For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Leif's Adventure: Netherworld Hero, from OneManOnMars Art & Games.
This demo has been available on the Switch eShop for a while but i don't think it's been updated since i downloaded it a while back. i was initially curious about this game as i wondered if the main character was from another Swtich game i played called No Place for Bravery (https://youtu.be/uLe1gCu_fe4) but it's just a coincidence. what i was curious to see was the hand drawn art. i wondered if there'd be a lot of repetition, a focus on backgrounds, a focus on animation, or all the above.
after playing this, approximately, hour long demo i can say that the art work is mostly fantastic. in this demo we play through several distinct areas and they look great. the characters also look unique and good. the only thing that i noticed was certain animations looked a little off. the major one being when a character jumped down into an area, but in doing so they rolled up a little and it just looked off and unrealistic to even this game world. a simpler "superhero landing" would've worked better. there were a few minor issues with the animation when i did something the game wasn't expecting.
This didn't just affect the animation but it also affected gameplay. an example of this is right at the start of the demo, instead of moving right to start the tutorial i went left. by going right i would be told what the buttons do, but after going left i was in a situation where i had to figure out what the buttons do to get myself back. an example of how it affected gameplay was when i played with the snowball and went into a loft area. because i hadn't gone through the door, the loft event didn't trigger for me. when i went through the door later, the loft event started and i had to go back into the loft and get the item.
What i missed whilst playing Leif's Adventure: Netherworld Hero's demo was any kind of feedback from the protagonist. people in our village talk, a ghost talks, some weird bad guy talks, and yet we don't. with a game that comes across as story heavy like this one did in this demo, it was weird to have no kind of feedback from our character. especially when things get really weird when we chase after the bad guy and end up somewhere extremely different. it also was a little weird with the ghost character. they seem underused and i kept expecting it to give exposition or to help answer any of the "why" questions i had.
the last thing i want to mention is the platforming. at the start it's quite decent as we're given a surprisingly giant leap. but it wasn't long before i got to what looked like a simple jump and i failed a few times. the platforming required getting to the very edge of the land to jump and it was just weird when you consider how high we can jump. earlier, there was a situation where the height got in the way and caused me to miss a simple looking jump in a pub.
There's no denying that the art in Leif's Adventure: Netherworld Hero is good. i was curious about the story, too. but playing as our character wasn't a great experience from a combination of strangely hard platforming and the fact they're too silent in a world that seems not silent. it is a good demo in that we get to experience quite a lot and get some interesting story. but i don't understand why the link to the eShop page is at the end and not at the start. at least it did end with a new trailer that showed much more of the game ahead.
