I played INMOST on Friday night. It's a kind of a puzzle platformer. It looked like a metroidvania from the trailer, and I suppose it kind of is I guess.

I like how moody and atmospheric it is, the music's good, the world seems really cool and there are some awesome moments. However, that's overshadowed by all the really slow walking segments which get tiresome, the confusing and pretentious story, the mediocre puzzles and the fact that the controls can't be remapped.


My biggest gripe is that it has a serious problem with "show, don't tell", in a certain sense -- often, when something important happens, the game will rip control away from the player and launch into a cutscene. This gets really glaringly bad at the end.



I was unimpressed by the metroidvania aspect too -- the main character, the wanderer (I think that's what he's called) starts out really underpowered, which is to be expected for metroidvanias, but the problem is he stays underpowered for the whole game, you never feel like the world opens up. The second playable character, the girl (who I think is supposed to be the wanderer's granddaughter, or something like that, like I said the story's confusing and pretentious) is even more underpowered. The third character, the knight, has access to more abilities, but unfortunately that seems to exclude jumping.


Not all the puzzles were bad, though -- I really liked the endless hallway thingy, I felt super dumb for not figuring that one out sooner. Several puzzles involved getting rid of some monster in some clever way, most of those were quite interesting as well.


5/10


In more positive news, today I got this in the first level of Celeste -- it's 2nd place: