Owlboy (PC):
Another years-in the making indie darling, another dud. I hadn't heard of this before the release praise, at least, so there's no weight of disappointment here as with The Witness, Obduction, and to a lesser extent Inside.
I really need to learn to ignore indie game reviews. Owlboy has meticulous pixel art, but the general art design is fairly bland and repetitive (similar to Ori and the Blind Forest in that respect). The music swings wildly between chiptune type stuff and what sound like Andrew Bird tracks. There is way too much "story" for what I took to be an action adventure game from the trailer. It constantly jerks the control away from you to have the characters blather. Like Undertale, it treats emo "feels" baiting as profound, but it comes off even worse in this context given the genre of the game. And like Undertale it injects fedora-humor in at regular intervals.
And those are the aspects that seem to be universally praised!
The game itself is painfully mediocre. The controls are fiddly, the combat starts out as a chore and becomes insufferable. Level design is bland and it's hard to say what gameplay even really consists of; it'd be a stretch to call much of anything in the game a puzzle, moreso just very obvious obstacles that, again, feel like a chore to get past, and there isn't any platforming because you fly. There's really hardly anything to it. Oh, but there are regular stealth sections, which are predictably terrible.
All in all I have no idea how this game took so long to make. I think I'm near the final area, but I am having such a bad reaction to the game and its reception that I don't know if I'll bother to finish.