I am someone who once I start a game I paid for I will basically always see it through to the end (free games and stuff I give a shot out of random giant bundles excluded). Today was the rare once every few years day where I had to go “no mas” as I just can’t deal with Madcap Castle anymore. Basically a gameboy looking single screen action platformer where you get different spells for stretches of time that give you different abilities, I played its demo ages ago and found it a bit basic but charming enough. Unfortunately right past that portion they decide to ramp the difficulty up and make several questionable design decisions. Most stages ended up requiring you to run back and forth to hit switches that pop up after you hit the previous one (no clue where they are located until they do so) until eventually the exit door opens up, which means almost every room requires going through the same set of obstacles numerous times without dying to pass it. Many of these obstacles operate on a timing based system that make you wait for a bit before you can make your way through, a tough ask in a die a lot/instant restart (and in this case then wait some seconds) kind of game.
What broke me was stage 92, a screencap I will provide from a youtube video:
All those cannons shoot out projectiles at regular intervals, and each of those tiny tips you see on blocks are spears that stick out every so often. The issue is all those spears are on different timing intervals, it’s not like they all move in and out every 3 seconds; one may be every 3 seconds, other ones may be every 2 or 4 seconds. If you pay attention a given section may eventually loop, but that’s probably after a sequence a couple dozen various ins and outs. Now add in tight timing windows, having to move back and forth through all that a few different times, having to wait around a bunch of time and also oh yeah, the actual moderately tricky actual mechanical platforming, each death making you restart from the beginning forcing basically four straight minutes of no screwing up (how long it takes the person who has a no death run of the entire game to get through said room) and I just couldn’t bring myself to go through all that any more just to see if the remaining 40-ish percent of the game held any other horrors.
Don’t like to “punch down” on tiny games, but this was a special case. What is funny is that I checked its Steam achievements and the percentages for clearing the last four areas are 7%, 6.9%, 6.9% and 6.9% so it seems I hit the point where it scraped off literally every single person left who wasn’t gonna see things through to the very end no matter what.
Anyways the demo is still decent enough, feel free to give that a shot if you ever want to and pretend that’s the whole game 