About Ocean Hotels V4:
It has customizable difficulty by finding a hidden area where you can basically enable hard mode. Otherwise the game is very easy, since upon death you keep all items in your inventory (which also means you lose healh potions you used, which leads to me constantly suiciding rather than using health items as you get full health back that way). So that system is kinda flawed and exploitable but its much better than having to redo everything. Other reviews mention bugs but I have not encountered any. My main complaint is with the map. It’s not very helpful for a sprawling metroidvania-esque game to only have the continents and major city names and that’s your lot. If you vaguely remember a hidden door somewhere then you will have to search the entire area by hand cause the map is not gonna help you. As much as i want to love this game, and there is a lot to like, the control scheme and movement/interaction bugs are just not polished enough to not be distracting. A little jank is to be expected from an indie title, but getting stuck in a walking NPC’s movement animation repeatedly, falling off random ledges, environmental interactions requiring you to be in a super specific area to work, and not optimising for controller inputs is what made me stop wanting to continue playing. I would love to be able to change this review to a positive one, and if at least a few of these bugs are addressed i will absolutely finish the game and update my review. but as of not the lack of polish when it comes to game feel overshadows what is otherwise a very cool homage to one of my favourite game genres.
