Story is ok so far (maybe 10 hours in rn), looks good, plays well for the most part, dungeons and platforming are good too, puzzles are simple but not mindless or pointless. Gives me old school Zelda vibes tbh with a lil Squenix twist. Controlling both characters in real-time combat was always gonna be a bit hit or miss of an idea, but since your fairy companion doesn’t have pretty much any combat AI she’s almost useless unless you consciously use her. It is monumentally irritating how you can die to an enemy that she was floating 5 inches to the left of, where had you moved her 2 inches closer she would have attacked and possibly made the difference. But set her on fire and she suddenly does some area damage and is more helpful for the 15 seconds or so that she can do that. Her slow movement is fine for puzzles or interacting with the environment, but coupled with you only being able to used ranged weapons in the 8 compass directions makes certain encounters needlessly long, frustrating and awkward. The rest of the combat is pretty competent, though I do wish the block was a little more effective or they had some kind of dodge roll as a last resort as timings can feel a little janky. I am playing on hard though, so a lot of this may be just a skill issue on my part (along with the joycon thumbsticks being pieces of -blam!-). It’s worth noting as well that you can just tell her to go away if you want to do combat by yourself, and call her back for when you need one of her specific powers. At the same time though by default the game is quite hand-hold-y on the exploration side of things. Every 20 seconds someone is telling you there’s a chest over here or a path you can uncover with a bomb over there; you can usually fast travel from anywhere on the map and there are big icons above certain points of interest you might lose later, and usually I would find it annoying since exploration is what I like best about these kinds of games. As it happens though I am a visually impaired gamer playing on a handheld and very much appreciate the audio cues for enemies noticing you (often they blend into the background of the more busy or grassy environments) so have to take the bad with the good in this respect for the sake of people with less ability than me, especially playing on the switch. You can turn ‘partner chattiness’ down in the settings as well as bits of the UI, but if anything I don’t think they go far enough in this respect. If I’ve got a party member talking to me they might as well let me know there’s a ranged enemy up ahead or one with a shield that I need to change tactics for, which of course they don’t do in any setting. Overall issa good game though I think. Definitely worth your time playing the demo at least. The thing that got me interested first of all was it being an HD-2D game without turn-based combat (Octopath Traveller I promise I will play you at some point) and in that regard it really does the job. Like I said before, it feels like a Zelda game but with a certain extra zing to it. Maybe in a couple boss battles’ time I will turn down the difficulty though.