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Winsley's Guardian - Demo

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Winsley's Guardian - Demo

Play Game
A new wholesome Zelda/Earthbound-like for the GameBoy
  • » Suitable For All Audiences

Author Comments

Overview

Directed by Spencer Walters, this game serves as a tribute to his late daughter with an incredibly heartfelt action RPG inspired by The Legend of Zelda and Earthbound.

Follow Winsley on her quest through life to find someone only described as her guardian.


This is the public beta demo. Follow us and help us on Kickstarter​​


Characters

Winsley

Our hero, the player character. Watch her grow both literally and emotionally as the game goes on!

iu_1337141_12867327.gif

Guardian Soul [???]

A mysterious entity that lingers by Winsley, it's identity unknown...

iu_1337142_12867327.gif

Mom and Dad

Winsley's parents. They guide her from her birth up to her adulthood. They love her a lot.

iu_1337143_12867327.gif

Ryder

A childhood friend. Based on Real-life Winsley's favorite cartoon.

iu_1337144_12867327.gif


Controls:

iu_1337145_12867327.png


Licensing

This project shall not exist nor be related to any non-fungible tokens ("NFT") or blockchain-related projects.

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Hmm, I think this game has a pretty good foundation for a Zelda-esque adventure set in contemporary times. All the necessary bits and pieces seems to be in place: you've got your items, your slashy combat, cute art and menus, dungeons, boss fights, and so on...but it unfortunately didn't have any sort of spark or hook that caught my attention and made me want to keep playing, rather, it quickly bored me.

Some of my issues are attributed to aspects that can be fixed, and perhaps are already planned to be fixed in a future release, since this is a beta. For example, the lack of music really made everything feel so dull and without a sense of atmosphere. Even worse, it felt like I wasn't making any progress on my journey since it lacks the excitement of hearing a new track when you transition into a new area. There were also some glitches like how if you walk to the side of the slingshot boss, you can get stuck if he walks into you and get comboed to death with no way out.

Other issues aren't so easily solved. For example, I found the story kinda boring and with an odd sense of motivation: we've got a mysterious dream at the start which is cool and could set up some sort of quest, but then suddenly we're searching for an owner of some blanket we randomly found in the closet? Why is the blanket important? Makes no sense. And the other issue is that this does just seem to be yet another Zelda clone that lacks the smooth and satisfying feeling of the original and isn't bringing anything interesting to the table to set it apart.

As much as I'm being down on it, I do think it has some promise and I'd like to see how it evolves over time. If the game got polished up with some music, a better story/motivation, and some other stuff, I think it could be great.

Elv13s responds:

thanks for the review, the game is already finished and its already out as we speak. physical copies are available at https://guardiangamesstudio.com/. The dream intro issupposed to teach the player the basics of the world, before going into the real story...story revolves around Winsley's life and is much more of a cozy slice of life rather than an action adventure game. Thanks for pointing out issues, I strived and tried to address them in the full release. This is the beta demo that I am allowed to show publicly so some bad reviews might come from it being in early stages. But I assure you, this is a wholesome cute and heart warming experience. its not perfect but its still a good game in my eyes.

Had to play the intro 3 times because there's no checkpoint before the first combat area.

When a room has two switches, you can just hit the same switch twice instead of using both of them.

After the rat king spawned his underlings I open my backpack and then when I closed it the enemies were gone and I couldn't proceed

This was very cute. I pulled up some random Gameboy OSTs from Final Fantasy Adventure, Link's Awakening, Oracle of Seasons, and Pokemon (and a bit of Mother 1) to get a cute and wonderful kid fantasy feeling. Very fitting!

The art direction looks so good for the hardware im honestly amazed!

jogo muito bom! Meu único problema, é que aconteceu um bug, que o garoto que enfrentamos no começo acabou ficando prezo em min, e eu morri, mas tirando isso tá ótimo

Credits & Info

Views
2,620
Faves:
33
Votes
112
Score
3.82 / 5.00

Uploaded
Feb 14, 2025
4:25 AM EST
Software
  • GB Studio
  • GB Studio 2
  • GB Studio 3