izigame.me

The art and concept for this game are fantastic. However, unfortunately the execution on the idea is rather lacking. For as good as the environments look, they feel empty and full of pointless platforms that lead to nothing. There is so much waste in the level design, so many places where I thought "This would have been a good place to hide an item." The emptiness is further compounded by everything being just a bit too zoomed out, so Ebenezer feels small on the screen. Movement is clunky and unresponsive with a very noticeable delay, and sometime Ebenezer just doesn't do what your inputs tell him to. Avoiding attacks is further made difficult as they can flip their direction mid-attack, meaning the old reliable jump over them just doesn't work here. And good luck with bosses, because telegraphing is so poor that the telegraph itself can damage you. Special attacks in the form of summoning ghosts is janky and often they won't hit anything even though it looks like they should.
The games map is, frankly, useless. Very little is labeled and it uses the cheap "boxes connected by lines" approach which is the laziest form of Metroidvania map. The fast travel system makes you pick from a list, but since none of the stations are named anywhere else it's complete guesswork if you're going to end up where you want to go. The issue of labeling continues to the ghost summons, which are selected exclusively via a scrolling list in the bottom right corner. However, they are identified only by a headshot, and are nowhere near distinct enough from each other to identify while multitasking.
Other issues to briefly list; There is a variety of weapons in the game, but you are essentially punished for using half of them because they disable MP restoration on hit, making ghost attacks no longer viable. Some secret areas require ghosts to open, meaning you need the MP to use them, so you always feel like you need to keep some in the tank just in case. On the subject of the story, what starts as an interesting concept rapidly becomes dull and one-note. Ebenezer has made a complete 180 from the original story, as he should. But that is where his character traits end, he has nearly no personality beyond "I'm a generous man now." He has no personal stake in the story, which while that makes sense for a character whose main attribute is his charity, it makes him disconnected from the entire story.
In summary: This is a fascinating idea rendered in gorgeous art...But this is also a video game that is shoddily put together around a story that doesn't really compel the player. You are left with something that has a frustrating amount of unrealized potential that is quite frankly not worth spending much on. Buy at half price if you're really curious, but otherwise take a page from Scrooge's old miserly ways and save your money.