Indie games are sometimes my favorite games to play. I like how wide and varied they are, because they usually don’t have a massive publisher to adhere to in terms of following rules, or having to exclude things in their games the developer doesn’t want. Games like “Shovel Knight” and “Stardew Valley” succeeded because they had uncompromising vision and all the aspects of their games were great. Unfortunately, “Owlboy” is unlike those other, more successful, games.

“Owlboy is a complicated game for me. I love everything about the game technically. First of all, the game was an absolute joy to look at. The graphics of the game are in a hi-bit style, where it uses pixels, but also looks much better than the games which originally used pixel art. The art style is beautiful, and I loved all the scenery in the game.

The game actually has a day and night cycle, so the visuals will sometimes take on an orange and purple tint when it gets closer to night, which was truly marvelous, and I loved it. I think this is one of my favorite implementations of this style, and it was absolutely gorgeous.

The music was all great too. Sometimes I would let the character, Otus, sit on the land, and I would just listen to the soundtrack. This was my favorite part about the game. I was excited to hear the next part of the soundtrack, and it was one of the few reasons why I kept playing the game. I highly recommend you at least check out the soundtrack on YouTube, because it was one of the couple amazing parts about the game.

The characters and story are also great and funny too. I liked the story and the places it went, and the ending is cool, too. I loved the ending area a lot, and I thought it ended the game in a great way. The characters were charming as well, with each characters having their own quips and ways of being funny. I liked the animations of the game. When Otus is scared, he looks scared, and when he’s happy, he smiles. I liked these parts of the game a lot, and it gave the game a lot of heart.

But, unfortunately, the game is not fun to play at all. Much of the game relies on the player flying around to try and avoid different enemies and attacks, which is alright at the beginning when there isn’t much on the screen.

However, by the middle part of the game, the screen is almost halfway filled with enemies and attacks, and I didn’t like it at all. It was sometimes difficult to even know where my character was because there was so many things on screen, sometimes of the same color. The game stopped being fun to play around midway through the game because of this part of the game.

There were some specific parts that I absolutely despised. The game sometimes employs scenarios where it blacks out the rest of the screen, and the player has to make their way through big areas with no way of knowing where to go, and it was terrible.

There were more of these than I hoped there would be, and it ruins the best parts of the game for me. When the screen blacks out in these scenarios, it takes away the gorgeous visuals, and the music isn’t great in these scenarios either, so the good parts of the game are not present in these parts.

The combat of the game is also not a fun part of the game. The player has three different combat partners, and each of them have a couple different abilities. The way the game uses these abilities in the world is fun, but when the game starts to add enemies to the mix, it starts to get rough. Sometimes the game auto-targets, but then it seems there are other times where the auto-target doesn’t work, and it was frustrating.

I got tired of fighting enemies by the second hour of the game, especially because whenever Otus gets hit, he gets knocked back and is dazed for a couple seconds, leaving the player immobile for that time period. It was, in a word, awful.

The game also suffers from system crashing. I played the game for around 10 hours, and the game crashed on me three different times, and they were at the worst moments too. These three times, I had just finished a boss and while watching the cutscene after said boss, the game crashed, forcing me to re-fight the boss. Especially with how much I disliked the combat, this made me dislike the game even more.

I went into “Owlboy” with high expectations, hoping for a game that was great in the technical parts like music and visuals. I got that in spades. However, what I didn’t expect was that I was going to hate how to actually play the game. By the end, I just wanted it to be over, because I was tired of seeing enemies come on the screen, making me fight them all over again.

If you have the stomach for frustrating combat and really want to see the gorgeous visuals, then I guess try “Owlboy.” But, for people who only want the visuals and soundtrack, look for them on YouTube. You’ll save yourself the money.