Afterlight

Alright guys, I took the plunge and began playing faerie afterlight. Here's a few key things I noticed:

Movement

• Coyote time - pretty generous in this game. It's pretty hard to miss ledges unless you are really not paying attention.

• Clipping - again, very generous clipping, in which if you miss the ledge by a few pixels, the game will pop you up and count it as a proper landing.

• Input buffer - there's also a decent implementation of input buffer. As in, before you land, if you tapped or held the jump button, you'll immediately jump after landing.

• movement - this is a little slidey. Combined with the lack of legs, sometimes this feels like sliding through ice instead of walking. Not as precise as Hollow Knight, and feels more like Islets or Super Meat Boy.

• jumping - the jump speed is pretty linear, which is the opposite of Hollow Knight. It feels slower, as if there's less gravity, and changing directions in mid-air feels a little less precise.

Unique elemens

• Puzzles - in the first hour alone, the game pretty much solidifies itself as a puzzle-focused metroidvania. The level design hasn't wowed me yet, but so far I'm enjoying the puzzles, simple as they may be

• Possession - one of the main mechanics seem to be possession of enemies. This is actually a great mechanic that I'm starting to love, and appreciate. There's so much potential for this mechanic that I'm excited to see what the devs have in store in mid and late game.

Polish

• I'm impressed. One of my biggest issue with Aeterna Noctis is just how bad its polish is, especially on the UI elements. Not in this game; everything works, menus are well designed, visual clarity and contrast is great, and rebinding keys is simple and intuitive. Great work on this front.

• Charm. The art direction is amazing. There's a consistency to the world, and great abstractions to things like gates, doors, and what not. Animation is top notch, and it's charming to see how the art direction portrays a well polished game without blowing the devs' budget. It's simple, minimalistic, and exudes charm.

Irritations

• Not many irritations so far, other than the slow jump button.

• The opening cutscene is however, irritating. You drip from somewhere and coaslece into a being, but stays there for like 10 seconds before something happens. Also, you can't skip cutscenes; I hope this doesn't become a trend in the game...

All in all, worth the buy! I had to do a double take at the price, as it's ridiculously low for a well polished metroidvania. Go check it out!

I’m torn! I have both and I don’t need both lol. I’ve just been too lazy to skip so I let the charges go through 😂 I’m leaning more towards Afterlight as there’s more customization but the drawing of the characters throws me off. With OwlCrate, the reverse jacket is nice but I love a good sprayed/stenciled edge and this one doesn’t have it. I love how the characters look on this one too. 😭

Context: I went through my Humble Bundle keys from back when Humble Bundles were really, really awesome, and I got tons of keys for games I never redeemed.

These should still work fine, even if they're years old, and there is no way for me to check whether they're valid or not, so I apologise in advance if any should not work.

Leave a comment and I'll randomly pick a winner in a few days!

edit: the winner is:

Feel free to discuss anything regarding the event in this post. This includes the story, artwork, gacha pulls, and more.

Event Details

• Attribute: Pure

• Event Type: Medley Live

• Boosted Members: Ran, Moca, Himari, Tomoe, Tsugumi

• Boosted Parameter: Technique

Added Songs

• Afterglow – 「Petrichor Ovation」 (Difficulty: 9 / 15 / 21 / 26)

Duration

• Start: March 17, 2024 – 1:00 AM (UTC) ()

• End: March 25, 2024 – 6:59 AM (UTC) ()

Event Rewards

• 3★ Cool: Moca – Perfect Lock: GOOD notes and higher become PERFECT and score increased by 20% for 8 seconds.

• 2★ Powerful: Tomoe – Healer/Scorer: Life restored by 300 and score increased by 10% for 8 seconds.

Gacha: Pouring Rain of These Falling Tears Gacha (Permanent)

• 5★ Pure: Tsugumi – Healer/Scorer: Life restored by 750 and score increased by 110% for 7.5 seconds.

• 5★ Pure: Himari – Scorer: Score increased by 130% for 7 seconds.

• 4★ Pure: Ran – Perfect Lock: GOOD notes and higher become PERFECT and score increased by 60% for 7.5 seconds.

Note: Skill values are listed at Skill Level 5.

In my previous initial impressions, I liked Faerie Afterlight. But after spending more time and ultimately giving up at the 3 hour mark, I'd like to pen down my thoughts about this game, and forewarn others who might share my specific preferences on MV games. I am a firm believer that you shouldn't push through a game that you don't enjoy, and I have no regrets stopping my playthrough at the 3rd boss, in the 5th biome, at the 3 minute mark.

Misunderstanding Metroidvania, and level design

I don't think I can agree with the devs' interpretation on what metroidvanias are. To me, MVs need to have sensible and deliberate map designs. I lean more towards the metroid side of the spectrum, and I look for games that provides decent exploration first and foremost. Now how do we actually define what constitutes good exploration?

First of all, map traversal needs to make sense, and backtracking should be organic. This means the world needs to be set up in a way that even a linear exploration path would eventually loop back around (e.g. super metroid, hollow knight). If not, at least use a hub-and-spoke scheme where you have a town to upgrade stuff, and the rest of the world sprouts from that central location (e.g. blasphemous 2, aeterna noctis). This also means that if you put a challenging platforming section before the player, once they conquer it, you don't ask them to do it every time they pass by the area. Most games do this by creating a secret path that's easy to traverse the second time around (e.g. the bridge before the City of Tears, or elevator to the City of Tears, etc).

Not in this game! Not only do Faerie Afterlight not have a worldmap (so you can't see how each biome links to one another), they're just platforming rooms strung together like an anthill. If you happen to fast travel back to an earlier spawn flag, and want to travel by foot to the next, you gotta do the platforming section all over again.

Backtracking is atrocious too; there's nothing but story rewards so far. That, or just coins. You actually buy upgrades from vendors, so exploration isn't so much of an issue because you can grind enemies to get upgrades. But this in by itself, is another problem on its own that I'll cover in the next section.

Enemy design, or lack thereof

In Faerie Afterlight, there's a unique mechanic in which you can possess enemies in order to use them to complete platforming challenges. This is fun and a mechanic that has a lot of potential, but ultimately falls flat in execution. First of all, there's no AI to speak of. Enemies patrol on set paths, and launches attacks/projectiles when the player is near. They're just slightly more dangerous environment hazards (which by itself is fine). You'll use them a lot to solve platforming puzzles, but you also need to kill them to grind for money, in order to PAY FOR fast travel. This is the kind of game design that contradicts itself fundamentally.

Now onto the bosses. I have to say, these are some of the most boring fights I've ever seen in any game. I think the devs really get the idea wrong about movement abilities, and the reason why bosses exists: in most games, not just MV, you have bosses as kind of like a final test of your abilities so far. In an MV, this often means you need to utilize the last movement ability you picked up to overcome the boss. Some MV that are more open-world or non-linear do not conform to this, but since Faerie Afterlight is a linear experience, I'll treat it like a linear game.

In this game, the design philosophy behind the bosses seem to be: oh, you thought you stronk now that you have a new movement ability? Nuh-uh, here's something that completely negates part of your moveset. And once you're done struggling through this whole thing and beat the boss, here's the upgrade that would've made the boss fight so much easier in the first place.

Second boss is a scarab that has this tendency to jump and land on your head. It's horizontal size is about half the screen, so unless you're already moving in a direction (you only have wall jump at this point), when it lands, you'll get hit by contact damage and lose a life. Sometimes if you run out of space (walk into a corner), you will have absolutely no recourse to its slam attack.

You get dash and feel powerful; then comes the third boss, which insist in fighting inside water. Here your dash either doesn't work, or you have to time it properly so you don't overshoot and smack into the boss to take contact damage. There's no fighting fair; every fight means you gotta give up a huge portion of your moveset just to make things challenging.

Finally, contact damage. This game really does it badly; the hitboxes of everything is inconsistent. I've swam past bramble thorns and took no damage, only to jump next to spikes and be killed when my character is clearly at least 5-10 pixels away from the spikes. Bosses are like that too; for any decent players, due to how slow their projectiles are, and how slow your character moves, the only way they can do damage is if they accidentally run into you, or vice versa.

Sheer boredom

I gave up at the third boss, oddly, due to the music. Imagine fighting a boss which tosses projectiles that falls at the speed of snowflakes, which can be cheesed by staying directly underneath it, to a music that sounds more like something you'd play in an elevator or in a spa reception area.

The sluggish movement of enemies, the pastel color schemes, the wide expanse that you have to travel with nothing in between, all the unskippable cutscenes, the unskippable cutscene when you fast travel, and all the issues with the boss designs make this a beautiful game to stare at, but an utterly boring game to play.

SUMMARY - Could have been great

All in all, I feel sad for this game. There's an excellent level of polish to it, and it does seem like the devs put a lot of effort into making this game. The possession mechanic shows a lot of promise. The art style is hand-on-heart incredibly good. The story and characters are charming.

