gate Not a platformer, but Outer Wilds is another recent game that comes to mind that does this extremely well (in a truly non-linear way, too.) Probably my favorite game of the last decade!
Borderline ashamed to admit I didn’t care for it, lol. Perhaps for one of the reasons that I stuck with your game longer than I thought I would… my interest in anything fizzles out very quickly without enough feedback from the game that I’m doing something right, or perhaps more importantly, wrong. I “got” Outer Wilds, and I would never say anything so crass as to suggest there’s something wrong with it, there’s just something about it that makes me feel very frustrated with getting through it.
If I had to explain it… maybe it’s like… figuring out how to make progress doesn’t feel like making progress to me, it feels like a chore. And, in the worst cases of my experience with Outer Wilds, the feeling of making progress felt momentarily exciting but then that feeling would be fleeting, and often like I’d tripped over it rather than figured it out. As well it was deeply frustrating when I felt I knew what conclusion the game was expecting me to come to, because I could parse the abstract information coming at me, but repeatedly what I ran into was that the means by which the game expects one to play the little blue guy to make that result happen through manipulation of the game world would constantly escape me.
In other words, maybe you game is like that too… but also… you respawn several seconds away so at least to me it feels like experimentation has less downsides heheh
