izigame.me

Isles of Sea and Sky: The indie darling that became just Isles of Disappointment.
It's sad that the demo and non-NDA'd alphas and betas of this game were much better. Progression was almost entirely limited by only your own observational and puzzle solving skills. The addition of upgrades and a few one-off new mechanics since then not only caused a lot of arbitrary changes to existing puzzles that were originally far more ingenious and fun to solve without them (as the limitations of having less features bred creativity within these puzzles that are now sadly lost to overengineering / "too many cooks spoiling the broth"), but also introduces cheese to a lot of puzzles while arbitrarily gatekeeping them from being solvable at a much earlier point of the game. These changes actively hurt the "open world" aspect of the game by limiting the number of islands and puzzles the player could initially access and attempt; and is further hindered by the addition of more star gates within these islands that weren't in earlier builds. All of which only serve to choke out the player's freedom and sense of agency even further to the point where calling the game "open world" honestly feels like a misnomer at best, and false advertising at worst.
To add insult to injury the game launched incomplete as the Sun and Moon Island that we were promised as a Kickstarter stretch goal haven't been implemented yet. Neither were the native Mac and Linux builds of the game, nor the DRM free Itch.io release which were all part of the base Kickstarter campaign promises, nor the Nintendo Switch build stretch goal that was also met. Features shown in the builds without a NDA, like the goddess of the Tidal Reef island granting you a frog transformation at 18 gems, that people were hyped about have also been removed without a trace and were most likely replaced with the more lackluster power ups. We got just a shadow of what we paid / pledged for and now this dev is asking us in his update announcements to do unpaid beta testing for him after taking our money? What is this? Early Access without the Early Access label at an overpriced $20?!
Oh, and in case the words "non-NDA'd alphas and betas" caught your eyes earlier, let me just mention that despite the dev assuring me in a Discord DM that I'm "more than welcome" to stream any development builds of the game, which I asked about prior to me backing it at the $100 alpha test tier, he later tried to slap every alpha and beta tier backer with an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) after only a few early to mid game betas. Feeling ripped off and insulted by the dev blindsiding me with an NDA after previously telling me that I'm "more than welcome to stream alphas and betas, in fact, it would be great", I rejected the terms of it, avoided any further pre-release builds, and refunded my pledge on the grounds of breach of contract. In response, Jason Newman (Gojirra, Lead Developer of Cicada Games) bans me from their Discord server and slanders me as a "toxic person" who "contributed nothing" despite me promoting the game on stream and bug testing their game, all because I wanted the dev to simply honor his private agreement with me. Well, since I'm so "toxic", I feel its important that other people learn just how this developer treats people, especially their content creating backers, behind closed doors; but hey, at least I got all of my money back and all he has from me is this negative review.
Edit: Minor corrections / rephrasing.