Before even opening this game, there is "firedash drip". Upon opening it, I am greeted with a completely misscaled UI forcing me to go into fullscreen, which reveals the buttons in default godot font and misaligned so bad it upset my web dev girlfriend. The tileset is the opposite of seamless. The rain sounds like someone swallowing a microphone. You are slow as molasses, take forever to accelerate, have no way to modulate your jump height in a game with gap jumps under single-tile ceilings, and when you inevitably fall to your death after getting lost in the second level, the death screen has some of the worst font antialiasing I have seen in my life.
And you know what?
I vibe with it.
It's not you, it's me. I have a thing for speed games - probably too much Sonic growing up as a kid - and I want this shit in my veins. Air acceleration? What's that? Failing the aforementioned gap jump, only to wall jump, wall climb and then do a 180 in mid air is the reason I play videogames. The only way to conserve momentum at a standstill is to dash dance like it's smash bros. The only way to accelerate without crossing half a room is to dash dance. Falling down a pit, dash dance. Catching your bearings after an infinite walljump, dash dance. Not even the spindash feels this satisfying to pull off, threading the needle with the tiny platform over a bottomless pit in the second level with a dash dance and conserving all your momentum is just hnnngh. If you let go of the direction key while on the ground, you are locked into an un-cancelable slide animation that lasts about 75% too long. If this is a problem then you have a skill issue because being on the ground is for scrubs and is not optimal schmoovement when you have the ability to instantly turn around and conserve momentum. The level design is labyrinthine, I kept on scaling walls that were just obstacles expecting to find secrets, confused bottomless pits for the way forward and generally had no idea what was what my first time through. I would care if I wasn't moving a screen's width every second and every moment spent lost wasn't a moment defying every law Isaac Newton put to paper.
I only just found out there's a dash move. Why is the dash on E*? Why does it kill my momentum? Why is the game completely beatable without it? I do not know the answers to these questions, nor do I care. Quality and enjoyment are not the same thing, and reviewing is as much a subjective matter of personal taste as it is critical assessment. Halfbar's comment says everything important there is to say about this game in the latter regard, I just want you to know that this game made in three days made me feel things that AAA releases with multi-million dollar budgets could never wish to accomplish.
10/10
* This is bad for WSAD players because it forces you to take a hand off of D to use it. Something closer to the space bar, or some buttons on the left hand like J or K would've been great.