A freeware Metroidvania game chronicling the travels of an adventurous egg. Download it here.As the player progresses through the game, multiple separate paths appear, new powerups are found, bosses are conquered, and the plot slowly develops around your travels.The game has a uniquely cartoony appearance that, though simple, is still endearing and convincing. With a huge number of different environments, many of which are wholly optional, a healthy sense of exploration is definitely rewarded. Oh, and the game is really hard at times, with some jumping segments being pull-your-hair-out difficult.
This game contains examples of:
100% Completion: 95 Hearts, 18 bosses, 10 golden orbs, the list goes on.
Well, you get a ten point mini-heal for every heart you gather, but that's not much of anything.
After the End: If you find the secret library, the world is apparently after the end of humanity.
Always Check Behind the Chair: Very, very, very present. If you're aiming for 100% Completion, it's smart to check every corner big enough to hide a Heart Container. Averted once you find the crystal ball in SkyLands: it will give you vague hints for an ever-increasing cost.
Apocalyptic Log: A secret area in Dark Grotto contains the diary of a mining expedition that was attacked by the level's boss.
Attack Its Weak Point: Every single boss except one is defeated by dodging its attacks for a little while, then jumping on it or shooting fire/ice at it when it's vulnerable.
A Winner Is You: The ending is nothing but a white screen with something resembling the statue near the beginning of the game congratulating you, followed by a rather cute drawing of the protagonist and the pink bird holding hands, looking out over the sea.
Big Boo's Haunt: the Curtain and the UnderTomb, which feature ghosts as enemies (completely different ones from those important to the story). The latter has entire flocks of them.
Blackout Basement: Dark Grotto, which is so dark that you and the torches only reveal a very small circle. Many monsters that you can't possibly see or expect will hit you, and for huge damage too. And of course, they don't emit light. Thankfully, at least the boss does.
One room in Black Castle is like this, with the lights intermittently dying on you and then coming back. Apparently the endboss is too cheap to replace his damn light bulbs...
Bullet Hell: In an odd non-shmup example, most of the bosses in this game flood the screen with projectiles or other hazards in between which you must weave. Some non-boss obstacles qualify as well. The purple...substance falling from the ceiling in one room of BlackCastle comes to mind.
Killer grapes. They are killer grapes. Just ask Raocow.
Charged Attack: You can throw ice balls by charging your fireballs. ...yeah, I know, just go with it.
Climax Boss: Shakespeare. You fight him in an area that you need several different abilities to access and therefore won't reach until a good chunk of the game is over, and afterward most of the game's world will be open to explore, but there will still (usually) be a lot to do before you tackle Black Castle. You have to climb through a difficult mountain area to get to him. He gets a foreboding pre-battle cutscene with exposition revealing some of what's going on. (Fortunately, you can skip it.) After you beat him, you get another cutscene where he escapes, warning you not to go further.
Convection Schmonvection: Some screens in the Fire Cage contain lava. Despite the fact that, as the name implies, the area is an enclosed space, you will not be hurt unless you actually touch the lava.
Copy And Paste Environments: Averted to a greater extent than is possible in most games, as not even the background graphics are the same from area to area. Rather than having tiled or otherwise regular backgrounds, nearly the entire game world is one continuous piece of hand-drawn (probably MS Paint) art, with every screen therefore having a unique appearance. (The exceptions to this continuity are MountSide and the combined block of BlackCastle and the proper final area, both of which are not directly connected to the rest of the game world and only accessible through portals or save point warping.)
Death Course: Short ones (just a couple screens) are all over the place, as platforming is the main part of the game. There are also some protracted sequences, made tougher with unforgiving save placement sending you back to the beginning if you die.
Also, if you skip the upgrade that lets you warp between save points and then fall into FarFall, which you can't get out of without warping, the upgrade will be waiting for you right next to StoneCastle's first save point.
Disc One Final Dungeon: The Curtain. You need pretty much every powerup you can get at that point just to get in, and it's pretty difficult compared to other areas you've gone through. There's dramatic music and lightning, too...
Door To Before: Done creatively, though; as the player can find a powerup to teleport between save points... well, you can imagine what's on the other side of every boss.
Double Jump: One of the first power-ups you get gives you one.
Event Flag: A rather blatant example is the warp that appears for no particular reason after you've talked to a certain character about something apparently unrelated.
Expansion Pack: Since the source code was leaked, a few people on the AUS forums have been making an "expansion project" for the original game, though it is not yet complete.
The source has been officially released as of version 1.1.17
Unfortunately, the project (as well as two other similar endeavors) has been abandoned, and the creators have expressed no intention of resuming them. The forum has since been shut down due to a spambot problem.
Fake Difficulty: The sparse save placement and unforgiving platforming segments make some sections far, far more difficult than they really ought to be.
Fan Nickname: Nothing in the game except for the levels, the items, and two bosses have canon names, so these are inevitable.
The two bosses with canon names are Fluffy, the boss of Cloud Run, and the ninja, whose name is Shakespeare. (If you check the source code, the font he uses in his pre-boss cutscenes is called "fnt_shakespeare")
Raocow, in his Let's Play, dubbed the bird in the Indy/Crocodile Dundee hat 'Bartholomew'.
And then there's your hero, whom fandom has dubbed Byrd.
Bandit, which refers to the bird with the bandit mask, appears as a signature on several signposts across the world, too.
Floating Continent: SkySand, SkyLands, and IceCastle. The whole game world could as well take place on one.
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, to an annoying degree. Oh sure, you expect some of the bosses, but other ones will just come completely from left field.
"Wow, this place is interesting. A pink cloudscape full of platforming that takes me to The Bottom if I screw up. I wonder what the boss is? An evil bird? An animate cloud? An sentient storm? Oooh! Here's the boss room, and it's... a Humongous Mecha? ...sure, why not?"
Fluffy becomes an explained Space Flea if you find the library on the other side of the curtain en route to Rainbow Ride; the endboss and ghosts likewise, though they were less flea-esque to begin with..
Goomba Springboard: While it doesn't make you jump any higher than it normally would, jumping on an enemy regenerates your Double Jump, so you can use an enemy as a platform to get to a higher area, or use enemies to form a "bridge" across spike pits and the like.
Guide Dang It: Some players may find it very difficult to figure out how to reach the chamber with the first save point (and a necessary power-up) in SkySand if they have made a certain incorrect assumption about how the warp system works. You don't need to have used a save point to warp to it. You only need to have seen it.
Finding the secret library, which reveals a lot of the game's Back Story and explains the boss of CloudRun.
Heart Container: There are no fewer than 95 such items, each one adding 10 Hit Points on to your initial 100. Individually, these aren't that useful, when before long monsters and traps will do upwards of 100 damage. As a result of this, and possibly as a form of mercy, some areas (notably IceCastle) are absolutely stuffed with them.
Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Averted, possibly. There are treasure chests, but they only appear when you stand next to them and they can talk to you. Maybe they put themselves there.
Interface Screw: BlancLand has the screen constantly tilting left and right.
Invincible Minor Minion: The purple ghosts, although unlike the archetypal example these are the most dangerous non-boss enemies in the game. The other kinds of ghosts are straighter examples (but still relatively dangerous), although the green ones can be knocked back by projectiles even though they take no damage.
Let's Play: One done by Raocow and one done by hateworkboy (this one's an earlier version of the game, lacking two levels that exist in the current version) and one by CeilingNinja. There's also one in progress by the youtuber called "AnUntitledStory". All are pretty entertaining.
Mood Dissonance: CloudRun is a pink Bubbly Clouds level with no real combat and serene music. But at the same time it contains some difficult platforming shenanigans and is kind of a preview of the NightWalk sky parcours (which in turn is set in a place with calm music playing and [generic peaceful landscape, the rest of which is the first area of the game).
Nintendo Hard. Some of the bosses are ludicrously hard. Some platforming segments are no joke either.
The Grotto Eye. The frigging, frigging GROTTO EYE...
Fluffy, the mecha in Cloud Run, is also kind of a dong-end, as is the Endboss's second form. It'd be much easier to deal with these guys if their stages had such a thing as - oh, I don't know, A FLOOR?
Bandit Bird wasn't kidding about the hardness of the platforming segment above ColdKeep and NightWalk. It really, really is a giant bitch.
Noble Demon: The Recurring Boss is one of these refusing trying to kill you till much later than he should, and even wishing you good luck right before he dies from the fight with you
Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: In MountSide and boss rooms with open spaces at the bottom, touching the bottom of the screen damages you and flings you back upward. Everywhere else, an open space at the bottom means there's another room beneath you. Nowhere are there bottomless pits in the sense that you can fall through the bottom of the game world. (There's even an area called The Bottom.)
Oxygen Meter: You have a rather short drowning timer underwater. Fortunately, there is only one real Water Level in the game; a few other areas contain water but not enough for drowning to be a realistic concern. The timer can be lengthened.
The Paragon: The author of the "God Was Inside Us All Along" scroll in the library.
