cough cough :-P A good Metroidvania is all about fluid movement through the levels. If the standard movement options feel good, it’s not too big a deal if the game takes its time with upgrades. But they’re infuriating, maybe another option would work better?
It’s interesting though, I hadn’t really thought about how well Hollow Knight maps to how I felt about Cave Story.
Hmm… Usually this’d be time-wise a quarter or a third of the way through one of these games! Four hours into Ori you have the wall-jump, double jump and bash for movement. In Outland you’d have the slide, wall-jump and color shifting. (With the bash/color shifting being the respective McGuffins those games were built around). So yeah, this does feel incredibly stingy!
Anyway, thanks. If there’s a dash (air dash, I assume?) right around the corner, it’s probably worth getting at least to that point.