Owlboy is a beautiful, inventive and unique 2D platformer full of heart where you play an owl against incredible odds and danger, flying around, carrying other characters and using their weapons while dodging dangers, fighting bosses, collecting coins and participating into different gameplay sequences that keep you on your toes. For all its beauty and care, I didn’t have that great of a time with Owlboy. I felt like the controls were a bit confusing and made combat something that could go downhill very fast.
Like I said before, the game is beautiful, the pixel art is done with a lot of care and detail and you can only imagine the amount of work that was put in there. Sometimes this becomes detrimental to the game as everything is very busy and it’s difficult to parse where the dangers are, but that has only been an issue in spots where there was already a lot of hazards around.
The character you control can’t do much except carry and throw things, alongside characters that you can carry and use their weaponry while they are in your claws. You can switch characters and they all have different abilities, you can throw them and recall them as needed in order to solve puzzles and fight enemies and I had some issues switching characters, summoning them and using the right one at the right time, especially during boss fights. Using coins you find around you can upgrade your health and buy silly hats but this is not really an RPG, the upgrades are (too) few and far between so you can’t really grind your way out of being bad at the game.
And for all the care that was put into the music, story, characters and art, combat baffles me. The screens are fixed, but enemies are able to move between them and hit you, knock you back to a screen transition and then move through the transition to hit you again, you have almost no invincibility frames and your character is knocked around super easily. Enemies take a lot of hits and zoom around, making the experience of fighting rougher than it should’ve - in my opinion.
I also didn’t care much for the stealth sequence against enemies that will kill you instantly, and while some of the other non-conventional game sequences were okay, some took me a while to get through, and it’s not really fun the third or fourth try.
Owlboy is pretty cute and has a lot of heart, but it was a bit too rough on the gameplay side for me. Still worth taking a look at! It’s not too long either, so you probably can experience the whole thing if you can stomach what rubbed me the wrong way.
