts of the world building fascinating. What does work in this game in its writing works well enough that I'd probably take notes for my own TTRPG games I run.
Like I said, the game feels thin. You can go into just about any dungeon in this game and feel pretty confident that you can get to the boss room in pretty good time. The puzzles in this game are primarily a sort of block/barrel mover set of puzzles where you have to get all of the switches pressed at once. One thing I will say is that a lot of the puzzles feel like there are either multiple solutions to them, unintended solutions, or just designed with very purposeful red herrings. The puzzles range from being either pretty easy, frustrating as a result of those red herrings, and in one very specific case absolutely absurd.
The actual layout of the dungeons is a point of frustration just as well. The game seems to be built on a certain awareness that under ideal circumstances, the play should be taking very little damage through their exploration of any given dungeon. I say this because the only way to regain health is in town by sleeping, talking to Lynn, or eating the Smoked Salmon buff item. However, the designers seem keenly aware of how frustrating fall damage from falling into pits is and gives you a buff that lessens it.
This other problem I have is, and maybe just MAYBE this is a skill issue, it is stupidly easy to put in a bad input and throw your character into a pit, especially when you're walking down a path that is basically only a tile wide. I'm playing with an Xbox controller, maybe I'd have had a better time playing this game with a more comfortable D-Pad placement, but good god is it frustrating to be walking down a path and your thumb nudges a bit in the wrong direction and you fall off into the abyss.
There is also a rant I could go on and on about with Crystal Keys too. Basically they are items you carry through a dungeon to a door and the keys will break if you take damage. It is aggravatingly easy to take damage in this game. Siska's Workshop was made by a madman either more insane than Siska herself or just an absolute sadist. Which there are so many moments in this game where I kept wondering if something was designed for the purposes of schadenfreude. If it is that, all my whinging here amounts to is satisfaction from the developers.
The other side of this game is your sort of VN affair of going around the town, entering homes to start a cutscene (potentially), and even marrying one of the girls in town. I kind of just committed to marrying Oakley on accident because I sort of unknowingly was doing things to progress my relationship with her when I thought I was doing things to get better potions. It works out because I am pretty sure I married the character who would absolutely punch God and boy do I love the crazy eyes her sprites have for that and I love her for that. Let us poison God.
I could complain endlessly about this game, and yet the weird thing is I give it a thumbs up. I liked what was on display, I liked the potential this game had, and I could tell that a fair amount of effort and some polish went into this game. It might have need a lot more polish, but I wouldn't know what to say exactly that would look like.
The unfortunate thing I will say is that at the 15 dollar asking price, I think that is way too much. However, this game goes on sell these days for less than 3 bucks, at time of writing 1.49 for the 2025 steam summer sale. It really does pain me to wonder and write out whether even at that price I can go "Worth the price" because a part of me wonders if it's more a proposition related to overall satisfaction and time. Were this game free, would I even tell someone to play this game? I don't regret sinking about 17 hours into this game, I am cautiously interested in picking up Colorgrave's other games.
It would pain me if their future offerings (that is to say the other games they have made) continued to illicit this kind of review from me, because I think there is a lot of promise on display in this game, but nothing to write home about. But the only way from here is up, I hope.

On its surface, this is a neat little Zelda-like game. Cute GBA-ish graphics, you wander around and kill monsters with your pickaxe, you explore a few dungeons where you get new items that increase your mobility and solve some puzzles, you fight a few bosses and get some items you need to advance the plot, then you beat the last boss and the game is over. And that all takes around five hours.
But the game still has >10 hours of gameplay left after that, and at some point you realize that it's not the Zelda-like you thought it was. What this game is really about is its large cast of townsfolk, who all have backstories for you to discover and tasks for you to do for them, and it's really about you looking for secrets while you trigger events and complete personal quests. This leads to a surprisingly non-linear story, and there are still more dungeons to explore and bosses to fight, but a lot of these can be done in any order or not at all. This is interesting, but sometimes also kind of frustrating, because the game often only gives you vague hints about where you can go next, meaning that often you're not sure what you're supposed to do other than just run another lap around town and talk to everybody to see who has something new to say.
The "post-game" content is also filled with a lot of secrets that were clearly intended to keep the game's community occupied while the game was still receiving new content in patches. They're very well hidden, and some of them are going to require you basically combing through every room in the game with every item you have, trying to find something you missed earlier. It's good if you like that kind of thing, but annoying if you want to be able to find everything without resorting to a guide.
All in all, I think this is a pretty neat little game that is a lot more ambitious than it might seem at first glance. It's also interesting coming to this as somebody whose first Colorgrave game was Curse Crackers; there are some connections between the game, but if you're going in blind, they're not what you think they will be, and it provides an interestingly different angle on some of their shared lore.

+ pretty good dungeon design
+ interesting characters
+ excellent music
+ ton of post game content ( nearly 50% of the game is post game!)
- when you die you are transported back to your house outside of the dungeon! makes dying really tedious
- some quest are really unclear and you waste a lot of time looking to progress them.
in general really solid zelda like with so much charm

Well... I was loving this game until it froze on me and I lost tons of (nonlinear and somewhat confusing) post-game progress because there's apparently no autosave. Which nowadays honestly should be made clear to the player, and I don't think it was.
Great game, although I am unlikely to finish it now.
Played hours are not accurate, it seems because I played offline for a while.

Prodigal is one of the strongest entries in the weirdly robust "Gameboy Era Top-Down Puzzle-Adventure Games" genre I've ever played. Excellent music and spritework, an appropriate puzzle difficulty curve with options to sequence break, a solid story with fun characters, and an optional difficult post-game that dabbles in some meta stuff as well. If you're a fan of these types of games I can't recommend Prodigal enough.

An enjoyable game that's reminiscent of the gameboy Legend of Zelda titles. If I had to complain I'd say the combat was pretty lacking, there's an over reliance on sliding block puzzles, and it's annoying not being able to heal outside of the church. Not deal breakers but certainly makes me hesitate to replay any time soon