Bleb

I wanna begin this review with a statement that I LOVE platformer games. They are great and my favorites are mostly classics such as Cave Story and New Super Mario Bros on Nintendo DS. I feel like this game shouldn't be compared to them, but considering that this dung costs 5 dollars while the original Cave Story is free, it calls me to write an honest review for the price I've paid. -- So here's a review -- The truth is this game is a TASTELESS BARE MINIMUM you can do as a developer of platformer and shouldn't be sold for MONEY. Graphics are minimalistic at best, not stylish in the slightest and have mixels all over the place. It aims for the one-bit ZX Spectrum games aesthetic, but fails to capture what made the visuals on lil old speccy great. It doesn't look retro, it's barely an itch.io game that no one plays. It feels like the dev took a look at those free Heartbeast 1-bit Godot tutorials and decided to make a PAID game with that. Movement is fine, but level design is atrocious. There are different types of levels. The platforming ones are mostly unintuitive tasteless slogs with traps akin to Syobon Action, which look like they were designed to prolong your playtime. Literally the first level has platforms that disappear under the player's feet, leading them to their doom. Levels after that are not difficult, they are just cheap and not fun. Others are... quirky? And badly designed at best. There is a maze, in which 4-way direction is enabled. There are two ways in this maze - one is a difficult way with OBSTACLES, and the other is a fairly-the-same-way difficult narrow path. You die at the end of the narrow path because the dev thought he is a really funny troll, and in no way must the game value your time. And this theme CONTINUES in a level with a slot machine, in which you just... gamble. Gamble until you get a win, which allows you to proceed to another level. Music is mildly pleasant keygen at best. At worst it's terrible. Like really, it's like they gave witchhouse composers from soundcloud to compose RETRO music, to which they aren't used AT ALL. I'd give it to them if it didn't sound like something old, but it sounds like crap. Obnoxiously loud 8-bit piano and bassboosting drums, I've literally had to turn off the volume to not go insane. Plot is not the focus of the game, but I wanna speak up on this one, because it's not moving anything forward, it's just... boring. There are plotlines in platformers to keep players engaged. This one doesn't provide an engaging plotline, rather a shallow one, that tells a story about a little white Bleb that fell asleep after a breakup, which is why the game happens fully inside of a dream. The breakup doesn't compliment anything important to the game, it just looks like the dev considered the phrase "Your game must contain a part of you" and did the corniest shit imaginable. Whatever symbolism the game had with naked women and hands, it's disgusting and tasteless. My personal gripe is the Tsoy reference, which has a billboard in the middle of the stereotypically Moscow street. It appears out of nowhere, looks terrible and is a tasteless reference with no attention to anything happening on the screen. A damn TSOY BILLBOARD right next to an ORTHODOX CHURCH. You can't get any more surface-level reference to russian culture than that. In a minimalistic game. About a little guy. -- THE VERDICT -- This game is tasteless, has poor visuals (and MIXELS) and lacks a good soundtrack, most of it being an awful chiptune synth that tries to be retro, but doesn't achieve the same quality as even the sound of an NES bootleg cartridge. I've seen better games on itch.io for free, and there are numerous better games to spend your 5 dollars on.