I love this game, although I did have a hard time at the collapsing floors, other than that it was fun. I love the twilight ending, as it's very vague and leaves it up to the player's imagination of where they end up.
Reviews for "2-Bit Explorer"
Fiddleling responds:
I am glad you liked it! thanks for the reply!
At first it took me a long time to understand why the 4th and 6th slots are empty, but in the end, absolutely by accident in a hidden area stumbled upon another hidden passageway and found the helmet) Then everything went great. I got the endings Twilight Zone, For Whom The Bell Tolls and 4 variants of Bad Moon Rising (after patronizing each of the bosses and after killing all three). Even found all 15 Valac Shards, but I can't figure out if that gives access to another ending or if they're optional this time and only give access to a little extra information?
It helped a lot in the walkthrough to have previously completed the previous part, particularly to solve the puzzle to get the helmet.
rawr
Yowza, I loved 1-Bit Explorer a lot and this seems to be much of the same, but with some interesting improvements and quality-of-life, such as the ease of inventory management, active item usage, and new camera that allows for big spanning environments instead of just room-by-room. I'm definitely down for it, and I immediately got addicted to exploring and solving the various puzzles, some of which are the obvious ones that require items, but others more subtle and knowledge/observation-based such as noticing that eyes point towards illusion walls: clever stuff! It's definitely pretty intimidating what with the big map and the tons of spots I'm going to have difficulty remembering to go back to once I get something, necessitating loads of backtracking, but I'm all for it!
Overall I'm very pleased and looking forward to playing more, but if I had to have any feedback so far, it'd be some minor things like:
*While using the items such as the sword more directly is nice, it's a rather slow and stiff animation to do so: makes me much less inclined to cut all those bushes as it can be so tedious, and because it shares a button with interaction, it can also be very awkward when you're trying to do so but end up pulling out the sword instead. I'd hate to see someone be so annoyed with how slow it is that they don't experiment enough to realize you can chop ivy to reveal doors, for example!
*Movement can be a bit too fast at times: sometimes I like it because it means it's much less tedious to explore the world and backtrack everywhere, but other times I hate it because I go a bit too quickly when I'm trying to delicately weave through pitfalls and other such traps.
*As said, the game can be pretty dang overwhelming at times: so much to see and do makes it so easy to get lost and lose track of whatever you were doing. There's also plenty of times where I'm not quite sure whether I don't have what I need or I do but I'm just not doing it right (so many unsure dead-ends) or times where I don't know the effect of what I've done, like turning in the music box to the sister. Not sure what's needed here: maybe some sort of 'last item received', or a journal or map or whatever? Also might just be what it is and you gotta deal with it, haha!
Great stuff you got here!
This gives me Cursed Travels vibes and I love it. So much to do and explore. Very nice pixel art.
I think I did everything, though I never figured out what the upgraded torch is for. The only hint I really needed was waiting on the unstable floor. I thought I was supposed to make the floor collapse by walking a lot rather than waiting. I think you should switch it from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. Also it was nice to look up some reminders about where the temples are in FCPXAV's review. This game could really use a map, especially one with either automatic or manual markings. I found all the Valac shards without any help so I'm proud of that, and I tried to uncover all optional dialog and Easter eggs like turning the shade to gold.
Also, I accidentally lost progress a few times by ringing the bell to get the Twilight Zone ending. The first time, I didn't have a habit of saving very often so I was really lucky that I saved maybe 10 minutes prior because otherwise I would've lost over an hour of progress. You should really make sure that when an ending is triggered, the autosave is right before that ending.