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Website: http://mableandthewood.com/
Price: +- $10 on Steam, and about $12 on GOG.
Blurb: “Mable & The Wood is a Metroidvania where you hunt down massive beasts and, upon destroying them, shapeshift into their forms in order to use their powers to save or destroy the world. Players with less violent intent can find secret paths to complete Mable without killing anything, including bosses.“
You play Mable, a young girl, resurrected by a cult to stop the end of the world. Revenant anyone? The twist: Mable cannot do anything in human form, she cannot jump, or run, let alone fight. All of these things can be accomplished by her shape changing. There is a restriction on these abilities though, Mable has a power meter. So, in your Spiderman form, you shoot webs and swing around (sorry spider form. Wink-wink), but you cannot do it all the time. You gain more powers as you kill bosses, their powers actually. Megaman anyone? There are abilities like mole-form, stone-form, and ghost-form, to name a few.
You can supposedly finish the game without violence, but it is not clear how. With these powers you gained after killing a boss, you can supposedly go back and access areas that you could not before. How you are supposed to do this is also a mystery. Lots of areas look the same, and the map is not the best. The pixel art in the game is good, not great. Though there are lots of animations for different characters, I feel the art could have used just a bit more polish. The minimalism loses its charm after a while. The level design and coloring is top notch, and you can see a lot of thought went into the palette. The only thing missing is distinct areas / architecture / backgrounds so you can remember where you were and are going. The sound feels like it was made for a console though. It comes across as basic. I understand that it is the theme, basic pixel art, basic sound design, but it is like eating fries that need more salt. That said, it is a perfect fit and has no repeats that work your last nerve. Even with headphones on and doing something repetitive, I never tired of the sound.
However I did have issues with the playability. It seems there are still bugs to be sorted. Some spots are horrible. In some places, the collision detection blows, allowing you to move through solid objects. Anything with an angle seems to be a problem for the engine. In some places, sound is just missing. A fire will be silent or a creature will be. Your grave site that allows you to recover your goodies sometimes appears and sometimes not, and sometimes behind a solid wall you cannot reach. You can not only get lost back-tracking, you can also get stuck. The only option is to start a new game. You don’t always know if what you did was correct or a bug (ahem, feature). The twist being the hook of the game, will hook you. Though it was advertised as metroidvania, it is not quite, but it is addictive. I just think it came out of Steam greenlight a little too soon. That said, the developers are actively fixing, and there are lots of updates. The game has a lot of potential and a lot of room for improvement.
Compared with modern games, it is not big, being about a 600MB download. However, if I compare it to, say, a game like Prehistorik2 that came on a few (or was it one?) stiffy’s, it could be a lot smaller. Optimising space is also not the only issue; in some places you may see some slow-downs. A game like this, in 2020, should not have those. I almost want to say the game feels somewhat like a game-jam game that you would find on itch.io.
If this was polished to shine, it would be one of those outstanding games you see every so often, but, as it stands now, is meh.