Owlboy

Owlboy does not deserve to be mixed, but it does deserve to be openly and fairly discussed. That means talking about the bits people might not like.
To get this part out of the way'; the people tagging this as a metroidvania are dirty liars. There's no map or heroic progression, in the strictest sense, and the usual foibles don't apply. There's a few similar trappings, but this does not have the spirit that poorly named genre tries to invoke.
Owlboy is a frustrating game to love, though I love it. By the standards of the time period I'm writing in, where tastes flux and change regularly, where patience is becoming a more and more precious, rare thing, Owlboy demands a fair bit from you. Not in terms of twitchy movements or difficult patterns. Hell, I'd say this is one of the easier games I've played. Despite the fact that you'll run into "that one room" more than once and you'll die a lot in it, the game is quite generous with checkpoints (most of the time). Honestly, I wonder if the game might have been better served with a different health system. But I digress.
You might get frustrated because this game does not play like any other, despite playing like so many of them. You have to wrap your head around the fact that you attack with buddies instead of our main character, a disconnect that will confuse a lot of people. I find if you think of your buddies as guns then it makes more sense, but when we're told it's two people, we believe it's two people.
The story is also taxing. Not because it's wordy, but because it explains so very, very little. Things happen in a linear progression, no event doesn't make sense, per se. But unless you're really paying attention, you'll miss the fact that some people are actually pretty bad at their job. Unless you go looking, you might struggle to realize there are dead parents. And without truly focusing, the existential dread of the plot will sail over one's head through no fault of their own. To buy into this world requires taking so much at face value, and that is asking a fair bit when the game starts, despite being so colorful, quite sad and bitter, then jumps into the action and rarely stops.
There is plenty to admire from its tight design and pixel graphics that, to this day, are breathtaking. But then there's so much that's frustrating, such as the curiously complex plot and having to accept that spiders can be foolish and also friends. If one buys this game, I ask you not to un-recommend the game simply because it doesn't jive with you. This game was a labor of love and deserves to exist peacefully.

A simple platformer with fun mechanics. Story doesn't really do much for me but the environments are really pretty, albeit the repeating set pieces and lack of change sometimes makes this game feel dull. I'd def recommend it on sale, its fun to go through.

For most of the game, Owlboy didn't really click with me. There are a lot of aspects of the game that I didn't like:
- Combat isn't all that interesting or challenging. The player character can fly and has a very short dodge cooldown, so enemies rarely ever felt threatening.
- Player flight also means that there isn't really any platforming in Owlboy. The game instead adds hazards that the player has to carefully fly around, and it ends up being more tedious than engaging.
- Stealth is stupidly simple. There's only ever one path forward, enemies don't have complex movement patterns, there's no distraction mechanic or any way to bypass by an enemy other than simply waiting for them to look away. It's more of a test of patience than skill.
- It's seriously easy to get lost in Owlboy. Many sections of the game are designed like puzzles, and the game doesn't always do a great job communicating the correct path forward.
- The game doesn't always do a great job of creating safe "room" transition points. This essentially means that, when moving between two areas, It's possible to get hit by an enemy you couldn't react to, since the camera was still transitioning into the new area from the old area. This could be avoided by making sure enemies are never anywhere close to the border between two rooms. Other platformers, even platformers made by much larger studios, do this same exact thing, but it still annoys the heck out of me every time I see it.
- And, as a final note, the writing is painfully, obnoxiously cheesy. Characters don't speak like independently thinking people. So much of the dialogue feels overly-dramatic or out of place. It's the type of story that you skim through as quickly as possible, in the hopes that the story gets better later on.
Fortunately, the story, and the entire game for that matter, does get better later on. Owlboy's endgame is actually really good. The last few bosses are seriously fun and challenging to fight. During the final level, the game becomes much less confusing to traverse and even removes the player's flight abilities to create some actual platforming challenges. The game's ending was unexpectedly emotional and beautiful, and I ended up finishing the game with a positive view of the game despite its early frustrations. Owlboy isn't a *great* game, and I couldn't recommend it to everyone. But, a stupendous amount of work and passion went into this game, and the ending in particular is good enough that I ended up liking the game as a whole.

sweet, 8 hour adventure, charming and perfectly formed.
Nothing revolutionary in terms of gameplay, but it is absolutely dripping in charm, with engaging, well formed characters.

