Dust: An Elysian Tail Review (Rei)
I initially bought Dust in August 2014, played it for about 4 hours and forgot to continue.
Now I finally started a new playthrough yesterday and finished it within 2 days with all achievements.
Warning regarding the achievements: Two achievements belong to the same quest, and based on your decision at the end of said quest gives you either of the achievements. Luckily I looked through the achievements beforehand and just picked what I didn't do 9 years ago.
Dust is certainly not a bad game, but its age shows.
The controls are all very responsive, but the problem is, that the controls are partially unreliable, if that makes sense. Dust has a spin move, which you can use to move around in the air.
Thing is, when enemies are around, the ability often just decides to shoot you upwards. And I mean UPWARDS, like a rocket to the top of the screen where no enemies are.
From then on you just gotta wait until you fall again to get back into the fight. And that happens ALL the time.
However, when you want it to shoot you up to reach a platform/ledge, it sometimes just doesn't want to move you upwards at all.
Another thing I disliked was the difficulty. I played on the highest difficulty for about 30% of the game. I had to lower it to the second hardest difficulty setting unfortunately, since the developers idea of high difficulty is to get Oneshot by literally everything. One small monsters attack? Dead. One flamethrower hit? Dead.
After I invested in some defense and noticed that its useless, as I still got killed in one hit by everything, I lowered it to the second-hardest difficulty, where it was actually decently balanced.
As previously mentioned, the game is a little aged, but considering it's now pretty much exactly 10 years old, it's still a rather decent Metroidvania. Rather short though, so maybe wait for a sale.