Supraland: Six Inches Under Review (01proco)
It's the most average parts of Minecraft, Mario and Zelda combined into one game.
Positives:
- A world of small objects is fun to explore, like jumping up lego bricks, magnetizing to nails and forks, and throwing around batteries.
- Going through the world multiple times to see if you missed things does not feel like a chore because there are a lot of movement upgrades that remove all of the early-game hurdles. It also helps that the world has a nice structure with a central town and areas branching out from there. With this and the help of the map (which you can draw on), you can easily keep a checklist of what parts you explored and where you think secrets are.
- There are a fair bit of neat references from other games and funny internet things.
Neural:
- A story about capitalism ... blrgh, I want to get away from those topics in my free time ... at least it's kept somewhat funny.
- It doesn't have the "wow" of the first Supraland. There, you can always look up, see the sky, the house, and sometimes the kid. You constantly get a sense for how small everything is inside the sandbox. Six Inches Under is (as the name suggests) mostly caves which are dark and labyrinthian and overall pretty bland.
Negatives:
- The overall progression is awful. The main story content houses about 50% of the collectibles (if you collect most things you come across), the rest is going out of your way to collect what's left after the credits.
- The main problem with this are the upgrades. From the hidden chests you mostly get combat upgrades (damage, attack rate, stun duration, ...) but there are ZERO difficult enemy encounters. By the time you collect most of them (after the credits), there are zero encounters period. Also you get a lot of health but you die in one hit anyways if you fall into lava (which you will often), so another basically pointless 20% of collectibles. You collect all of that for nothing. There is no ultimate battle or something that tests you on how much you collected or gives you an absurdly difficult challenge if you instead breezed through the game.