Agartha

Target Audience: Explorer type puzzle players, patient players wanting a more unconvential puzzle game
Summary:
A game that has a very niche audience, Agartha is not a puzzle platformer for those wanting to focus on combat for their puzzle solving. The fact of the matter is, the combat within Agartha is systematic and can feel awkward at times, especially when attempting to shoot on angles with the way that weapons work. You'll take time to understand that you have to play slow and methodically to not take damage, but you'll feel like the game isn't exactly giving you great feeling of accomplishment while doing this. But that's not the game's strength.
The game's strength has to do with the exploration and the use of your limited resources in each level to get to the exit. Attempting to get that next gem to unlock another character while keeping your bullets conserved can be a challenge, and rewards smart thinking and unconventional solutions. The element interaction of turning steam into water to then turn into ice to make a platform is neat, and helps to allow for some variety in getting to the various exits and allows for creativity. It took a while to appreciate it, but I did like working my through the various areas and trying to work my way past enemies with taking little damage
The game isn't going to blow you away: the game's framework is shaky with some structure problems (like the ability to restart quickly with minimal interaction) and some clunky implementation with controller rebindable keys. It's not a particular grat game in the presentation department. There's some music loops that are reasonable, but the sound and the rest of the music won't blow you away. The pixel presentation can get in the way at times as well, not giving you enough detail to know the exact place you can touch and not.
For those loving exploration type games in terms of puzzle exploration, then Agartha is for you. Others, it's a target sale title if you like unconventional puzzle platformers.
Video Review:
Lists:
Positives:
The elements of oil/steam/water help create some great non-traditional puzzle elements that have more of an active puzzle challenge.
I do appreciate the slow/methodical combat approach as being hasty will be punished (to a certain extent)
Good variety in terms of paths to get to to exits and ability to get new resources.
The balance of characters and their weapons are done well, giving you enough resources to get through most levels, while punishing overuse of specific resources.
Those a-ha moments are pleasing when you figure out a way to get through something.
Health system feels right for the challenge put in front of you.
Physics system is spot on and can lead to some cool interactions with falling debree.
Good incentives to find gems/meat without being too restricting.
One or two of the music tracks despite repetition are fun and don't wear on you.
Negatives:
The combat controls get in the way more often then not, despite the slow structured combat. Feels like there should be a button to stay still.
Takes a while to get going. Wish there were better tutorials to introduce some of the concepts.
Wish the pause menu had a restart stage option as opposed to having to hold your breathe and commit suicide.
Wish there was a zoom out function as sometimes it's really hard to get a lay of the land here especially for resource management.
Controller rebinding is here, but it uses the numeric xinputs, and can be tricky to rebind if you don't know which button refers to what number.
Some AI is exploitable, especially on the bosses side. They seem designed like that.
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If you like exploring and puzzles, I would recommend this game. I took around 8ish hours to 100% the game.
Good things:
Lots of variety in characters. Each character has their own playstyles. I used Esper the most, the teleport ability is helpful (and might be a little bit OP).
Exploring and finding secret paths is fun. In some stages there is more than 1 exit, so it presents are further challenge to find these hidden exits.
Object physics is great. If you burn grass or oil, then it will burn away or if you freeze water or lava, they will turn to their solid countertypes. This makes the puzzles interesting and fun to figure out.
Bad things:
I wish key rebinding was easier. I didn't bother trying to figure it out and played most of the game with a gamepad, which I find easier to use with unmodified bindings. Despite this, I never got used to the default controls for a majority of the game.
A fastforward button would be nice. In some puzzles, you have to do something like drain a pool of liquid and this takes a while. You can't tab out of the game and wait, the game would stop until I tab back in. In one instance, I had to wait around 7 minutes just to drain a pool of lava to get to where I need to go.
All bosses can be cheesed. There are 5 bosses and a final boss, and for all them I used a variety of tactics that feels like cheating. You can dig a hole and shoot out of the entrance for most of them or just spam the wizard's flare bomb.

I bought this on DLsite and played 99% of the way through it in the past, just rebought on steam on and wanted to review. Just a decent little material simulation puzzley action game, unfortunately something that's been done bigger and more popular since Agartha came out. Several wildly different characters although they may not be super well balanced (I found some characters could handle almost any situation while others could handle almost no situations). A cool game if you want to shoot dirt and freeze water.

Agartha is a neat platformer with puzzle elements largely concerning the diggable environments and the game's per-pixel temperature model. The game consists of 64 stages, some of which are only accessible by using an alternate exit in a previous stage. Various characters with different abilities can be unlocked by using a combination of meat (from defeating enemies) and gems (found scattered throughout stages, usually requiring the player to take an alternate route through the level). Each character varies from the others by way of their movement speed, jump height, health and air meters, as well as their 4 abilities. Some stages are clearly designed for specific characters and not all stages can be cleared by all characters. Stages are entered with the selected character's stock of ammunition for each of their 4 abilities, and some of the puzzle design is based on the player not only selecting an appropriate character but managing their ammunition in a way which allows them to dig or traverse their way to the exit without dying to enemies or the environment.
It took me about 4.5 hours to beat the game, and another 2 hours 15 minutes to finish 100%ing it. I purchased the game on sale at a modest discount and I'm satisfied with the experience I had for the cost of entry. Other reviewers have drawn favorable comparisons to Noita, but it bears mentioning that this game was released before Noita.
Additionally, I experienced a performance issue which caused the game to hitch for a fraction of a second, every few seconds. This was fixed by plugging in a controller. Log files from the game indicate that when a controller is not plugged in, the game attempts to initialize a directinput controller device approximately every 3 seconds, which causes the performance issue described. The game experience is superior with a controller, anyway.

It's pretty good. Reminds me of some old physics based DOS games

It's pretty good, but controller support either doesn't work properly, or it's just way to hard to figure out how to get it working. Also the game is a little overpriced @ time of writing. 5.79? Nah. Get it on sale if you want something a little different and don't mind playing a game with a keyboard that would be way better on a controller.