Secret Level, sort of. Many areas are optional and some of them are harder to find than others, though all of them have collectible items like Heart Containers to make the effort worthwhile. And to give 100% Completion people a run for their money.
How many areas are optional depends on the difficulty level. Some areas that are optional on lower difficulties are mandatory on higher difficulties because you need more Golden Orbs.
Sequence Breaking: Since you can warp to any save point you've been on the same screen as, even if you haven't gotten to it directly, at least one boss can be skipped to go straight to the goodies beyond, depending on what abilities you've acquired by that point.
It's actually possible to completely skip the Disc One Final Dungeon and Climax Boss if you go through Deep Dive or the Dark Grotto instead, but only on Normal or Simple.
Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: They're much like Thwomps in this aspect — they only smash when you get near, only the buffer zone of triggering-it-without-getting-hit is very narrow and the things do huge damage.
The pseudo-thwomps will also trigger when shot, and can be frozen (except for the ones in StrangeCastle.
Speaking Simlish: Anyone that speaks to you in text is perfectly legible. However, the Shopkeeper actually audibly speaks to you — in a "blarby buhblarbidyblar blarblar" or "Blarble blah burgerburgerburger" sort of speech.
There's also a boss that screams nonsense syllables when it first appears and when you hit it for the first time.
Spikes of Doom, in a big way. Sometimes they're obnoxiously stealthy.
The Spiny: There are two different types of snail enemies. One is yellow with a red shell and is safe to Goomba Stomp. The other one is blue with a purple shell that protrudes spikes if you get too close. These snails can still be killed by shooting fire, but they also appear in Deep Dive, where you can't shoot fire, turning them into Invincible Minor Minions.
You can, however, still freeze them.
There are also spiked versions of the flying circle enemies, electric fish, and the triangle enemies in BlancLand. The first and third can also be killed with fire, and all of them can be frozen.
Stupidity Is the Only Option: To trigger the boss fight of the Dark Grotto, you have to light the four torches that mark the boss's health, implying you're summoning it or waking it up somehow.
Tactical Suicide Boss: There are quite a few, but probably the most glaring example is the purple eye in StoneCastle which summons gold energy bits as part of its pattern that serve no purpose other than to let you jump up high enough to hit it.
Temporary Platform: Sort of. In certain areas, platforms will slowly fall when you stand on them, so you can't stay on them forever. They hover upward again as soon as you're off them, however. There are also "energy clusters" which disappear as soon as you touch them, but also hoist you into the air upon contact. They do respawn after a few seconds, though. There are also "blue platforms" that only become platforms once they're shot at and only stay platforms for a short while.
Tennis Boss: Deep Red can only be killed by shooting his giant fireballs with an ice ball and sending the whole thing back at him.
Also, the first form of the final boss, though you don't have to deflect it.
The SkySand boss is kind of in this category, too, in that you have to tweak him into firing his sword at you so you can yoink out of the way and the sword will hit him - usually in the groinal area...
Tomato in the Mirror: Though it's rather obvious if you give it a moment's thought.
Town with a Dark Secret: Almost literally; birds can't leave Skytown because the ghosts will come for them.
Turns Red: Somewhat inverted in that the player turns red when injured. Bosses do not change color at all (at least not in adherence to this trope).
Actually, the boss of Stone Castle does. All bosses become more difficult as they take damage.
The music gets more intense when a boss is three quarters of the way dead, though, which is at least as good as changing color.
The Unreveal: May have been unintentional. The game makes it look like you're going to find out where the ghosts are coming from, what they're trying to do, and why. When you finally meet the primary antagonist you learn the proximate reason why he needs to keep the birds in SkyTown (his ghosts need darkness to operate, and the sun follows the birds), but you never learn what his actual goals are, nor do you ever learn anything about who he is. This would be standard Excuse Plot fare if the game didn't keep leaving Story Bread Crumbs that made it look like there was more to the plot.
Well, not every endboss is prone to monologuing...
The secret library explains some of it, but getting there is a Guide Dang It.
Walk, Don't Swim: Your bird player chararacter ain't a penguin to swim in water. He compensate by jumping high.
Warmup Boss: Grotto Red, the first boss, is pathetic. On lower difficulties, the game even tells you to jump on him when he's vulnerable.
.As the player progresses through the game, multiple separate paths appear, new powerups are found, bosses are conquered, and the plot slowly develops around your travels.The game has a uniquely cartoony appearance that, though simple, is still endearing and convincing. With a huge number of different environments, many of which are wholly optional, a healthy sense of exploration is definitely rewarded. Oh, and the game is really hard at times, with some jumping segments being pull-your-hair-out difficult.
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