Mikal-Halgi

An incredible remake of the flash game Phoenotopia. This game sets you on an adventure of immense scale, over 50 hours of incredibly well designed combat that rewards patience, smarts and strategy rather than mechanical skill or brute force, puzzles that truly test your lateral thinking, wonderful music that will stuck stay in your head for hours, and a world unbelievably full of colour, depth, meticulously detailed lore and sheer heart. Cosplaying itself as a cosy, light-hearted fairy-tale game, yet the more you go down the rabbit hole, the more it surprises you with its sheer complexity, the darker sides of its lore, philosophical implications and starkly contrasting history. One could argue that its scale and complexity can take a lot of effort to get the ball rolling, or for one to click with/understand its progression mechanics. There are a lot of sections that involve piecing together bits of information by talking to NPCs, and learning about all the important locations in a new area, and doing some light detective work to find out where you need to go next for part of the story or any given mini-quest. There is definitely an initial learning process to all this, however it also makes the game so incredibly immersive, making it important for you to have to really learn about the areas you uncover and indulge in the NPCs wonderfully enjoyable, humorous and informative dialogue. The more you sink yourself into its world, the more it rewards you with story and lore. This method of progression even ties into the combat. By engaging in the worlds sources of information, they can lead you to combat abilities/upgrades, and even strategic information on how to outsmart certain enemies, making attacks that would have seemed impossible or extremely difficult to deal with before, now suddenly completely trivial and in some cases can now give you a huge advantage. More often than not your character is far more limited in movement and much smaller and weaker compared to the enemies you're up against, getting hit will send you flying, while hitting them wont budge them a bit. I compare this combat style to a less in-depth version of Monster Hunters combat. Where you're fighting a monster, or monsters, that far out power or out number you. This meaning strategy, information on the enemy/enemies, positioning, using your toolkit to its maximum effect, or using an enemies behaviour/mechanics against them is of utmost import as you cannot contend with them in a fair fight. This is opposed to many other games revolving around allowing you to run in with no plan or strategy and be able to dodge, outmanoeuvre, out-skill or face tank every enemies attack. This placing emphasis on enemies having immediately clear and fair ways to deal with them, whether its to do with getting a certain stat up, or learning the enemies attack patterns. This instead of needing to stop, go to the drawing board and analyse the enemies mechanics and interactions with your player or the environment to overcome. It's different from the norm and definitely not for everyone, but I love it for that. All of these different things tie together to bring many aspects of the game together under the rule of preparation, information, strategy and smarts being the primary ways to progress. Not to mention that the games tutorial, context clues and NPC dialogue all help smooth this out. It's a very complex game, and that comes at the cost of being harder to immediately grasp what you should be doing, requiring some time to figure out its subtleties. It's story also promises enough good things to come, and fulfils said promises, making it worth learning and making an effort to be curious and explore every avenue, detail and interaction of the games systems. Whether this be its world, its many secrets and mini-quest eluded to by its NPC interactions for you to go and hunt down, its tool based weapon system where each tool has its own unique interactions/properties for you to discover and scheme about how to use them to exploit enemy behaviour, or its deep, incredibly meticulous lore where even the most insignificant of details are fleshed out, have a reason to exist in its world and to connect it to it's gameplay and story. Although Phoenotopia is heavily inspired by many other bits of media, from Zelda to Dragon Ball Z to Cave Story and many others, it never once crutches those inspirations and manages to set up its own unique individual aspects that all connect and blend together into one seamless, unique and beautiful adventure. It's a game that reminds me of why I love games so much. The child-like awe, wonder and feeling of true adventure, combined with its down-the-rabbit-hole style of story-telling and lore where everything isn't quite what it first appears as, hiding many layers of depth and while being unexpected, is definitely welcome. I couldn't ask for a better game, only for more of the same.

An incredible remake of the flash game Phoenotopia. This game sets you on an adventure of immense scale, over 50 hours of incredibly well designed combat that rewards patience, smarts and strategy rather than mechanical skill or brute force, puzzles that truly test your lateral thinking, wonderful music that will stay stuck in your head for hours, and a world unbelievably full of colour, depth, meticulously detailed lore and sheer heart. Cosplaying itself as a cosy, light-hearted fairy-tale game, yet the more you go down the rabbit hole, the more it surprises you with its sheer complexity, the darker sides of its lore, philosophical implications and starkly contrasting history. One could argue that its scale and complexity can take a lot of effort to get the ball rolling, or for one to click with/understand its progression mechanics. There are a lot of sections that involve piecing together bits of information by talking to NPCs, and learning about all the important locations in a new area, and doing some light detective work to find out where you need to go next for part of the story or any given mini-quest. There is definitely an initial learning process to all this, however it also makes the game so incredibly immersive, making it important for you to have to really learn about the areas you uncover and indulge in the NPCs wonderfully enjoyable, humorous and informative dialogue. The more you sink yourself into its world, the more it rewards you with story and lore. This method of progression even ties into the combat. By engaging in the worlds sources of information, they can lead you to combat abilities/upgrades, and even strategic information on how to outsmart certain enemies, making attacks that would have seemed impossible or extremely difficult to deal with before, now suddenly completely trivial and in some cases can now give you a huge advantage. More often than not your character is far more limited in movement and much smaller and weaker compared to the enemies you're up against, getting hit will send you flying, while hitting them wont budge them a bit. I compare this combat style to a less in-depth version of Monster Hunters combat. Where you're fighting a monster, or monsters, that far out power or out number you. This meaning strategy, information on the enemy/enemies, positioning, using your toolkit to its maximum effect, or using an enemies behaviour/mechanics against them is of utmost import as you cannot contend with them in a fair fight. This is opposed to many other games revolving around allowing you to run in with no plan or strategy and be able to dodge, outmanoeuvre, out-skill or face tank every enemies attack. This placing emphasis on enemies having immediately clear and fair ways to deal with them, whether its to do with getting a certain stat up, or learning the enemies attack patterns. This instead of needing to stop, go to the drawing board and analyse the enemies mechanics and interactions with your player or the environment to overcome. It's different from the norm and definitely not for everyone, but I love it for that. All of these different things tie together to bring many aspects of the game together under the rule of preparation, information, strategy and smarts being the primary ways to progress. Not to mention that the games tutorial, context clues and NPC dialogue all help smooth this out. It's a very complex game, and that comes at the cost of being harder to immediately grasp what you should be doing, requiring some time to figure out its subtleties. It's story also promises enough good things to come, and fulfils said promises, making it worth learning and making an effort to be curious and explore every avenue, detail and interaction of the games systems. Whether this be its world, its many secrets and mini-quest eluded to by its NPC interactions for you to go and hunt down, its tool based weapon system where each tool has its own unique interactions/properties for you to discover and scheme about how to use them to exploit enemy behaviour, or its deep, incredibly meticulous lore where even the most insignificant of details are fleshed out, have a reason to exist in its world and to connect it to it's gameplay and story. Although Phoenotopia is heavily inspired by many other bits of media, from Zelda to Dragon Ball Z to Cave Story and many others, it never once crutches those inspirations and manages to set up its own unique individual aspects that all connect and blend together into one seamless, unique and beautiful adventure. It's a game that reminds me of why I love games so much. The child-like awe, wonder and feeling of true adventure, combined with its down-the-rabbit-hole style of story-telling and lore where everything isn't quite what it first appears as, hiding many layers of depth and while being unexpected, is definitely welcome. I couldn't ask for a better game, only for more of the same.