Edit: Staff contacted me an basically told me that I'd have to bump up my rating for all quests I have ever reviewed by one star. Note that this does not reflect my own opinion on the matter, or the quest, but just that it was something I was made required to do.
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I'll be going through some parts in detail, so if you want to avoid spoilers then this review isn't for you.
Talking about this quest in a critical sense is problematic. Often when it comes to outlier products like this it's often that critic gets hand-waved away as any perceived issues are either because that person doesn't "get it" or that it's just not for them. And while certainly, those scenarios could very well happen, but that does not mean that the critic does not hold any water, so disregarding any complaints from that perspective is banal to me. I'll admit first-hand that this quest isn't for me, though I play a lot of quests that aren't strictly speaking for me. But I don't think that's weird, this is a product that has such a narrow demographic that it aims for that practically most people coming in to play it will fall outside of it.
I struggled for a long time while playing this quest to find a value for it, but there certainly is one. If the goal of the quest author was to take the core ideas from Yeto's Quest, improve upon them, and then release a quest with wider appeal..., then the author has already succeeded. And I'll admit, I have never played Yeto's Quest, but I have played this, so I know that it has already reached a much wider audience and appeal then the quest it was inspired from has ever experienced. But to me? That's not good enough.
Would I recommend this quest? No, I probably wouldn't, not in it's current state. Is the quest hard? Yeah, no doubt. Does it have some neat mechanics? Yep, that too. Was it an enjoyable or interesting experience to play through the quest? Now that, is where the jury is still out. Because to me "being hard" don't necessarily have any impact on good I find a game.
Subverting and playing with an audience's expectation is a very difficult task, so it's very nice to see that this quest actually does that part right in several scenarios. The Crystal switches come especially to mind, the green one first was both hilarious and interesting to run into, then the second red one played it straight, and then the blue one throws another curve ball. It's interesting because there is a build-up, but the pay-off it's at all what you expect it to be. The green one is seen before you reach it, yet it turns out it's not quite what you thought it was. But since the red one works you still get established with the idea that this is an mechanic that exists in the game. So when you reach the blue one then it keeps getting more and more build-up as something necessary, then later one it is seen more as a practicality if it could be reached. By the end of the game when you figure out it's gimmick then it's very interesting and even a bit funny in hindsight.
The hammer pegs also serve this purpose. There are a lot of heart containers spread around the world, each of them seemingly requiring some specific item to get, and yet when you finally get it then you realise that the build-up didn't at all have the pay-off that you thought it did. This also happens with the mountain area, you can constantly see it from near the start of the quest, and yet when you finally reach it then it's not quite what you expected it to be. But that's fine, because it's still exactly what it needs to be, and it still serves a purpose and have a proper pay-off. At these high points is where the quest truly shines, where it really does something quite interesting.
But that's not most of the quest. Most of this quest is running around for literally hours trying random shit until you find what you're supposed to do, and I do mean literally, this fairly short quest took me around 15 to 17 hours to beat. It's not as if there aren't any interesting puzzles, but what you need to do is often the last thing you try. And to me, I find that to be poor design. It means that there isn't enough information there for the player to grasp at. Strictly speaking, having a puzzle game last for 15 hours is a number, but most of that time wasn't spent logically considering puzzles; it was spent attempting random things in hopes of finding a solution. Sure, some of the solutions makes sense in hindsight, but that does not mean that there is enough information there beforehand to solve it. And, I think a lot of these things could have been adapted better if the quest had a wider testing group to provide feedback.
Sure, it makes logical sense that a wallmaster dumps you in the prison, and yes, it does play with the players expectation of what would happen if a wallmaster gets you. But there is nothing in the game that'd suggest that you need to be grabbed by a wallmaster other than one out of several yet to be accessed areas. (Which also looks like you can access if you have another item that you eventually end up getting later). And this is just one example of when the quest does this, it happens fairly often. The problem with these things are that if you need to do one to progress then you can be walking around for hours without any sense of direction or making any progress. And to me? That's not really compelling gameplay, because it's not that I have a puzzle that is to hard for me to solve, it's that I don't even know what the puzzle is in the first place. To contrast, the blue key next to the crystal switch is a much better puzzle, because you actually know it's a puzzle by the point in which you need it. So then you can spend your time figuring out what would be the solution, it's not necessarily what you expect, but it is a solution you can figure out via train of thought, rather than aimlessly walking everywhere.
But then that's not even the only way this quest is hard. For a quest which has a main focus on solving puzzles there is a heck of a lot of hard combat. And the weird thing about it is that not only is there, the difficulty curve is crap. To illustrate I have made this chart in MS paint:
Generally you'll want a curve that is somewhat like or close to example 1 or 2. You don't need to, but you should probably have a good thought through reasons for why you don't stick to a curve like this if you want to deviate from it. Project Snow's curve is more like what I drew out here. Strictly speaking the combat outside of bosses only gets easier the longer you play the game. One you start having to deal with the various enemies inside the castle then there is a jump in the curve again, but generally it just goes down the further you get in the quest. And I find this very problematic, because it really doesn't mesh well with the other mechanics of the quest, and it only adds frustration for the first half. Yet, combat outside bosses turns into more of joke the further you get in the quest. And I just can't grasp why this was done other than maybe to emulate Yeto's quest, and sure it may have succeeded if that was the aim, but is it good? No, I don't think so.
The bosses are also really hard for the wrong reasons. Apparently an update dropped after I got the quest that nerfed the bosses health and damage. But to me, that sounds like a band-aid solution that doesn't actually solve the problems with the bosses. The first boss is not hard because it deals a lot of damage and kills you easily, it's hard because it doesn't give you nearly enough reaction time to deal with the incoming threats, almost as if you were somehow supposed to know how the boss function before you get to it. Because there clearly isn't enough time or space to learn how it functions on the spot, as should be evident by the fact that I died around 10 to 15 times before I managed to beat him. And it's not as if this even makes any sense either, the boss fight is repeated with a harder version later on, so why isn't this one more lenient and actually give players the space needed to learn? Again, I feel this could have been adapted or avoided with a larger testing/feedback team. (Which, admittedly, is not necessarily easy to get). The final boss is really epic and I like it as a concept on the paper, much like the first boss, but it suffers from similar problems. This is a short list of changes I'd personally make to it rather than damage/health nerf:
And that's just the abstract puzzles and the combat. The quest also has a large amount of walk-trough walls and bomb-able walls, most of which have no or next to no hinting towards them. Some of them are clever, which is fine, but those often have secondary elements to them. Such as the pushable statue on the second floor, or the lockblock that seems to do nothing on the first floor. But here's the thing, most of them aren't like that. And I just don't think it's a compelling game mechanic to have players randomly push up against every wall, because that's the gameplay that this design makes players do.
On the flip side, the graphics in this quest are fairly great and competent. Palettes are great, tile-work is great, I don't think I saw any instances of style clash. The music in this quest is also fairly good. Personally I'm not sold in seeing midi files in quests these days, but the songs are at least decent and they all fit the scenarios in which they are played. So generally this quest has fairly good aesthetics.
I can go on, (such as how the lockblock as used, etc) but I think I have made my general views at least somewhat clear on how I feel about the design of this quest. It has a lot of potential, but there is just a lot of crap here that stands in the way of a truly enjoyable experience. For most people, this quest is just going to be an exercise in frustration, so I can't really in good faith recommend it.
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