This was my second favorite game of the competition. The amount of content (for a demo, even!) was really impressive, and the game is polished and fun. I think you did a great job with this and I intend to check out the full version.

I encountered one technical issue playing the game in Mesen where a wildcat enemy in the beach area (on the map, the sprite dot for this screen is at $70,$97) spawned incorrectly, with incorrect attributes (vertically flipped when still and wrong palette) and incorrect properties (would not collide with the player or projectiles). When it spawned, the music also broke, only playing on the triangle channel. I rewound and tried again and it did not break the second time, so I'm not sure what triggered the problem.

I have one major complaint about the game, which is that the balance for enemy health and weapon damage seems really off. I got pretty far before finding my first weapon damage upgrade, and by that point, enemies had turned into damage sponges. I had to resort to turbo because it was completely unreasonable to try to kill them with actual button presses, and even with turbo, some still took way too long, especially the bosses. I'm not sure if I just picked the wrong path every time there was a fork and thus missed out on all these critical upgrades the first time through, but without any damage upgrades, the combat becomes a frustrating, time-consuming chore. I did eventually decide I probably missed some kind of combat upgrade and should go back, but the world is so large and wide, so with how much distance I'd have to cover to return to the earlier areas, it seemed better to just keep marching forward rather than turn around and explore more in the hopes of maybe finding useful items I didn't actually know existed.

As such, I wish the game did something like any of the following:

• There were perhaps damage upgrades on the main path
• There were something to gate forward progress until some useful combat upgrades are found
• Damage were reworked to make later enemies immune to the base gun to help the player understand he's missing something
• There were earlier access to a fast travel mechanism so going back to explore more isn't so time-consuming early on

Any of these probably would have solved this damage problem for me, and it's easily the biggest issue I saw and one that might prevent me from recommending this game to someone who isn't willing to use turbo.

Despite that, I still really enjoyed Isostasy. I'm really impressed by the size of the world and how well you used the repeated screens, as it generally feels more unique everywhere than Metroid. The style and graphical touches, like sprites for an extra 'background' layer or the changes to the player sprite in different environments, are really nice. The map is also extremely handy and works well. Thanks so much for submitting this great game!

I always try to beat what I’m reviewing before leaving comments at least once, and after four and a half hours I’ve completed the demo. Good work! I was not expecting such a big experience for the luigi cool spot!

I don’t think I explored quite enough, as I always felt severely underpowered. But respawn was never too far away, and running off to find more stuff further, so I just kept at it, and eventually you get good at avoiding touching things. Or at least, at touching the right things to minimize your damage, like using the boss’s projectile to damage-boost through the bosses and avoid their relatively high contact-damage.

Speaking of bosses … I never found Shellack!

It felt like some room layouts were recycled between areas, which helped remind that there were unexplored spaces in previous areas. Whether this is just a technical limitation or something deeper in the story I haven’t seen from the demo. I do know there were at least a few that I didn’t go back and recheck, simply because they were far enough away I wasn’t sure how to easily get back to them and it would be disappointing if they payoff were small.

Overall this is a great game!

It looks like CDBaby *might* have made a monetization claim on a youtube stream of compo titles. (We had a similar problem with Project Blue through its soundtrack distributor). I would hope that's unwanted behavior, and if so, you might want to opt out of that feature: https://support.cdbaby.com/hc/en-us/articles/209494806

Game's awesome, btw!

I like the feel of this game - it controls very well. Nice animations for the playable character. I like the background graphics too - good use of color. There's a real sense of exploration. The map system is a nice touch. 

Overall, I'm impressed!

This game has awesome atmosphere, gives me good "metroid" vibes. I see a lot of potential in it. Very nice entry , good job ! :)