izigame.me

Under a hundred steam reviews on a game of this quality is really quite saddening to see. This is a good little combat puzzler with an interesting world with lots of lore to read, a pleasant, adventurous atmosphere and some solid time loop gameplay as you and your copies run around defeating enemies as fast as possible.
If it suffers from anything (other than being completely overlooked), it's how it feels like a game of two halves, and they don't always complement each other in the best ways. There's the story, cutscenes and exploring the environments for upgrade spheres, bits of lore and new outfit colours. It's all pleasant and interesting enough, if maybe not the most gripping and sharply written stuff. It's got an air of a saturday morning cartoon, a kind of "we can do this, together!" tone that can be both endearing and a little on the nose in equal measures. I appreciate it avoids going for too much melodrama, and a hopeful, positive tone is definitely welcome.
The other half, the thing that really makes the game special, is the combat puzzles, but if you are following the first half, the narrative, you will just bash your head against each encounter, mashing away at enemies, taking hits, dying, looping again, until you either run out of copies and have to restart the encounter, or you eventually clear it.
But in order to really make the mechanics of the game sing, you need to play, and replay each encounter until you reach the presented par times. These really bring forth how carefully planned each encounter actually is, and how much depth all of your abilities and skills have. Each encounter adds a new skill or a new enemy type or some new twist to shake things up. Playing for the par times really pushes you to plan your routes carefully, requiring clever use of timing, placement and the kind of 5-dimensional chess stuff you'd only expect in the weirdest, most demanding indie puzzlers. Destroy this thing here, so that it opens a gate for your next copy to dash past to get to the exploding enemy sooner, so you can launch it against another group of enemies you will be fighting with your third copy, which will free up the crystal your fourth and fifth copy can destroy together before the fifth one can join the second one and distract the shielded enemy for the fourth copy can smash through the other crystal and-" and it's really compelling stuff.
It's just that it gets really tough, and it can be exhausting after several of them back to back. And so you kind of end up with a choice: do you proceed with the story, intending to maybe replay previous fights later for the par times? Ignoring the par times and just going for normal completion means the combat encounters can start feeling repetitive and more than a little annoying interruptions when you're trying to just get on with the plot. Ignoring the par times, there is no challenge really, you just run against the wall until you clear it. OR do you grind story progress to a complete halt, embrace the robust play mechanics and really learn and route every encounter to get the most out of the gameplay and reach those par times? You risk exhausting yourself, but it's a more rewarding game to PLAY. It's just that there is a LOT of encounters.
So it's hard. I don't know how to solve that problem, and neither did the team. They chose, probably very wisely, to let you take everything at your own pace, and hope you will have a good enough time to want to engage with the deeper mechanics when going for the par times later. By request the team updated the game and added online leaderboards for comparing and competing for the best times in each encounter. They even added even more optional challenges for replaying past fights, with additional modifiers, enemies and tricks. If you don't exhaust yourself, there is a wealth of stuff to play, but if you're just trying to "get on with it" a lot of that feels like it's just in the way.
So it's not perfect, but it has a lot of love put into it, and I have to stress how rewarding reaching those par times is. I hope the team gets to make another game, I'd love to see what they do next.
7/10