Best game I played this year. 100% must-play. Metroidvania is my favorite genre and this is one of the very best games in this genre. I played it on PC but I might get it for other systems just because.

Yeah it looks kind of 8-bit, but even if you don't care for that look (and I very much love it), it doesn't look like an NES game. It looks like an NES game without NES hardware limitations, incorporating decades worth of refinement that's gone into pixel art and animation and level design. It runs at high resolution, infinity FPS, often with a million things happening on the screen at once, fully animated backgrounds, tons of destructible bits on all of the levels, and really cool weapon effects. The music is also very solid; not a beep boop borp NES chiptune (though I love those too), rather a modern synthesized version, probably what the Metroid devs on NES dreamed they could make. The game oozes atmosphere. There was exactly one part of the game where I wasn't rooted to my screen and that was because I sucked and kept dying. I couldn't put the game down otherwise.

The glitch mechanic is cool, but even more fun IMHO was the movement options you get later in the game. I was expecting the standard double-jump and wall-kick a la every game ever, but what this game did is waaaay cooler. The save/load system is also genius for reasons I won't mention. The level design was great; craptons of secrets and unlockables. I thought the bosses were kind of easy, but maybe I'll play again on hard mode and see what happens. My favorite weapon was Kilver for most of the game, but I swapped between guns a lot. Some of the guns were a bit pointless but a lot of them found a use, which was nice. I always thought one of the bad things about old side-scrolling Metroid games was how boring the guns were, and this game certainly fixes that problem.

This game was made entirely by one guy, Thomas Happ, including art and music and programming. Which is insane.