🔒 EXCLUSIVE: Id/autumntwentytwo - Complete Album!

FIRST OFF: I have been waiting to review this game for SO LONG. But I had to wait until I finished it, because reviewing something and giving a verdict before actually beating the game is dumb. I bought this game back in December when it came out, probably two days after the release. Alas, life got in the way and I sadly had other things to do. Also, I'm leaving the comments open on this. If you have questions about the game, ask away and I can get back to you.

oh, and TL;DR: It's very fun, creative and satisfying to do well in, but the brutal platforming difficulty and frequent roadblocks you might encounter can alienate some people. It's unironically one of the best games I've ever played. There are so many layers to this and and dozens of insanely cool secrets and mysteries. Just play it. Please. This is a one-of-a-kind game.

I went in for a few reasons, with the novel concept, the nice music, and the cute artstyle all being big draws. What I was NOT expecting were things like

1 - The really solid core game design
2 - How many interesting mechanics would be in it
3 - Just how difficult it would end up being
4 - Just how much dumber I am than the average human

It's rare for a game to leave me wanting to come back to it even after repeatedly kicking me in the teeth so many times, but the sense of discovery in this game is great. Even after getting stuck at a difficult part, wanting to know what came next kept me determined to push through. The checkpoint system is great, as well. There are some parts early on where you can fall down and lose a considerable amount of progress, but you can just respawn back at your latest checkpoint and continue from there. The game is one seamless world, and discovering new areas is particularly fun because of this. Instead of loading into a new area with an intermission screen, a massive jump that's the final challenge of the previous area will send you flying directly into a new floating island or something similar.

I'll also note the difficulty. The difficulty in this game comes in two forms, with those being physical difficulty and mental difficulty. At its core, BttH is more of a puzzle game than a platformer, or that's what I felt at least. Physical difficulty is being able to schmoove your way around all the obstacles and complete a given challenge, and mental difficulty is looking at a maze of bounce pads and angles and being able to figure out what you're supposed to do in the first place. These can kind of go against each other at times. There are a lot of times where you might not understand what to do for a puzzle and may keep just jumping in not knowing what do do. There are other times when you figure out exactly what to do, but spend 20 minutes trying to pull it off because of the difficulty timing things. There are other times where these two things work in harmony. Where you'll make it to a certain point unaware of what to do, only to figure it out in real time. Each attempt will get you a little bit further and it's very satisfying.

For the most part, the areas are comprised of various bits of the level separated by checkpoints. Usually, there are three or so obstacles or bits to get past. If you've played Celeste, this could be comparable to a screen in that game. These are mostly self-contained, but in some areas you can fall from the third section of a checkpoint back to the second or even the first. When on the final obstacle of a checkpoint, it usually works like this: You can mess up and retry as long as you don't fail in a specific way. If you fail in a specific way, you can hit blocks that kill you and you're sent all the way back to your last activated checkpoint. It's kind of like Getting Over It in the sense that there are certain methods of failure that send you further back than others. One thing that I REALLY don't like are the areas that have what feel like filler segments before the harder sections, where you'll need to keep beating one relatively easy or frustrating section to get to the harder bit. This just feels like it's stretching out playtime, and it's annoying to repeat one part a bunch to get to the section you're actually going to fail or succeed at. If you've played Dark Souls, it's kind of akin to the boss runbacks in that series, just a bit shorter.

As a whole, it's great. Even on an individual, deconstructed level, it's great. But it's certainly not for everyone. I'm not even sure how many of the other positive reviews actually beat the whole game, because it really goes from a relatively simple puzzle platformer to trying to steer a pinball through a machine at the later parts to the point where it's honestly hard to compare the beginning and end of the game. So be aware that there's a steep difficulty curve, but there's a bunch of satisfaction in making it through as well as lots of fun things to discover in the game's vibrant and interesting world.