Downward

There are some very good things about this game, but the bottom line is that I cannot recommend it to anyone.

The best thing about Downward, and what made me want to play it in the first place, is the explorable world, which opens up to you more and more as you gain certain abilities (the Metroidvania genre). This promise is essentially fulfilled, with plenty of environmental challenges in many carefully crafted levels. It's wonderful to discover a new area, or to go back to an area you visited a while ago only to find new delights and secrets available to you.

But there's quite a lot of bad things about this game.

The world is fairly interesting, but the story taking place in it is weak and predictable. The voice acting is horrendously bad, and the dialog not much better. At least there's not much of it!

And then: the awful, awful controls. There's the "parkour" angle, a big part of the marketing of this game, but it's really kinda gimmicky: yes, you can sometimes bounce off walls, but Downward is essentially a 3D platformer with finicky magical powers. Very few 3D platforming games get it right, and here we have yet another example of why. Jumping from surface to surface in first person is awkward and imprecise enough, but here it gets worse because the magical powers require you to focus on one spot so that you have to manually spin your character as you move through the air. There's a "focus" ability that is supposed to help but it often makes the experience even worse at it warps your vision and messes up the timing. For much of the game the bad controls are just annoying, but there are several challenges that are made infuriatingly difficult because of them. Bad controls are a lazy way to make a game challenging.

Finally, and possibly worst of all, this game is very buggy. Here are a few examples:

I decided to play "out of order" and explore different areas on my own, which ended up being a mistake because it broke several sequences. Luckily I did not have to restart, but just look through the discussions and see many people who were not so lucky. If you play it, make sure to do exactly what the game wants you do. Will that make the game less fun? You betcha.

The save mechanism is a complete mess. You will not be able to come back to exactly the same state you left the game. The "energy" you collect in order to progress will be back for you to collect again, which might sound nice, but turns the game into a repetitive grind and totally shatters immersion as the world just "resets" itself because you, the player, had to go to sleep. This problem even appears during play when you move between areas. Worst issue: sometimes collectible items will be returned to where you found them, despite you having saved the game. Basically, save is so unreliable that I would advise you to keep your computer on until you finish the game.

And the terrible controls are made even worse (is that possible?) by bugs. Input lag is random and disastrous. I played it with an Xbox controller, and constantly had issues with a button press not registering. And yes, there is a penalty for dying. The final boss fight made me rage quit a few times: I pressed the right buttons at critical moments but sometimes nothing happened. (My controller works just fine with other challenging games.)

And then there are more mundane bugs: getting trapped in nooks and crannies, dying-but-not-really-dying so that you have to manually restart the game, monsters that sometimes randomly wiggle or seem unable to move, etc.

All in all, the game suffers from some poor design choices and a severe lack of polish. There are some good ideas at the core, and I did quite enjoy some parts of the game, but I also do not think they are worth the frustrations. This game needed more time at the design phase and a lot more time to develop and test it.