1. There is something about it that is inherently likeable about Lion Quest but it is very much an unpolished and unfinished feeling experience.
2. Graphically, I suppose this is effective enough. You get little, barely animated, pixel art character and enemy sprites on a very stark and square background. It looks pretty cute, to be honest, but I do think it might have looked better had the backgrounds been in the same style as the sprites.
3. There is a really cool mechanic where you control both your character and an NPC on screen at the same time and there's some clever little puzzles here and there where you've got to maneuver both yourself and the NPC into switches to progress. It's really cool but unfortunately does not make up the bulk of gameplay.
4. The bulk of gameplay is really mediocre platforming. The controls are kind of crap. Jumps are always the exact same height and it is incredibly easy to slip of the end of a small platform even when it looks like you've executed a jump perfectly. The are sporadic difficulty spikes and it seems like they are all there accidentally.
5. The levels, at times, seemed so random that I had to go and
double check they weren't procedurally generated. You just sort of meander your way through haphazardly and hope you are going the right way.
6. The ambient soundtrack feels similarly random, as if someone just found a cool arpeggio preset on a synth and just noodled around w/ it for five minutes.
7. The descriptions of this online make mention of it being a 3D platformer you navigate in 2D, making me expect a Fez-like puzzling system where you would have to rotate each level to figure out how to get through. This is not the reality of the game though. What really happens is every now and again you hit a switch and it gives background objects drop shadows for some reason.
8. After a brief tutorial, you can play the levels in any order you like. There is a cool little hub world you have to explore and even a little bit of challenge of finding some levels. This is pretty nifty.
9. You can also find Lion Quest's arcade mode from this hub world and it is very strikingly better than the main game. The meandering levels are replaced w/ quick more puzzle-based levels that come at you in quick succession almost like Warioware or something. It's really fun and I hope future work from this developer ends up more in this vein.
10. There is also multiplayer but, like everyone else, I don't have any friends.
11. Playing through, you unlock a variety of characters who control vastly different than the little lion you start w/. They jump higher or go faster, things like that. Unfortunately, none of them really feels any better than your starting character so it's just different flavors of sloppy feeling controls.
12. In addition to everything else, Lion Quest just has good deal of general wonkiness. Sometimes you fall faster than the screen can scroll, for example. Or sometimes the spinning blocks that are supposed to kill you just don't. There's little things that just seem a bit off all over the place.
13. I don't really mean to be so hard on this game. The arcade mode, esp., has a lot of potential to it and Lion Quest isn't some asset flip. There was clearly attention and effort put into its design. However, when it comes time to actually play this game, its issues all add up and make it something that is simply not very much fun to play.
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