Ninja cat metroidvania where you just want to find your kidnapped child and wife. With a whole story told without a single word in a large connected world of stunningly beautiful pixel art, this is definitely up there on the list of very good metroidvanias.
You find your house has been raided by some cultists who steal your child, and it’s your job as a vindictive father to murder everyone trying to stop you from rescuing them. And it would seem that you’re not the only father who they’ve attacked. But you’re the only one with the strength to fight back. You have a pretty decent set of moves to work with, and like any good metroidvania, you find more moves as you explore.
Unlike a lot of similar metroidvanias, to start with it’s mostly platforming, with the occasional boss fight. Very few mooks in world getting in your way, though a few screens after the half way point gain some mooks on revisits, but you’re usually strong enough to kill them in one or two hits. All the boss fights are fun and unique with their own patterns to learn how to dodge and punish, and if they’re causing issues, you can usually explore to find health containers to improve your survivability. Each boss has a distinct tell and visual flicker where if you hit them with a charge attack, you can punish them and throw them into the air for a brutal combo, leading to a super satisfying back and forth flow of combat where you switch between dodging attacks and waiting for an opening, then fighting back and brutalising your opponent before they recover from the stun and start attacking again.
You’ll want to bring some paper to take notes about what is blocking various pathways however, as the in game map is little more than a series of connected boxes with circles indicating what rooms have items in. There are gaps in the edges of each box to say where you’ve not investigated yet, but nothing indicating why you couldn’t progress past that point. I found myself in the late game revisiting the same exit several times, forgetting each time that they need an ability I don’t have yet.
I played the game on it’s normal difficulty and it provided a decent amount of challenge. A few bosses kicked my ass a dozen or so times before I beat them, but I think thats more beacuse I stumbled into late game areas a bit too early. Still beat them though. There are a few more harder difficulties that are tied to medals, including one where you’re locked to 1 HP, but I was satisfied with the regular playthrough.
My main gripe is that there are a couple of abilities that make movement slightly harder after you collect them. For instance you unlock an ability to chain dash through some targets at one point, and a later ability to increase the number of chain dashes you can do, but I found that the higher amount of dashes lead to me shooting backwards away from the ledge I was trying to reach. Might have just been a me issue though, ymmv.
All in all, if you like metroidvanias, go play this game. Add it to the list of required consumption for metroidvania fans along side Hollow Knight, Vision Soft Reset and Ori and the Blind Forest.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096180 £11.39 (Demo available)
Itch.io: https://tinywarriorgames.itch.io/ato $15.00 (Demo available)
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