While the Switch is generally thought of for its family-friendly qualities, there’s no doubt that the explosion of indie games in the eShop has guaranteed that it has access to an impressive number of games that are meant to push your skill ceiling to the limit. One of the genres that has tended to be known for tougher overall play has been Metroidvanias, typically pairing tough combat and boss battles to overcome on the path to success. Rusted Moss, however, takes a bit of a different path, instead focusing mostly on the challenge of traversal, with its pretty tough grappling mechanic often taking center stage.

Relatively early on you’ll receive your grappling hook, get put through the essential paces to help you understand how it works and how to best utilize it, and then pretty much be let off the chain from that point on. While there’s absolutely some combat that you’ll engage in against a relatively modest overall number of robotic enemies, I’d say that the twin-stick shooting generally makes this feel quite manageable. By comparison, getting through certain areas, trying to establish and maintain your momentum (there’s an attempt to subject you to some real physics here, for better or worse), and then mechanically work through making the right moves at the right times to proceed is much tougher. Boss fights then tend to crank it up another notch, often expecting that you’ll be able to do a little bit of everything, depending on the boss. When it clicks and you’re on top of your game it can absolutely be exhilarating.

But then there’s the rest of the time. Whether the issue is simply missing the mossy zones you’re able to grab onto, promptly impaling yourself on some spikes below, or just not quite being able to manage the hand-off between grappling, swinging, and then releasing just right, there are going to be some dark times ahead. Having played a few other games with a grappling mechanic like this, I’ll say that this probably feels the most cumbersome, and some of the issues revolve around simply trying to manage the default controls. Now, there are actually quite a number of ways to modify this, from multiple options for the grapple’s functionality to remapping the controls, but honestly this punt also feels like a bit of a cop-out. Going with the base scheme it feels fiddly and your fingers can be prone to getting in your way. Expecting people to patiently iterate through multiple ways to toy with this, trying things out and then hoping you haven’t developed muscle memory on a scheme you’re giving up on, seems sloppy. I’d also note that you have an option to outright fly in the accessibility options, as well as play with any number of other settings that will help make the game more manageable.

While I applaud the desire to help make the game more approachable for more people, in this case it feels like a flawed plan. The experience is constructed to be tough, and it should simply own that fact, though ideally they’d have expended more effort in tuning the controls and the feel of things so the defaults all feel like they make sense out of the box. Instead, it feels like they panicked a bit, figuring out that they tuned it a bit too roughly and simply throwing options out to people to tone it down. Yes, you could get through the game that way, but it also feels like that’s betraying the experience in this case, so it would be an odd thing to do outside of on occasion when you’ve simply hit a wall you can’t get around. There’s undoubtedly a pretty good game here, and for people who don’t mind the challenge, or taking the time to tune everything to feel just right, it may even be great. But when there are loads of amazing games in the eShop that won’t demand such an effort to enjoy them fully, it knocks the experience down a notch.