Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

The music is amazing. The transformation mechanic is addicting and marvelous too. I hope in the future a sequel of this game. Please add frog tranformation again

It's a very cool metroidvania game, great graphics and animation, cute story and characters. It plays wonderfully well on the Steam Deck too. I haven't finished though because I got tired of redoing a small section of a level which required fast reaction timing to get through with it. I would eventually have done it, but I really dislike redoing a thing over and over again so I quit, but this is a "me problem" not a game fault which is why my review is positive despite I dropped the game before the end (I think I was around two thirds of it).

Great game, lots of fun, great exploration and more challenging to complete than you would assume at the start, with lots of great design and music.
I love all the inspiration it took from Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap (and the remastered music) and turns it into a different game with its own charm, secrets and exploration. Overall the secret areas are fair and the games gives you enough help to completely explore the map (minus the main secret on the Village of Lupia's well which is a bit hard and had to use a guide for).
Loved the new versions of the music and the mix of transformations with their abilities.
One negative aspect is the platforms, you can see in the reviews quite a few people complain about the controls, but the real issue is the platforming, specifically the hitboxes on the edges of the platforms, you need to aim for the center of the platform and avoid the edges as much as possible, specially on small platforms or you will just fall through. It takes a bit to get used to it, its not too bad, but if you are used to really tight platforming games its a bit annoying.

Great on Steam Deck.
This game is deceptively difficult and can become a little frustrating in the end. I enjoyed the game overall but put it down just before the final boss.
I had no desire to keep playing by the end but really would recommend the experience to metroidvania enjoyers. The gameplay is just really fun. Would love to see a game take this idea a few steps further.

Warning: mild spoilers ahead!
I have a weird love-hate-relationship with this game. Overall I enjoyed it, and after my 1st playthrough I even did a 2nd one for 100% (or "had to" - more on that necessity later). My main frustrations stem from three(-ish) things: pacing, its implementation of difficulty and the difficulty curve (and I'm using the word "curve" very losely in this case).
These three are somewhat intertwined, but pacing is what struck me as off first: after a short 20 to 30 minute tutorial-type section the flow of the game really took a nosedive (for me) when I was locked into the first (and weakest + imo most un-fun) animal form for the next couple of hours. I suppose those "couple of hours" vary a lot depending on your skill level (I consider myself slightly below average in that regard) and maybe even more on how much exploring you do. This has been a stretch for me where the game overall felt more like a chore and it almost made me quit the game for good (I actually didn't touch it again for a few weeks). Why is that? This is where we're getting into the game's implementation of difficulty (as well as it's difficulty curve I suppose): Your first animal form has basically no reach with its melee attack, you hardly have any health in the beginning, lack the other forms abilities to unlock powerups and enemy-placement is kind of "haha, gotcha!": enemies hidden behind terrain features, slightly out of screen just before a transition or they spawn basically right on top of you when you walk up to a certain point on screen. I've read in other reviews that some of that felt "cheap" to others, and I'd have to agree (during gameplay the words "scummy", "unfair" or "f**ng d*****bag devs" came to mind ^^). So ESPECIALLY in the beginning it's a lot of learning enemy spawn-patterns. This gets less tedious in the later stages, when you have more powerful (and fun!) animal forms, more health, better armor, etc. - I guess the first time I felt optimistic about continuing the game was when I got the second animal form (and it's not even a particularly great one either).
That's not to say later stages of the game don't hold their fair share of new frustrations. In quite a few other reviews people complain about the "races" you have to participate in. In these you have to complete a platforming section as quickly as possible against an npc (basically flawless). Difficulty on the same "race-track" can vary in between tries: sometimes the camera keeps slightly trailing behind, leaving you with barely enough of the track in front of you visible ("hey! here are some deadly spikes just a pixel in front of you - have fun dodging that!"). Then there is the "Volcano" you might have read about in the other reviews. I guess that part is where it's ultimately decided whether this game is for you or not, since a lot of people experienced this as a huge and sudden spike in difficulty (again: I agree). I think by this point I wasn't willing to let the game get the best of me - in another review I read "I'm going to finish this game out of pure spite", which made me chuckle in an "I can totally relate to that"-kind of way.
Up until this point my review might sound like a nonstop rant, but there's also a lot of good things about the game: it's graphics look beautiful, the soundtrack is just awesome, controls are tight, it's got a great cast of characters, a diverse set of "biomes" (I'm lacking a better word), some cool boss battles, I really liked the exploration and the puzzles (that were rather annoying for quite a lot of other reviewers) and later animal Forms are super fun to play as. The different sets of Armor, Weapons, Boots and Bracers and their upgraded forms are also extremely fun to play around with and can substancially change how combat feels. Occasionally it also completely switches it's gameplay loop up with something different. When it's not frustrating in one or the other way, the game is really great. I still think a positive-score of 89% all-time (currently) is overrated, since this game is definitely not for everyone, but overall I loved it more often than I hated it.
For the achievement hunters among you: getting all achievements is fairly easy. Be careful, if you play offline though! I play a lot on a notebook while offline and it looked like it didn't count ANY achievement for me at first. However, when I reconnected to my home LAN and started the game up, every single Achievement got unlocked EXCEPT for a single one roughly from the game's midpoint, so in order to get 100% I had to replay about half of the game. Keep that in mind, if 100% is important to you.
tl/dr: Pacing in the beginning was off for me. It's implementation of difficulty feels cheap sometimes. Difficulty "curve" with random, sudden spikes. This is the game I love to hate/hate to love (not sure which).

This game is so criminally underrated its crazy. Beautiful art, fantastic level design and puzzles, great music. The game difficulty spikes on you pretty hard in the fire level but I enjoyed the challenge that it brought. Game is just really polished and you can see the effort it took to make it.

Despite the few issues that I have with it, I really do want to commend Game Atelier for how amazingly of a job they did with this game. The platforming is great and the transformation mechanics and the unique things that they bring to the table are stellar! The music and art direction is fantastic and the story is exactly what it needs to be. The game is great overall as it honors the past Wonder Boy games and what they established while seemingly also taking a couple gameplay elements from Wario platformers. However, the obnoxiously cryptic puzzles that plague the last third of the game along with the complete lack of replayability does hurt it a bit, as I feel they could've added a boss rush mode or some sort of challenge mode that would allow you to enjoy things without having to replay the entire game. This game is close to being perfect in my eyes, so I hope the devs look very closely at what people take issue with as their next attempt could absolutely knock it out of the park if they do it right!