If there's one thing I can admire in games, especially Indie games with all their limitations, it's ambition. The ambition to shoot for the moon and create something well above your weight class, if only because you have this firm idea for a project in your head and all the gumption and confidence (misplaced as it may be) to get it done by hook or by crook. That moxie is what I see reflected back at me whenever I boot up this week's game, Ary and the Secret of Seasons by eXiin and Fishing Cactus, both of which hail from the infrequently-represented (on here anyway) country of Belgium. Yeah, the waffle place. Ary sees the titular heroine take up her missing brother's sword and pitch in to help her elemental guardian father (still mourning said brother) by substituting for him in the big elemental guardian pow-wow at the Dome of Seasons. Issue is, all the seasons are out of whack across this vaguely Sinocentric world due to some ominous red crystals dropping from the sky and monsters prowl the streets between cities: Ary's got her work cut out for her if she's to become a guardian apprentice (despite being the wrong gender) and track down her AWOL sibling.

Secret of Seasons could've taken the same route as many Zeldersatzes before and stuck to something 2D, or maybe 3D with a fixed perspective, but instead it's a moderately-sized 3D action-adventure that hearkens to more recent Zelda titles like Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess and their level of scope: those games with sizeable overworlds that maybe don't have a whole lot to do in them besides find the entrances to the dungeons where the real action is. Ary's a proficient sword fighter but her chief weapon are the "season" balls that she can activate at any time: doing so creates a sphere of influence for that specific season, helpfully color-coded (pink for spring, green for summer, red for autumn, blue for winter), and by using each season's distinct properties you can make progress through a dungeon's environmental puzzles or when collecting treasures off the beaten path. Ary also picks up typical ability upgrade items like a pair of boots that allow her to double-jump (found mercifully early; they add a lot to simply getting around) and a slingshot to hit distant targets. So far, so traditional Zelda; issue being that all of these snazzy 3D environments and puzzles may have been a little more than the devs could handle. The game got lambasted at launch for its many game-breaking bugs, and some four years later it's still kind of a mess.

I could be here all week delineating all the strange problems this game has... and since I love to complain let's go ahead and get started: Ary receives a distinctive scar on her left cheek early on in the game, but it vanishes in half the cutscenes. The font's real basic-looking and doesn't fit the aesthetic. It's surprisingly easy to jump up to areas that shouldn't be reachable, though there's enough invisible walls to prevent you going OOB too often (though I'm sure speedrunners already know them all). Sometimes there's maps for internal locations like dungeons and sometime there aren't: the four big dungeons that make up the second half of the game don't have maps, but the basement of your parents' house and the tutorial mini-dungeon with the double-jump shoes both do. The larger boar-like enemies drop money that you can never collect because of some sort of solid posthumous hitbox you can't move through. It goes on like this but I'm not a QA report so take my word for it. As far as the more serious stuff is concerned I've also had it glitch a boss battle that made it unwinnable until I reloaded, and it's hard frozen on me once. There was also a time when I panicked because all the passive upgrades I bought disappeared after being captured along with my weapons and my double-jumping boots (which was fair enough; prison wardens tend to take that kind of thing away): those upgrades all come back later, some several tense minutes after the escape itself, but I've no clue how or why learned skills would also vanish with your items. But yeah, from reports it's still in a much better state than it once was.

It's not that the game is sloppy. I mean, it is, but not in the sense that the devs were resting on their laurels or taking things too easy. It feels more like the 2016 Summer Olympics at Rio: they overpromised and underdelivered because it turned out to be way more work than they bargained for with too little time to make it happen (though as far as I know, no-one on the dev team caught the Zika virus at least). Even now, a few years out, the game continues to feel as unfinished as a wall without its final coat of paint; large chunks of the environment are missing everywhere you look. There's some other odd choices too: for instance, you get the summoning balls for the first two seasons (winter and summer) individually with a bit of a tutorial lead-in on how to use them effectively—winter creates blocks of ice that sometimes obstruct the way but can also be useful platforms, while summer removes same. But then you're given both spring and autumn simultaneously after a major moment in the story with no hints as to how to use them (spring removes pools of water, which feels like it should've been summer's job, while autumn makes it rain). You also learn how to destroy the corrupted red crystals found across the overworld halfway through the game's plot, each of which earns you a new HP upgrade: this means you spend the first half of the game with a paltry five hearts and then suddenly balloon to over a dozen shortly after that revelation, making the game's combat significantly easier there on out.

It is a shame, because fundamentally the game isn't bad at all. Its story and presentation recall one of those recent Disney CG movies where you think it's going a "traditional" narrative route until it swerves on you—there's some gender equality stuff where the female Ary is less than pleased that all the important hero positions are male-only, and you're told that you'll have to defeat all the season temple golems for their cores only to meet the first one and discover he's completely chill and willing to help—and the facial animations for major characters and the goofy hyena enemies are expressive and often amusing. Some of the level design is solid too with some imaginative puzzles revolving around your season-changing abilities (if you recall the time bubbles for that one Skyward Sword area, they're a lot like that) and a few traversal upgrades like the aforementioned double-jump and a magnetic ring that lets you pull around metallic objects. The dungeons can be a bit empty and tough to navigate at times (a map would've helped) but they're otherwise the highlight. Combat's so-so and is rendered more or less moot once you have the timing for parries down (and it's not particularly strict, either) but the few boss fights I've had were engaging enough. I certainly wanted to like Ary and the Secret of Seasons more than I did partly because I have a thing for Zeldersatzes and partly because I can see the big dream it was reaching for but couldn't quite grasp, but there are times when progress can be real hard-going and not for the reasons the devs may have intended and it just makes me feel like I should've gone with the thematically-similar Kena: Bridge of Spirits instead. Maybe I'll cover that game in a future one of these and people can yell at me how it's too high-budget to count as an "Indie". That'll be fun.

Rating: 3 out of 5.