ABANDONED: Down Ward
Dec. 29th, 2019 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoLet me just say that I do not regret this experience at all. It was great until it... wasn't anymore, at which point I stopped. But it was incredibly nice while it lasted. I'm calling this one a recommendation even though I hit a wall and noped out eventually.
Down Ward is a pixel action/puzzle/exploration thing about an owl on a quest to gather up all the magic glowing feathers in each level, then take them to the tower/beacon that will whisk her off to the next. Being an owl, you have access to a flying mechanic that is mostly unlimited (no "can only stay airborne for X seconds" stamina system or anything like that) with the only catch being that you have to keep moving forward in a straight line; stop or change direction and you plummet until you can regain enough forward momentum to rise again. That said, you can fly up by going back and forth so long as you have a wide enough space to have a net gain of height on each direction, but (like many maneuvers in this game) it's kind of tricky and the controls take some getting used to at first.
The music is one single song that loops infinitely, but it is a very good song, a jamming keygen-style beat that's somehow catchy yet not obnoxious no matter how many times you've heard it. I really like it. The graphics are gorgeous, with a pixel art style that's expressive and easy to track while visually stunning, sprites and landscapes that look every bit as good in stills or in motion. Everything is done with a four color palette that can be changed around like a Super Game Boy, with such a dizzying array of choices that I can't possibly have seen them all. There are so many that it honestly wraps around to the other side and becomes cumbersome to navigate, such that I settled for a palette I actually really liked without scrolling all the way through the list to check if there was a better one later, because I didn't want to lose the one I was on if I scrolled like fifty choices ahead without seeing anything. (A suggestion to the developer: Perhaps some way to see the entire list as a clickable drop-down menu, rather than left/right-scrolling single selection?)
I experienced a kind of bell curve of enjoyment with this game in practice. The first few levels were rough, as I was struggling to get used to the flying controls and almost gave up before I'd even really started. Then, things just... clicked, everything grew on me, I love that song and those graphics and I was really getting the hang of flying and just... yeah, this was great! Then the difficulty ramped up, and eventually it stopped being fun again. Not even in a way I can fault the developer for; I absolutely respect a good well-made masocore challenge, especially one that's such a well-made audiovisual delight. It's just that that's not really why I'm here, you know? This is good but once the ninja-rushing invincible bird skulls came out, it was no longer for me.
The only thing I can genuinely fault in this game (aside from maybe needing a better system to browse that many palette options) is the utter lack of a way to sense progression. I played this game for about an hour and a half and stopped at the first appearance of the bird skulls, which was level ??? out of ?????? Was I almost at the end? Was I barely out of the starting gate? How long is this game, anyway? It's maybe a minor thing, but I do feel like not having any sort of sense of how far along I was had a psychological effect on my ability to withstand grueling level after grueling level. Do these impossible challenges just keep coming forever, or...?
Still. This is well made, pretty, fun to play at least for a while, and is the kind of experience that sticks with me. The developer honestly could have gotten away with charging money for how much quality went into this game, yet it's free. By all means, you have nothing to lose by checking it out. I don't regret trying it and then stopping when I did. I stopped before things got frustrating enough to tarnish the experience, and will look back on the parts I played very fondly.
Down Ward is a pixel action/puzzle/exploration thing about an owl on a quest to gather up all the magic glowing feathers in each level, then take them to the tower/beacon that will whisk her off to the next. Being an owl, you have access to a flying mechanic that is mostly unlimited (no "can only stay airborne for X seconds" stamina system or anything like that) with the only catch being that you have to keep moving forward in a straight line; stop or change direction and you plummet until you can regain enough forward momentum to rise again. That said, you can fly up by going back and forth so long as you have a wide enough space to have a net gain of height on each direction, but (like many maneuvers in this game) it's kind of tricky and the controls take some getting used to at first.
The music is one single song that loops infinitely, but it is a very good song, a jamming keygen-style beat that's somehow catchy yet not obnoxious no matter how many times you've heard it. I really like it. The graphics are gorgeous, with a pixel art style that's expressive and easy to track while visually stunning, sprites and landscapes that look every bit as good in stills or in motion. Everything is done with a four color palette that can be changed around like a Super Game Boy, with such a dizzying array of choices that I can't possibly have seen them all. There are so many that it honestly wraps around to the other side and becomes cumbersome to navigate, such that I settled for a palette I actually really liked without scrolling all the way through the list to check if there was a better one later, because I didn't want to lose the one I was on if I scrolled like fifty choices ahead without seeing anything. (A suggestion to the developer: Perhaps some way to see the entire list as a clickable drop-down menu, rather than left/right-scrolling single selection?)
I experienced a kind of bell curve of enjoyment with this game in practice. The first few levels were rough, as I was struggling to get used to the flying controls and almost gave up before I'd even really started. Then, things just... clicked, everything grew on me, I love that song and those graphics and I was really getting the hang of flying and just... yeah, this was great! Then the difficulty ramped up, and eventually it stopped being fun again. Not even in a way I can fault the developer for; I absolutely respect a good well-made masocore challenge, especially one that's such a well-made audiovisual delight. It's just that that's not really why I'm here, you know? This is good but once the ninja-rushing invincible bird skulls came out, it was no longer for me.
The only thing I can genuinely fault in this game (aside from maybe needing a better system to browse that many palette options) is the utter lack of a way to sense progression. I played this game for about an hour and a half and stopped at the first appearance of the bird skulls, which was level ??? out of ?????? Was I almost at the end? Was I barely out of the starting gate? How long is this game, anyway? It's maybe a minor thing, but I do feel like not having any sort of sense of how far along I was had a psychological effect on my ability to withstand grueling level after grueling level. Do these impossible challenges just keep coming forever, or...?
Still. This is well made, pretty, fun to play at least for a while, and is the kind of experience that sticks with me. The developer honestly could have gotten away with charging money for how much quality went into this game, yet it's free. By all means, you have nothing to lose by checking it out. I don't regret trying it and then stopping when I did. I stopped before things got frustrating enough to tarnish the experience, and will look back on the parts I played very fondly.