Probably the closest you'll get to a studio Ghibli 16 bit platformer

Steam only has a "yea" or "nay" option, but Owlyboy is very much a "nyea?" sort of call in the end... I guess something like a 7/10 for me? So I guess that's a recommend?
There's a lot to like in here, but there are some fundamental problems with the experience that annoyed me throughout. The game is quite pretty, and the animations are well done without feeling cumbersome or sluggish. Aurally, it's clear that a ton of work went into the soundtrack as well, and the game sounds great throughout.
But some of the gameplay decisions are tedious. Your primary means of attacking involves holding party members in the air while you flutter about, shooting enemies with the partner abilities via a sorta twin-stick-shooter-ie control scheme. It's not bad, but it does feel a bit overly convoluted when you're in a tight spot. On occasion, I'd find myself harried by enemies, struggling to press the right buttons to get the right things to happen. This is because your flight controls are pretty nuanced, and while they feel pretty good once you've gotten the hang of them, they change slightly depending on whether you're carrying a partner or not. If you're not carrying a partner, feel free to press "jump" to stop flying, but if you ARE carrying a partner, pressing "jump" will do literally nothing. It's a little thing, but these micro-deviations in control prevent flying from ever feeling totally intuitive and liberating.
Speaking of these "micro-deviations," they're kind of all over the place. When you're holding a partner aloft, your hitbox changes slightly because this action necessitates floating just a bit off of the ground. So, you need to be prepared for that minute change in elevation if you want to use a partner's weapon or ability. And if you want to shoot someone while afoot you should really learn to NOT want to do that, because you can't.
The game seems to know that these obstacles are a little tedious, and it does its best to get out of its own way (pressing the final button of a desired action will usually cut out the middle portions of the sequence that would otherwise be necessary), but the very nature of a sequence of events needing to transpire at all nevertheless induces a bit of friction in the experience.
All that being said, my main issue with the game is its take on death.
You heal in the game by picking fruit found growing in the environment and eating it, and if there wouldn't be fruit accessible anywhere in a setting (pirate ship, temple, etc.), then you're just not going to have any diegetic source of health. So that means you don't heal. And that typically means that you're going to die. But Owlboy isn't a BAD game. It knows how its been made, and it knows that you're going to die pretty frequently, and its solution is to just throw a checkpoint at the beginning of every screen, bringing you back with full health when you do die. Again, this isn't BAD... it just makes dying feel pointless, and I found that I never really felt that there were any real stakes or challenges over the course of the adventure. This over-compensation for a lack of health made the game feel like it was capable of playing itself, which left me feeling like I wasn't really contributing all that much... which is a really weird feeling to have while ostensibly PLAYING a game.
It's annoying because the game attempts to do some cool narrative things with your character "kinda-dying-but-not-really," and you see your life bar go down and whatnot in sync with the story event, and that kind of shit is really neat... but at that point I was so inured to dying that I just didn't buy it. I literally thought to myself: "Yea, but death is meaningless to Otus." And that's not the vibe they were going for (I'm pretty sure).
Narratively, they do some cool things with subtle world building, especially in a couple of mini areas that are totally skippable, and I dig all of that. I absolutely hated some character arcs (Asio is a dick who seems like he's trying to be redeemed after a certain point but did nothing to deserve redemption, and I never once stopped hating him), but I thought most characters were relatively well written for this manner of game. You don't want a ton of text for an exploratory, platformie experience like this, and while there's a bit more than the norm, the text that's there is pretty good.
In terms of exploration... for a game with a fairly large, interconnected map, I think that it could have really benefited from an in-game map to reference. There were points where I attempted to go back and explore prior areas but found myself completely incapable of actually finding them again. And in so doing, I also became afraid of being unable to find my way back to my next main objective. It's a weird issue that you don't normally see in games like this (mostly because they're usually self aware enough to give you a map).
Final thought: weird that a game made by D-Pad Studio is like the least D-Pad-ie 2D experience I've played. Normally you'd want a bit more precision for a 2D platformer (so... a D-Pad), but because you're flying around so much in this one, I typically found myself playing it more like a twin-stick shooter. Huh, go figure.

It took me a while to get around to this one. But oh boy am I glad I did. It's a really fun game, with a nice story and it is a clear labor of love.

This game is fine, just with some caveats especially because it is not what I expected.
Firstly, THIS IS NOT A METROIDVANIA!!!
I have to say that in all caps because, as a big big fan of vanias, I feel kind of suckered into this buying this game that was labeled as a vania. I repeat, it is not, there is no world map, there's no real reason to backtrack, the abilities you acquire are linear-based designed for a rather linear game. To that end, this is not a strictly open-world game either. There's collectibles you can go back to and access after you get your new abilities but after 9 hours I can tell you - you get very little game & story progression going back to retrieve any leftover items.
What Owlboy actually is, it's a linear story-based game with some novel designs. In that you will find yourself going back to areas you've explored before but only as it lines up with the story of the game. Which is fine, there's a fair bit of 'all is lost' moments here if that's where you like to get your feeling of tension.
For the pros, there's actually a fair bit of variety in terms of gameplay, the story and writing is decent enough, the pixel work is pretty fantastic. Although, this is also a fairly frustrating game to play cuz you'll run into your fair share of BS as your trying to get through everything. That said, all you really have to do is pay attention and you'll get by. Which, y'know, for me that would be fine if I was actually playing a game I was expecting.
Again, this is not a vania exploration 'search action' game. It's a story driven game with a fair bit of tough gameplay that you can overcome after a few attempts. I don't wanna be too harsh on Owlboy cuz it is a pretty solid game, just wanna make it clear that it is not really as labeled/advertised. As, again, I was looking for a vania cuz that's my jam, and instead I'm getting thru a flight game that I'm refusing to let defeat me before I defeat it.