Auridia

Несмотря на простоту исполнения, Auridia — прекрасный образец чётко выверенного платформера с элементами метроидвании: приятный стиль, отшлифованные механики, не проседающий темп игры и интересный для изучения лор мира. При всей своей скоротечности она полностью отбивает все затраты за восемь часов игрового процесса (ну, плюс-минус). Да, не хватает локализации на другие языки помимо английского и ключевых азиатских, но ничего не поделать.

Это отличная игра, которую легко недооценить из-за трейлера. На самом деле нас ждёт не просто пиксельная прыгалка, а насыщенная метроидвания, в которой интересно всё: передвижения, история, сеттинг/лор.

This game was played in its entirety (save for five minutes on my partner's Windows PC) on a MacBook Air M1 8gb ram 7c gpu running MacOS Sonoma. There were a few minor bugs, but no crashes throughout my time with the game. All achievements, SAVE ONE, unlocked at their appropriate times. TLDR: An amazing near-zero combat Metroidvania. If exploration and knowledge-seeking are your thing, this is an amazing adventure for you. CAVEAT EMPTOR: You currently *cannot* get 100% achievement completion of the game in either the Mac or Linux version. One achievement, No Stone Unturned, was bugged and was subsequently fixed by the dev...but only for the Windows version. Please be aware of this. I didn't know what to expect when I saw that this Metroidvania has zero combat in it! (Though, "zero combat" is not entirely true) Turns out, they can be fantastic! I really enjoyed my time with this game. If you like reading and learning about a past civilization, piecing together clues from snippets of history, and using a truly awe-inspiring set of traversal methods to explore a large and well-designed map, then this game is an absolutely easy recommendation for you. The graphics are very minimalistic, but they work really well. The gnosis pulses (as you...understand your environment more) can be shocking to see and might even have some moments of terror. Triggering light sources provides a very pleasing sense of discovery, as your view distance increases. And the mechanical design is so tight here, that once you see (and maybe get ambushed by) a specific element, you'll recognize it every time in the future and be prepared for it. The sounds are pretty good and did not bother me. The music is extremely good here. Several of the tracks are worthy of downloads, in my opinion! The gameplay is completely fantastic, and a lot of that is due to the movement options at your disposal. You unlock them at an even pace throughout the game, but pretty much any one of these powers (barring one or two, perhaps) would completely break most other Metroidvania games. Here? They just keep one-upping themselves with each power! You will feel like a god as you wander these caverns, and that might be by design... But let's not spoil anything! The lore is fantastic, and it would be a real crime if a player just skipped through all of this text. It is written very well, and it was always a joy to learn more about this past civilization. There were some pretty interesting moments, and just like a good book, this builds to a very nice climax. One downside of the climax is that it is really only the second time (if you count the first time, a few times; it will make sense when you play this I swears!) that you are forced into combat, and what ensues is a huge difficulty spike from the rest of the game. I could see players getting frustrated with this massive jump in difficulty. Another small downside is that there are a few minor bugs in the game that I encountered. All of them occurred when I did something either neat or terrible with movement and got myself somewhere I should not have (oftentimes partly inside of the floor or wall). The good thing about this is that upon any save and quit, you have two options when you load the game: begin EXACTLY where you left off (you will not have moved a pixel from where you saved) or jump back to the current zone's "beginning" area. You're never really stuck with this and the two or three times it happened during my play throughs cost me a handful of minutes at the most. Speaking of those play throughs, I did three. The first one was to see and do and get everything. It was the most fun. Doing it this way lets you see all of the wonderful lore in the game, solve all of the mysteries, and complete all of the detective bits with Snorri. You'll be very powerful by the end. I would rate this as a 1 out of 10 on the difficulty scale, not counting the combat and climax portions. The second run was a speed run. 2 hours is…