• they/them or anything else idc

I'm not a real robot, but I have a real face!

25, bi, genderless.



I get the impression that most people quit in frustration very early on in the game. The steam achievement for beating level 1 only has an 8.8% completion rate (and that rate drops off sharply for levels after that). Several steam reviewers say that after beating the tutorial they couldn't even navigate the hub world.

I personally "beat" the game, that is, I beat the 8 levels that the game's starting screen displays as being beaten or not, then beat the ninth level that appears when you do that, then got to watch the credits. I think I'm not even close to getting all the gameplay - looking at the achievements I didn't get, there are several collectible gems and keys that I never even saw, except for a single key, which I don't even know what it opens. There are also five unlockable characters that I couldn't get, an arcade mode, a multiplayer mode...

On its surface, Lion Quest is a standard 2D platformer. It's tough in places, but never really tough. The one place I really got stuck was on level 6 - I had come back to the game after a year and forgot the "zen" mechanic even existed, which was necessary to progress past the very first part of the level. It was only by chance that I eventually sat on the opening screen long enough that as elements faded in one by one I saw the hint "(zen - x, master zen - z)". I then vaguely remembered that these were introduced earlier, either in the tutorial or in an early level, and figured out their uses through trial and error.

See, Lion Quest's main conceit is that while your character interacts with the world as if it were 2D, it's actually 3D. semi-frequently, as you play, some of the block pieces that make up the level will become unfixed and fall down, often toppling out in the Z axis so that your character no longer collides on the same plane as them. Often this is played as a cheap fake-out, where the platforming course you see ahead crumbles apart into a more difficult one.

The zen buttons interact with this mechanic, doing nothing if none of these gravity-affected blocks are on the screen. If they are on the screen, one zen button will toggle gravity on/off for all blocks you can see, causing them to drift aimlessly, and the other will freeze any such blocks in place (or unfreeze any that are frozen). Aside from using the freeze button with quick reflexes to possibly counteract an aforementioned fake-out, there are very few places you actually need to use zen. And if you can't freeze quickly enough, your only punishment is usually that the platforms to jump on will be a bit more sparse.

There are a couple sections where a button will spawn some stray falling blocks, which you have to freeze in midair and platform on. This was what had me stuck on level 6. Having forgotten zen, I thought I was supposed to just keep mashing the button and piling up blocks until I could mountain climb my way up. But they kept falling away in the z-axis, with only 2 or 3 sticking around on the collidable plane each time, often knocking off the ones that were previously there, and the button's cooldown was very long. So I quit the level, taking me to the intro screen before the hub world, and took a 15 minute screen break, leading to the fade-in text I mentioned earlier. (It doesn't take 15 minutes of no inputs to fade in, more like 15 seconds. But I would have just mashed through every time if I hadn't decided on that break.)

I still have no idea where in the game the gravity toggle zen is useful.

So, the game's only mechanic that really sets it apart from a vanilla platformer is barely even utilized, to the point that after a lengthy break from the game I had forgotten it was even there. Why do I love Lion Quest so much?

I don't know. I guess I really like the hub world , which is its own platforming challenge to navigate and explore - while I can see why so many people were put off by it, but for me it evokes the Mario 64 hub world, which I have many fond childhood memories of exploring in the DS version. The barebones visual style with an animal protagonist is reminiscent of the "Achievement Unlocked" elephant flash games which I also played as a kid.

It's not all nostalgia, though. The game feels like it's brimming with secrets, both intended and unintended. At several points in each level you can go off the beaten path and there's something there. Not a collectible, just... something. To let you know you aren't out of bounds. But also knowing that there are collectibles makes me feel like at any one of these little impulsive explorations I could run into one of them - that's how I found the one key I did collect.

Let's see. I like that there are these weird prism powerup things that just... rotate the camera a bit so you can see that it's 3d. Not full Fez, just the slightest tilt for a few minutes, to remind you the third dimension is there. As far as I can tell they do nothing else. (I don't think they're the "gem" collectibles, as I've gotten plenty of these but haven't even unlocked the achievement for collecting 1. Maybe it's broken.) I also appreciate the many unnecessary features the creator included - there's a custom character creator which is a whole built in tiny pixel art program.

So, in conclusion, for whatever reason, I thoroughly enjoyed Lion Quest. You might or might not feel the same. It's a charming but flawed game. I got its sequel, Lion Quest Infinity, this Steam Winter Sale, and I'm excited to try it out next.


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