But the gameplay and MV elements are all atrocious. This isn't a failure of game development; this is a failure of game design.

I would say, if you want a MV that respects your time, have fun bosses, satisfies your twitch needs and adrenaline needs, or have well thought you puzzle platforming, this is not a game for you. But if you enjoy a game that has a casual atmosphere and pretty artwork to look at, give it a go, you might be able to enjoy it more than I do.

EDIT: finished fourth boss, verdict is still the same. In fact the fourth boss is even more boring. Extremely cheeseable in the first 2 phases. Bad music also contributed to the snooze fest. Let's hope fifth boss will show some resemblance of a fight.

EDIT2: Fifth boss actually was somewhat fun. The mechanics was decent, still extremely cheeseable, but at least there's a logic to it, and you're not handicapped in some ways. Still, waiting for the boss to unburrow is very tiring.

EDIT3: At the final biome... and it's all just platforming, which is fine, except that if you die they reset you to a very very early checkpoint so you have to do it all over gain. All I can think of is artificial difficulty.

We noticed a significant increase in Wishlists on Steam last week, and it seems that a good portion of them came from Reddit.

We saw the post on this subreddit about Faerie Afterlight and we just wanted to thank everyone for the kind words and support. It means a lot to us, especially since – as you may know – indie game development can be really challenging and demanding at times. We've been working hard on this game for several years, so it's heartening to see that people are looking forward to the full game and are enjoying the demo, so thank you.

(Btw, this is my first post on this subreddit from 2 years ago!

)

Good news!

We're nearing the end of our development journey, and if all goes smoothly, we'll have some exciting news to share very soon.

We’ve also been trying to keep up with the comments and know there are important questions to address. We understand that a lot of you have been following along since the game first popped onto the scene (thank you), and there has been a spot of radio silence while we put our heads down and focused on making this the best game it can be. But as development continues and nears a close, we promise to keep everyone updated, so please do look forward to more frequent posting here, in our Discord, and on Steam.

Thank you again for the support!

(Do consider wishlisting the game as it supports us a lot! )

Sale form:

What this sale offer?

1. 4 design with 4 fixed colorway

2. All keycap have GID and UV effect

3. All cap in this sale are MX

Sale info:

1. Raffle format

2. You can win up to 4 cap

3. Pricing are around $40 - 45

4. Shipping with EMS cost at $12

Giveaway:

1. Only commentary are available for this sale

2. To enter commentary giveaway please post a comment at my post or Geekhack thread.

3. You can enter both if you want to.

4. Please do not fill the sale form if you only interested in giveaway. Because i will pick the giveaway winner after invoicing are done this time.

Cap for giveaway in here are: 1 Water elemental Bird and 1 Green eye black bird update: giveaway winner are: & please pm me your address

Edit: shipping 100% . Big thanks for participating in my event :)

Tell me your favorite horror/thriller movie (Mine is killer klowns from outer space)

I’ll pick a Winner tomorrow

Winner -

Man, what a surprise this game is - it has a very distinct artstyle without heavy linework that sets it apart from a lot of the other metroidvanias, visually.

More importantly however, this game just feels good to control. It feels precise and RESPONSIVE which is something I look for in every game that I play. The jump, dash, movement and everything else just feels so snappy - I know exactly what I want to do and reach exactly where I want/

The controls are helped by the decent enemy variety, good boss fights and platforming segements. They fall in this sweet spot of just challenging enough. Though the last boss in the demo can be a REAL pain.

The unique mechanic with this game is that you can *technically* control enemies and some platforms to reach new areas. Though, I will say that maniupulating both of them is quite contextual, at least in the demo. If they build this idea up throughout the rest of the game, it will be fantastic!

One more thing that is unique about this game is that most of the map is one HUGE ROOM. In traditional metroidvanias - we have a lot of rooms with transitions in between. Fairie Afterlight has significantly bigger rooms. In fact the only transitions that exist are between boos rooms and area biome changes which makes it stand out even more.

There are some minor gripes I have such asset placement where spikes are hidden behind layers and players could run into them because of them not being visible, but these are minor nitpicks that can be ironed out by the time it releases.

The demo mileage will vary for people between 40 minutes to an hour, but I would say that people should give it a go!

Link:

UPDATE

I am thinking about fictional, male character who explained what does losing it (madness) means with ketchup, mustard and plate. Who is it ? Whoever answer correctly firsts gets the key.

And winner is **.** Once again congratz. For anyone interested this was that particular scene that I was thinking about