izigame.me

While the base gameplay is fine, there's an extremely pronounced lack of variety comparable to a game launching in early access that led to me feeling as if I'd seen the entirety of the game in only 45 minutes. I'll take this point by point.
The Aforementioned Base Gameplay (wow big words, very cool!)
You run around with a gun and shoot the enemies. Enemies give you money and sometimes health. Some rooms will give you cool items that give you or your gun better stats or extra abilities. Nice! Simplistic sure, but with good enemies and a fun gameplay loop, there's nothing wrong with this setup.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of enemies. Like, really not a lot of enemies. You'll get maybe ten enemies per area, drip fed one at a time at an agonizingly slow pace, until you get to the next area where the enemy variety is back down to like 2 or 3. It's hard to put into words but it feels extremely extremely plain.
The gameplay loop also has zero variety. being running through tiny room after tiny room. No branching paths or other things to make each room feel distinct, just room after room, same after same. You don't even feel like you're progressing sometimes, more that you're just living through Groundhog Day over and over again.
Importantly, each area is LOOOONG. Like a good 20 minutes each I'd say. Not the end of the world until you realize you can't save and come back later - ever. It's kinda like Risk of Rain, only unlike Risk of Rain where it at least saves your permanant progress when you quit out, the game doesn't even do that - all your progress made since last run? Bye-bye! You completely wasted your time, all because you got a little bored of the game.
Visuals
The pixel art's a little mediocre for my taste, but it's by no means bad. It's clear people put a lot of work into the visuals, and I can appreciate that. The traditional artwork is very well done, especially the animations done for the trailer, and I definitely need to commend them on that.
If I did have to criticize anything, in the Wharf things tend to blend in with the background REALLY badly, and it's very hard to tell what's an interactable, what's a platform and what's random background decoration. It makes navigating the whole place a pretty big headache.
Music
Probably my favorite part of the game. The music weirdly reminds me of Arzette: Jewel of Faramore, a game whose soundtrack I absolutely adore, so that's saying something. Couldn't tell you why it reminds me of the game though, it just does. The songs with vocals especially stand out, and whoever the singer is did a fantastic job - although the lyrics themselves are pretty nothing.
Story
The story appears to be based on the play Waiting for Godot, as the story seems to be a bunch of random happenings all centering around the absence of a character named Hebbi whose presence seems to be required to interact with literally anyone, and it's unclear whether Hebbi is a real person or simply a figment of the characters' ever-worsening psyches.
I jest of course, but seriously. I haven't gotten to interact with any characters beyond inviting them to the Wharf. It seems like all of them either say flavor text without purpose or something about needing the demigod of creation Hebbi (or maybe he's just an engineer guy, I don't know) in order to fulfill their roles. Seriously, this happened multiple times. Just how important is this guy?
As for what's actually happening in the game, I have no idea. The opening sets up the basic plot pretty well, but everything past that is extremely unclear and I stopped asking questions after a while. Characters' personalities seem to fit into pretty static boxes and none of them felt like they had any depth, not even the main character; although maybe that changes later in the game.
Voice Acting
It's fine. Like acceptable. Although it did bother me that the only voice acting seems to be for flavor, and never from characters talking to one another or anything. At that point I don't know why you even bothered having voice acting at all. Like come on, can't you have the characters actually talk to one another? Giant missed opportunity, though given the lack of character interaction maybe there wasn't a lot to voice act for to begin with.
Conclusion
While this game's not bad per se, I didn't feel a lot playing it. It just felt...void? As if I didn't know what I was doing and why. Neither the story nor the gameplay was nearly as engaging as would be necessary to keep me playing, and especially with the game being $16 (and on discount no less) I lost interest in it way too fast. The game would be fine - great even - if more focus was put either on having a more well-defined and obvious plot (maybe something like Freedom Planet? Just throwing ideas out there), or if the gameplay was more varied or at least in-depth as to engage the player for longer. But as it stands I got bored really quickly, and I already don't feel like carrying on with the game.