Violet Wisteria is a 2D action platformer. You play as Wisteria (weird name) who has to defend her world against an invading monster horde. The controls are pretty simple - you get a jump button, which can be transformed into a slide on the ground a…
Violet Wisteria is a 2D action platformer. You play as Wisteria (weird name) who has to defend her world against an invading monster horde. The controls are pretty simple - you get a jump button, which can be transformed into a slide on the ground and 3 types of attacks, each marked by a colour - blue, red and white. The gimmick of the game is that enemies can only be killed by a specific colour attack. Blue enemies are vulnerable to red, red to white and white to blue. If you hit an enemy or a platform with the same colour attack you will bounce off, which is used for platforming. This all sounds good on paper, but the execution here is terrible making the game a frustrating mess. There is a noticeable input delay, especially for the jumps, so you have to press the button slightly before you intend to. Then the whole colour-coded enemies thing is an issue, because not all enemies are single colour, so you have to look for the hint above them or simply guess. If you happen to get it wrong you either do no damage and likely take some yourself due to the limited range of Wisteria's sword or shoot yourself into other enemies or into a pit of death. You can use magic with each colour giving you some projectiles, but using them reduces your time and when that is over you lose a life, so they are practically useless.
After reaching the first boss - a two-faced floating head shooting projectiles at you - and failing, I swallowed my pride and reduced the difficulty, to the easiest one. This gave me some extra hearts and continues to work with, but the levels and enemies remained the same. With perseverance I managed to beat the first boss, but the second level was even worse. You are in some nightmare realm, where they introduce these transparent platforms, which you sink into making your jumps heavier and trickier to perform. As if the platforming of this game wasn't hard enough. Throw in some enemies while you are doing that and you have a recipe for disaster. I died a ton, but thankfully there is a level select and you can start from this stage if you lose all your lives. The boss here is a 3-headed dragon, which is surprisingly easy compared to what you had to deal with so far. You basically kill the heads one at a time with the correct attack while avoiding some random projectiles.
The next level was even worse. After a gimmick free-fall bit you land in what I presume to be the Apocalypse since fire is raining from the sky. A terrible new type of enemy is this demonic dog which runs towards you. You barely have time to react to it and it takes several hits before it dies. If 2 of them are running together, they are essentially immortal since your attack will be cancelled regardless of the colour. I got frustrated and decided to quit the game.
Violet Wisteria has an interesting concept, but it's a frustrating mess. The controls are sluggish, the combat mechanics turn into an unfair quick time event where you are not 100% sure which button to press and the difficulty and randomness of the enemies is downright sadistic. I'm not going to torture myself to finish this game and I advise you avoid it for your own sanity.
