9 Years of Shadows demo playthrough (Nextfest Oct 2022)
1I can't remember the last time I saw a near-future release date and felt disappointment rather than excitement. This is a promising-looking metroidvania, but it needs significant work in terms of accessibility and UX, and I can't imagine they're going to address all of the critical issues in time for a November 14 release.
The first issue I noticed: absolutely zero d-pad support. Your only option for movement is the analog stick, in a game that does not make use of analog sensitivity whatsoever. On top of that, the analog stick seems to be implemented such that even barely moving the Y axis in the up direction causes you to unintentionally interact with NPCs, which gets annoying real fast.
The most critical accessibility and UX issues involve the in-game menu. First of all: the text size. Rather than intelligently design submenus or separate screens you can switch between as we've seen in metroidvanias since 1994 if not earlier, everything is on one screen, and the text labeling each pane is TINY. This game has evidently only been tested by people with 20/10 vision.
Secondly, the map - an INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT PART of any metroidvania - is useless. It contains no details whatsoever - not even room transitions - and is a nearly-invisible rectangular gray blob. You also can't focus it to zoom or pan, not that it would help in its current form.
The character's movement appearance is also strange, as any time you move left/right Europa and Apino seem to jitter, which on some monitors can make them seem almost blurry. This is overlookable but would be really nice to see fixed, as it makes the game seem unpolished and makes it a bit hard on the eyes to look at your own player character any time you move (which is, uh, kind of often). Also in terms of appearance, some enemies (the large sword knights in particular) don't have particularly clear tells of when they're going to attack, which makes dodging them a guessing game.
The demo hints at an options menu but doesn't make it available, so no telling what is/isn't adjustable there (a huge missed opportunity). One thing I would hope to see there (but won't hold my breath for) is an option to turn off screen shake, which is oddly inconsistently present when you break containers but seemingly not when you hit enemies?
It's unfortunate to see the game announcing an imminent launch date in this state. It's clearly got a lot of potential, impressive graphics, story, etc., but there's too many flaws for me to consider this a solid buy without seeing significant improvements first.
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