Introduction

Lost Resolve is out now on Steam! The game, which describes itself as "a love letter to speedrunning," tasks Soul with jumping, bouncing, slamming, wall jumping, sliding, and dashing her way through twelve fast-paced levels to find her friend Melody's lost Resolve.

Gameplay

The gameplay takes a page right out of Sonic's playbook, with you having to preform moves like dashes and slides often to build up and maintain your momentum. It can be QUITE challenging at first to get a grip on the controls, but the satisfaction I got after a perfectly-executed jump made it all worth it, every time! Lost Resolve took over a year to make, and the polish really shines through here with the game's incredibly solid controls. You'll need them, too, because the game gets very tough at times.

To keep things fresh, each level introduces brand new mechanics, such as green gems that give Soul infinite wall jumps, ghost enemies that represent Melody's inner demons, and GIANT bosses like the Condemned Pumpkin King and the Accursed Apparition that really put your skills to the test.

Art

The art of Lost Resolve is fantastic. It's clear that a lot of time and effort was put into to crafting the characters, polishing up the animations, and adding in little details that just make you smile. For example, Soul's hair changing colors after collecting a green stone reminded me of Madeline's hair turning blue when she collects a dash-refill in Celeste! Another small thing I noticed was that, after you defeat the Condemned Pumpkin King's head, his statue in the background actually becomes permanently headless! Details like these show the thought and care that went into every aspect of the visuals.

However, I do have one complaint about the art direction. All of the levels in each area kind of blend into each other. There's not much to distinguish, for example, Somber Sepulchre I from Somber Sepulchre II; they just feel like different arrangements of the same gray bricks and orange grass. Adding some unique set pieces to each stage would spice things up a lot and make them much more memorable.

Audio

The sound effects of Lost Resolve are top-notch, they elevate the overall experience by providing very satisfying feedback to the player! I only have one slight nitpick, and that is the ledge climb sound. For that action, the sound of a woman grunting is heard, which just caught me off guard because literally no other actions in the game were voice-acted, they're all just various swoops, sweeps, beeps, and bloops. 

The music of Lost Resolve is stellar, too. It does a FANTASTIC job of setting the mood! Songs range from feelings of bitter loneliness to upbeat, motivational bangers that encourage the player to keep going, even when things get tough. I have no complaints here!

Replay Value

Lost Resolve is on the short end, with only a handful of levels that the game actively encourages you to blaze through as fast as possible, but it does have replay value in the form of finding optional collectibles, beating your best times in the Time Trial mode, and earning a high rank on each level!

Each level has three of keys for you to nab. What do they do? I dunno, I wasn't good enough to get all of them! However, one annoying detail is that they reset when you die, even if you had a checkpoint! That means if you're going for a key and then mess up, you'll have to either backtrack all the way back to where you got it from, if possible, or just restart the level entirely! This makes an already hard game even more difficult, but in a kinda unfair way.

The Time Trial mode was disappointing to me. It's just a menu where you pick from all the levels you've unlocked. Isn't that just a slightly faster version of the hub world? I feel like this mode has a TON of potential. For a game that prides itself on speedrunning, I think an online leaderboard would be the bare minimum. It would also be super cool if you could view others' runs, like how ghost data works in Mario Kart. Perhaps this could even have an in-universe explanation like a "distant memory" or "echo." These features shouldn't be too hard to add in a future update and would, in my opinion, greatly increase the value of the mode!

The ranking system is a great feature that encourages you to go back and really truly perfect each level, but it felt arbitrary at times. It would be awesome if there was a breakdown at the end of what things contributed to your ranking and by how much, so you know what you need to go back and improve next time.

Other Notes

I only have one complaint to put in this section. Why is the settings menu only accessible from the title screen? You can rebind your controls in-game, but that's it. Using the settings menu in-game doesn't seem like an extraordinarily hard thing to add in to me, maybe it just got overlooked by the developer.

Conclusion

Lost Resolve is a brutally fun, albeit short, experience from start to finish. The game exudes a ton of charm and polish through its solid and responsive controls, crisp pixel art visuals, and a soundtrack that's both desolate and groovy in all the best ways. However, the game has a ton of potential to be improved through small, quality-of-life changes. Additionally, I would love to see new content in the form of free updates or paid DLC.

Whatever the case, I recommend Lost Resolve to anyone looking for a difficult, fast-paced platformer that combines the best of Sonic and Celeste. And at only four bucks? That's practically a steal! And what's more, if you dash on over to the game's Steam page right now, you can get 10% off through July 18th!

I'll definitely be keeping my eyes on Lost Resolve for the future, and on whatever developer SwinklyDev puts out next!