A self-described Celeste-like that largely lives up to that lofty comparison.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/reviewmini/75657/tethergeist-switch-review-mini
For an indie developer, comparing your game to something people know is an easy shorthand to communicate what it is, but those comparisons can sometimes be too ambitious. When I saw that the makers of TetherGeist were comparing their game to Celeste, for my money one of the best platformers ever made, I was intrigued, but skeptical. I am thankful to say, however, that this game is in many ways worthy of being mentioned alongside that classic. While it could come off as pretty audacious, the Celeste comparison would be obvious when playing TetherGeist even if they weren’t overtly inviting it. From the graphical style, to some of the gameplay elements, to a story involving a young woman’s journey of self-discovery on a mountain, it’s hard to deny the similarities. But rather than feel like a copycat, TetherGeist adds some really good ideas of its own to create something unique despite the clear influences.
In TetherGeist you play as Mae, a young girl on a journey to the fabled Fount of Souls, using her tether spirit Bao to traverse the environment. There’s no combat here; it’s strictly about navigating around and through obstacles. The various power-ups you utilize with your tether can accomplish this in a number of different ways, starting with just jumping from one spot to another, but evolving over the course of the game to include powers like grappling mechanics and bouncing off walls. It can be overwhelming at first, so it’s nice that it doesn’t throw everything at you all at once, but it achieves a really good balance. It felt like every time I was fully grasping each ability, the game would throw something new at me to keep things fresh.
While it offers a lot of variety, TetherGeist is very linear and usually pretty clear about what you’re supposed to do. There’s generally one way to solve each platforming challenge with the specific power-ups they give you in the level, and most of the time it’s fairly clear what the path is, though there are extra challenges in there to collect flowers scattered throughout the levels, which like the strawberries in Celeste serve no real purpose other than to be able to say you got them. It strikes a really good balance where I rarely felt like I didn’t know what the game was asking of me: I just had to pull it off. One of my only complaints is that sometimes the level of precision the game requires can veer into feeling unfair, but fortunately those moments aren’t very common, and with the frequency of checkpoints the frustration is kept to a minimum. As a massive fan of Celeste, I believe TetherGeist earned the comparison the developers made to it, but more than that it stands on its own as one of the best precision platformers I’ve played on Switch or elsewhere. It takes a unique gameplay hook and finds a lot of interesting ways to iterate on it, and I highly recommend it to platformer fans who don’t mind a bit of challenge.
Topic: TetherGeist (Switch) Review Mini (Read 31 times)
