Golvellius: Valley of Doom
I was told this was a Zelda clone, but I feel like mostly the game has ideas that were inspired by Zelda but involved some interesting other directions:
linear exploration (but with upgrades)
boots that let you fly everywhere (as my brother said, some programmer was like “what if we turned of collision detection”
you don’t need special items to reveal caves (mostly), not like Zelda where you would have to bomb everything.
the enemies are quite aggressive. There are some maps where you can use this against them and force them to only come at you in one direction, but often there’s a lot of them making strange movements quickly towards you.
The side scrolling sections where you can’t go back….without a map I would definitely have gotten stuck on the caves leading to the boss fights. I'm not sure these really added to my game experience, but I suppose it's a good change of pace.
Also, the game looks way cuter than Zelda.
I will admit that the fairies giving advice was really annoying XD You work so hard to find a cave and then the fairy is like “Hi”.