outdoor[/spoiler area.
-Does a good job at conveying the 'mystery' atmosphere present in a lot of early NES games. It's pretty vague, slightly confusing, and not at all in-your-face with tutorials/exposition.
-Great sprite work on the bosses.
-A nice challenge level... not ridiculously so, but you still need to pace yourself, learn enemy patterns, and not rush into things. A few 'cheap' hits here and there i.e. off-screen spiders who will quickly jump down at you. But the placement of save points is great and the enemies all take a decent bite out of you, HP-wise.
My issues with it:
-sound effects are really loud and some very harsh
-character portrait is dorky
-bosses are HP sponges with easy patterns.
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control is weird and touchy
Overall a great game and I'm very happy with it. Friends, who are huge retro gamers, also seemed to be quite into it once we all realized that this is more than just a Metroid clone.