Elephantasy and its sequel, Elephantasy: Flipside, were both excellent!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1459540/Elephantasy/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2284310/Elephantasy_Flipside/
Here are my impressions
Elephantasy is a metroidvania 2D platformer.
The main character is a cute elephant, and there are only a few bosses and no other enemies, so you can concentrate on solving riddles and going to unknown places without other things.
As in Metroidvania, you can expand your exploration area by wearing items with special effects, but all items are located at the initial location.
At first, you can only carry one item, but as you collect gems and raise your rank, you can carry multiple items, and it was fun to combine items to expand your search area.
The puzzles are basically completed in that area, but there are special areas after the game is cleared where you have to search a large area to get to the solution, and it was fun to solve those and feel a sense of accomplishment when I cleared the game with rank 3!
Elephantasy: Flipside has the same item system as the previous game, but the viewpoint has been changed to quarter-view, and the area to explore has been expanded 5 to 10 times.
It took me about two weeks to complete the game!
You move back and forth between the two worlds of Overworld and Underworld, increasing your rank and increasing the number of items you can carry.
In Elephantasy, I was able to handle everything in my head due to the size of the world, but Flipside was so difficult that my memory of the previous location would drop out of my head when I changed the place I was exploring.
To compensate for this, the manual had information about the early stages of the game and a slightly more detailed map, which I used to create a map that I could take notes on and write down the information as I played.
This was a lot of fun, and as I wrote down information as I played, I began to understand where I was walking in the game, and eventually I was able to see where I was walking without a map.
There are more puzzles to solve in this game than in the previous one, and every day I played it, I was surprised!
Even reaching the normal ending was a struggle, but after that, the exploration and puzzle solving for the good and true endings was a lot of work and a lot of fun!
I'm writing this after seeing the true ending, but it was so amazing that I'm still feeling the aftermath of the excitement as I write this.
I'm glad I was there with Font, the sleeping dog in the ending, which I didn't find until the end, even in Ghost!!!!!
Thank you Linker for a great piece of work and thank you Sylvie for inspiring me to play this piece!