v1993

Quite great - but could be better. World is ultimately fairly expansive and beautiful, controls feel excellent, enemy encounters are well-designed, leveling system is unlikely to get in your face, varied weapons allow for different play styles. Item placement deserves separate praise with stubble yet recognizable environmental clues to a vast majority of hidden areas and a late-game item allowing to hunt down remaining chests (something critical oh too many metroidvanias are missing). Now onto the pains (as of version 1.1.0): * In spite of significant improvements brought by updates Switch performance is still not quite there. While it probably won't interfere with gameplay, occasional stutter, pop-in or a loading screen is still there - not to mention massive initial loading time. I realize this is a Switch-specific problem - but that's a platform game claims to support and there are more technically impressive titles running at butter-smooth 60 FPS. - Story is... actually perfectly fine if you take time to piece it together from item descriptions and side quests. What is less fine is its presentation (very minor spoiler ahead) - about three of supposed "endings" are more like "continuings", making discovering the ultimate finale of the story very counter-intuitive unless one consults a guide to be told they aren't done yet (even after doing NG+). - Despite the overall story being fine, be ready to walk away with some introduced plot threads remaining apparently unresolved. Situation may change with an eventual free DLC (one was already released and more are expected to come), but as of now even the ultimate ending leaves some things hanging. - (English) text could use some more proofreading. For overall game quality the amount of errors there is somewhat embarrassing. TL;DR get it, but preferably not on switch.

A great game overall and an outright awesome pick for its price. Main puzzles are pretty easy, but completing with low amount of boxes while collecting all crowns gets pretty challenging as you keep going. Level structure and instant rollback work really well in eliminating frustration games of this kind tend to have.