Game Podunk's Jonthan Higgins writes:
"As much as I dislike using the term "Metroidvania," I’ve become an obnoxious, snobby connoisseur of the genre. I’ve played bite-sized experiences like Xeodrifter and Cave Story, as well as much more in depth ones like Axiom Verge and Ori and the Blind Forest.
During my time at E3 2015, I came across Heart Forth, Alicia - A Metroidvania RPG when I was looking for something else in Sony’s booth, but I’m rather glad I found it when I did."
Handheld Players reveals its top 30 most anticipated upcoming PS Vita games of 2018.
cant even find a vita in store here in canada, its been dead for over a year already.
Joanna Mueller writes: "As with any self-proclaimed Metroidvania style game, Martin and his team have spent a great deal of time working to balance the game’s difficulty. Since the developers want their game to appeal to both hard-core veterans as well as those new to the genre they’ve devised a system of checkpoints to mitigate some of the more frustrating aspects of death’s consequences."
From the article, they are trying to balance the concept of "save anywhere" to saving at checkpoints. This is not as easy as it sounds since if you have a "fair" game and a "save anywhere" you will annoy some of the better gamers who will find games like that no challenge while a checkpoint save will be off-putting to the more casual gamer.
Take the Souls/Borne games which are punishing but fair as an example. You can pretty much save anywhere but when you die and you die a lot initially until you "git gud" 🙂 you return to the last bonfire/lantern and you only have one chance to get you souls/blood echoes back. The same concept also applies to games like Nioh and Lords of the Fallen (has a time limit as well).
While it is possible for the developers to include a difficulty setting (eg. easy, normal hard, punishing ... etc) but you won't please everyone and if the game has an on-line component you are going to have casual players getting creamed by more advanced players even with "fair" and "balanced" matching. Of course, you can always include "Pay to Win" microtransactions but the better gamers will just not bother playing.
Then you have the concept of a difficulty setting you as the player can change "on the fly" (eg Oblivion, Skyrim, The Witcher 3 to name some) which may be helpful to a noob players but disdained by the more advanced player since that for them is effectively a cheat. Lets put it this way how many players of games that have an "on the go" difficulty setting that you chan change "on the fly" reduce the difficulty rather than "git gud' 🙂 ?
This and A Hat in Time. A Hat in time has been in development for at least 4 times longer than Yooka Laylee and that's already been released.
Alonso Martin will release the action RPG Heart Forth, Alicia for the PS Vita and PS4 in 2017.
Heart Forth, Alicia will be playable at this year’s PlayStation Experience (PSX) conference in Anaheim on December 3-4, 2016.
