izigame.me

I WANTED to like this game, but it was very difficult to do so. It had its redeeming qualities, and I played it to the end (bad ending), but it was an utter slog. There were many issues that disrupted the enjoyment, like abysmal guidance, a horribly under-powered player toolkit, and the constant need for grinding memorization.
Feedback:
If you're going to include a "dodge roll" mechanic in a game, but then design it so that it's essentially ineffective outside a 3-frame window, then snags and catches on every enemy and every minuscule outcropping in the environment (trapping you for repeated hits with no recovery frames), you have not made a dodge roll; you have made a piece of Velcro and thrown it in a jar of syrup lined with hooks.
If you're going to design REGULAR enemies so that they can breathlessly execute 5-wave AOE power combos in rapid succession, you don't fill the screen with them up to every corner and then give the player a timed pea shooter and a range-less toothpick with the DPS of a mild fart. There is no reason a standard enemy should take 5-6 charged up strong attacks to kill, especially with leveled up weapons and damage-boosting trinkets. And, without any actual numbers, you just basically take the devs' word for it when you get a "powerful" new upgrade, because there is no context for comparison between attack types.
If you're going to design an environment within a complex and multi-storied isometric fun house, at least have the courtesy to provide a map. Even Tunic was willing to do this, limited though it was, to give SOME idea of orientation---and that game was literally designed to be confusing. There's a huge and nuanced gap between "hand-holding," and refusing to provide even simple cues about where you're supposed to go next in (at least) the main story line.
A huge part of this game was spent wandering, dodging and mindlessly back-tracing, searching for... literally anything. There is no XP, and you earn far more gold than there are things to buy with it, so the only real incentive to clear out enemies is to look for secrets or new pathways, but since there is no system to track anything, you have no idea what you're searching for or how much of it is left anywhere. If you "miss" a single obscure chest with a critical upgrade part in it, you will either need to search every screen of the game to find it, or simply never get the upgrade. 2 of every 3 chests is a relic, and some of the most cumbersome fights in the game give no reward at all for winning. Almost every active "quest" you are given is along the lines of 'Find 56 b'guffins distributed randomly across every region of the game,' and even after an exhaustive retrace effort, still nearly HALF of the "crew members" needed for a main mission were still inexplicably missing. Most movement ability upgrades you find are niche, and generally just help you navigate an obstacle introduced directly within the area where you found the ability.
Bosses have SO much HP, it almost feels like you're being trolled. Battles can take 8-10 minutes of rolling around and attacking, and the only indication that you're getting "close" to victory is when the mob starts slowly changing color (though when this happens, it'll still take dozens more hits to finally finish). I'd really like the devs to understand that this may have been a workable mechanic when we were all playing Ninja Turtles II on NES 35 years ago, but it's actual CRAP by modern standards.
Even some minor basic additions would have made a huge difference in playability---like location-based quest indicators, a HUD for boss health, a flippin' MAP, or, ffs, an area percent-completion tracker. What exactly was the rationale for excluding them? Anything other than being cast in a directionless oblivion is "too easy"?
This game could have had so much more to offer. I just get the feeling that in the 'quest to eradicate hand-holding,' the devs snubbed an entire conceptual domain of obvious quality-of-life and best-practice mechanics that modern games are based on.