izigame.me

An adorable platformer. Using a drill to carve out your own path is pretty satisfying and since there's no combat whatsoever, exploration has a nice leisurely pace to it. If you're not careful you can make backtracking more difficult by over-doing it. But there's an easy way to get back to a check-point and you can even reset the tiles if need be. It's a very accessible game; none of the platforming is too difficult. Figuring out how to progress is a little trickier sometimes but that's on the pretty light side of things too.
The visual are definitely worthy of praise. But beyond the sprite work, what I also like is the way color palette changes with each location. When combined with the change in music, it makes for a simple but effective tool for setting the mood. And that soundtrack is great. Really surprised it wasn't made available with the games' launch.
I do have some criticisms though they're more like nitpicks. The main one I have is how the fuel for your drill in the top-left is displayed. The jars are either full or empty with no in-between. So having 3/5 of your jars full might actually be closer to 2/5. It's not a problem later on, but in the beginning it can sneak up on you. Oddly, refilling your drill will show exactly how much fuel you had left. The other criticism I have is the inventory, which to me, has two issues; the first is that you can't have the cursor wrap around to the last item of the list from the top left or vice versa with last item to the first. Second, you can't hold down left or right to have the cursor continuously move. Having to instead tap left or right each time can be a little tiresome, and you do get quite a lot of collectibles.
Still, Everdeep Aurora is a great game. The world has some interesting lore for you to find and piece together and secrets are sprinkled around. It's still a short game even for thorough players so waiting for a bigger discount might be best for anyone strapped for cash and willing to wait.

Tldr: 8/10 Great game, I'm mostly blabbing about my little nitpicks because they're easier for me to put into words.
I don't often leave reviews but I've been waiting for this game for a while and it deserves the attention. The art and characters are beautiful, the exploration was fun, and the reveal in the true ending was very satisfying. Love the music as well. I do have some complaints:
1. A pretty large chunk of Npcs on the map don't talk, and a lot of story related npcs don't say a word if you revisit them after finishing their little story bit. It makes things feel a little dead.
2. Currency is practically worthless, and you get your drill upgrades really fast.
3. That stupid jar in the claw machine. (I'm mostly joking, but I did spend over 30 minutes trying to get it. Could be a bit less hard)
4. Lore is neat but 2 of the endings felt a little abrupt. There's no indicator that your going into an ending until you reach the room and you can't leave. (unless I'm just stupid and couldn't find it. EDIT: just remembered the "go back to campsite button". I never used it before so it slipped my mind when playing. I still think this complaint is somewhat valid though). If you haven't saved in a while then you'll lose all progress made before entering the ending. I didn't know there we're three endings or what they were, but I knew I wanted to open the hatch so I tried to back out but couldn't.

It's okay.
The game is enjoyable enough as a short romp (3-6 hours), but I was constantly having gripes or wishing for what could have been.
Things I wish for the game:
- Deplete the pips within your energy canisters to better reflect your fuel; early in the game only knowing that I'm somewhere between 1 and 50% of my energy is not enough info for me to plan around. It also just feels really bad that it doesn't do this.
- A warning or acknowledgement somewhere that this game does not autosave. Presuming the game saved after certain events and then encountering a softlock resulted in me losing my entire 2.5 hours of gameplay up to that point.
- The ability to save freely. I presume the fixed save points were necessary due to the random terrain, but this system feels extremely restrictive, especially with the necessity of saving not being as apparent. I feel a traditional save option that just placed you at the last camp or other static landmark would help.
- Conveying better the controls for side-content. The controls for fishing are not apparent as the sole indication for the expected input is small to begin with and hidden behind another UI element. I also had to test buttons when trying to navigate the terminal logs, where a small graphic of a joystick or somesuch would have made it clear from the start.
- Too much button overlap. Having interact and drill on the same button has bothered me on several occasions where I'm too close to a door, and needing to navigate your inventory to use a certain function is a bit of a headache when it could have had a dedicated button. It is also extremely frustrating when the button to advance dialogue is also a confirmation for decisions. I read faster than the text displays, so I advance the text to make it display at once; this causes issues when the dialogue is paired with a choice/confirmation that takes precedence over advancing the text.
- More meaningful rewards. My experience would have benefited from something like a heart-piece for energy. Too often I found myself disappointed by rewards, traversing a platforming challenge only to be rewarded with a picture, or finding a secret only to get a chest full of duracite which the world is already littered with. Not everyone is going to be incentivised by lore, and it's especially frustrating when every once and a while the reward is good and impactful so you can't ignore the content completely. Rewards that improve your character or improve gameplay are almost always well received, and a higher ratio of these rewards would have left me less disappointed with the exploration.
- Better utilization of currencies. Expanding on the previous point, some rewards already present, the energy and ores, are poorly utilized. Despite the description stating duracite is used as currency, I've only found one thing to purchase with it. And after obtaining two of each upgrade, the ores become seemingly useless. Resources that can be procured infinitely would benefit from having larger or more persistent outlets to spend them on. Additionally, a wider array of options engages the player by forcing them to decide when and how to spend their resources.
- More environmental hazards. Difficult to implement without a health system or such, but traversing the world felt lackluster as there was no real impediment. You can hold a direction and drill and more or less get there eventually. The only decision making or threat evaluation is "which route is slightly quicker" or "where do I want to drill to cross this gap," neither of which are of much consequence.
- Skippable cutscenes.