Cellar | Demonstrative Review
2Cellar is a maze game with a bit of a horror theme. You play as a little girl who lost her teddy bear. You are strangely home alone and decide to go looking for your bear in the cellar. The first thing you may notice is that you move kinda weird. Pressing in one direction moves you several steps at a time. When you enter the cellar it will make more sense. You move based on these large grid spaces. So it just looks and feels really weird in the house at the beginning of the game. The cellar is made up of multiple floors that end up being a sort of maze. Your goal is to find a large key and go to the exit door with it. Once you pick up the key, each time on each floor, a big green monster will appear somewhere nearby and begin chasing you. This monster, as well as any other obstacles in the cellar kill you in one hit. Other obstacles in the cellar include falling floors (one way paths), steam pipes, and gremlin-looking creatures which move on set paths. Your abilities include: walking. That's it. The challenge in this game comes from navigating the mazes and avoiding enemies. There are optional other toys to find and pick up. They do nothing for you, but contribute to some of the achievements.
The graphics are well detailed and have a nice aesthetic. The environment (the cellar) is not static as there are some leaky pipes and scurrying rats which you can see from time to time. There is some creativity with some of the achievements and dialogue, like picking up this first toy after the monster starts chasing you. Your character says they won't leave it behind.
All the text does auto scrolls, so I wasn't able to keep up with it at first during the opening. I see no reason for the text here to do this when pressing a button to progress it at your own pace would not interfere with anything else going on. The death sound from anything it a wah-wah-wah-wah... which removes any horror vibe this game might have been going for. And I would say it is trying to be scary from the ending, which I won't spoil, but it was kinda lame. There is only one music track in the ENTIRE game! The title screen, main menu, and every level in the game play the same music on loop. I already said I like some of the achievements, but this game has two "no death marathon" achievements, which I do not like on principle. To get these achievements, you basically just have to quit to the main menu every time you die instead of choosing retry. There is no downside to doing this other than it takes a few more seconds to go through. It is pointless to have the retry option. The challenge is not real. Finally, once I got to level 5 and onward to the end, the game slowed down. Everything moved just a little slower. I think it is slow down from the large size of the maps. It was not cool, but the game is short so I was able to bear it. Also note the hardcore game mode only has one level when I play it? The description says you play through all the cellar levels. It got me the achievement easy, so I'm not really complaining, but it is not as described.
Let me say last that the game is only 99 cents and you will likely beat it in less than an hour. Except for one where you just play the game on a holiday, I got all the achievements in just over an hour. In my opinion, I do not recommend this game because I did not find it very fun, the game does not run perfectly, and there is little reason to play it again after doing all the achievements. There is a discussion thread in the community section that talks about how you can buy, play, beat, and refund this game all at once because it is so short.