The First Jump and Swing
Pick up the controller and the ground movement gives you an answer right away. MIO stops on a dime. There is no lingering skid when you let go of the analog stick, and the jump cut happens the moment you release the button. That instant response is what separates a decent side-scroller from one that actually respects your reflexes. Running around the opening corridors of the Vessel, the animation transitions between sprinting and turning snap into place without eating your inputs.
A lot of indie action games try to hide sluggish movement behind heavy windups or artistic momentum. This one skips that mistake. Your basic ground strike comes out clean, and recovery cancels smoothly into a dash. When you swing at a stray rogue machine in the opening hallway, you feel the connection without any weird visual desync. It set my expectations high within the first ten minutes.
Tackling the Vessel with Wires and Claws
The Vessel is a decaying technological ark, half metal graveyard and half overgrown garden. It is full of dead machinery, ruined bulkheads, and rogue automatons wandering through rotting corridors. Navigating it requires chaining momentum across wide drops, and the game keeps handing you traversal tools that feed into combat. The grappling hook latches onto anchor points with zero input lag. Once you sling forward, you can cut the tether early to preserve velocity into an overhead slice.
Wall movement is just as snappy. The spider-like wall cling lets you stick to vertical surfaces and reset your jump without awkward sliding delays. Air gliding rounds out the kit, giving you a controlled descent over hazard pits while you track enemy patrols below. Moving through these biomes never feels like busywork because the movement tools flow directly into each other. If you misjudge a drop, it is because your finger slipped off the trigger, not because the engine queued your command late.
Trading Blows with Rogue Automatons
Combat lives and dies on hitboxes, and for the most part, Douze Dixièmes got them right. Flying drones and ground crawlers have readable attack tells. Their striking zones line up closely with their weapon models, meaning you can duck under high sweeps or hop over low sweeps by a hair. When you connect, enemies stagger just enough to give your follow-up hit real weight.
A few encounters get sloppy, though. In tighter maintenance shafts where three or four erratic repair units swarm you at once, visual clutter can make incoming contact boxes tough to read. A couple of larger bruiser enemies have tracking overhead smashes where the active hurtbox lingers slightly longer than the metal arm contacting the floor. You dash through what looks like an empty recovery window and still take a chip hit. It does not ruin the fights, but it breaks the otherwise clean rhythm.
Atmosphere, Sound, and English Delivery
The visual style draws from comics and anime sketches, keeping character silhouettes sharp against colorful, dying backdrops. That clean line work helps you read enemy positions even when background foliage fills the screen. Backing the action is a dynamic soundtrack mixing lo-fi beats with haunting choral melodies. It builds up during aggressive skirmishes and drops down to quiet hums when you are wandering through abandoned rooms looking for damaged robots to repair.
Helping those damaged units reveals what happened to the Pearls, the ark's failed AI caretakers, while netting you useful upgrade bonuses. The Steam release includes full English interface text and English voice acting, both of which are clean and easy to follow without getting in the way of the pacing. At twenty dollars, it delivers a direct, mechanically sound run that does not waste your time with filler.
Comments 18
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The broken Ark setting looks pretty cool, just drifting out there. Fast combat feels good too, though the heavy enemies have some weird lingering hitboxes on their slams that caught me off guard. Movement is sharp enough to keep me exploring anyway.
u got a point but the wall-jump mechanic is worth the annoyance imo. also tried to grapple a breakable wall and ended up in a ceiling? just me?
manatee_3, I agree the hitboxes are annoying on those heavy slam attacks. It's frustrating when you get hit in tight spots. Still worth the $19.99 though, the movement feels so snappy.
Review calls the traversal 'sharp' but idk, the wall-jump recovery feels pretty generous to me. Maybe I'm just used to tighter stuff.
tbh looks fun lol but 20 bucks for a 2d action game with no replay value? i miss when games had unlockables and secrets. movement looks tight tho.
traversal is tight but those lingering hitboxes r annoying. still worth 20 bucks tho bc the core gameplay is solid.
@ciao_tonyu got a point but the wall-jump mechanic is worth the annoyance imo. also tried to grapple a breakable wall and ended up in a ceiling? just me?
@Rory PYo rory, is this game good for group watching? We usually talk over everything so single player games are hard to stay focused on. Does the movement look cool enough to keep people watching?
ngl wandering around the broken ark feels super lonely in a good way. drifting debris everywhere, empty halls, barely any text logs. loved the vibe.
@Phil M.Phil M., cool vibe and all, but digital-only is a bummer. If I'm dropping $19.99, I want a physical copy. If Steam goes down, I lose the game. It's just renting at this point.
@bladerunner_03It's just on Steam right now. No disc, but that's how it goes these days. Ownership concerns are valid, but for $19.99, most people don't care that much.
At $19.99 the price is acceptable, but I must ask: does this release include a physical disc or an offline installer? Without those, you own nothing but a revocable license. The game itself handles competently, though I remain skeptical of digital-only ownership.
Bought it for the grappling hook, refunded before the first wall-jump. Kidding, it's fine.
@possum_81Fair dinkum, that's exactly what I thought! But the movement makes up for it. No drama, solid little game.
Refunded before I even hit a wall-jump. Kidding, it's fine.
I thought this would be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it's pretty stale folks! Those cramped corridors are a pain. Still, the grappling hook is fun.
The broken Ark setting looks pretty cool, just drifting out there. Fast combat feels good too, though the heavy enemies have some weird lingering hitboxes on their slams that caught me off guard. Movement is sharp enough to keep me exploring anyway.
@Elena Reads CodicesIdk, the lore feels kind of barebones compared to other metroidvanias. Aerial tools and grappling around feel super tight though.
@manatee_3the lore being super barebones is the whole point though, the ship is trashed and abandoned so you just piece it together from the backgrounds.
@manatee_3manatee_3, I agree the hitboxes are annoying on those heavy slam attacks. It's frustrating when you get hit in tight spots. Still worth the $19.99 though, the movement feels so snappy.
Honestly just good to chill out with (after a rough shift anyway). Not my usual genre but the movement feels great.