sybil_butt.mp4
[Hide] (2.4MB, 1280x720, 00:15) sybil_sit.mp4
[Hide] (2.7MB, 1280x720, 00:15) >>220933
Movement
The main draw to Pseudoregalia is its movement. You start with nothing but a jump and a backflip, but by the end you'll have a slide, a slide leap, wall kicking, wall running, a super jump, an air backflip, and a few other goodies that I won't get into since they're much more fun to discover for yourself. The kinesthetics are incredibly good, and the simple inherent joy of moving around the world and stringing jumps together is the single biggest appeal of the game.
Sybil has a wonderful momentum to her, and the game uses analog movement so you have a very fine degree of control over exactly where she moves and how much she slides on landing and so forth. If you played Super Smash Bros Melee as a kid like I did and were infected with an insatiable desire to move well in video games, then Pseudoregalia scratches that itch wonderfully. Once you get to grips with the various power-ups you can easily start visualizing lines moving through the world, and mentally planning out how to spend your various abilities to end up where you need to. It is incredibly satisfying.
Exploration and Aesthetic
The dream world aesthetic runs through the entire game, and helps to excuse some of the nonsense video game/amateur 3D environments which would otherwise draw attention to themselves. The castles and houses don't make logical sense because it's a dream, so they feel more like images of castles and houses and I'm not bothered by the extremely low poly count. The environments themselves are not really that complicated, but being able to scrabble over almost every ledge and wall makes them feel a lot more explorable.
There isn't much of a story, which is nice because it doesn't get in the way, and exploration is left to the player to manage. There is no map, and only the bare minimum of tracking your collectable progress in that they appear on the pause menu once you've collected them. If you find a locked door and want to search for a key, you'll have to make a mental or physical note of that yourself and come back later. Keys are interchangeable so you can take something you find in one area and use it to progress in another.
Combat isn't very deep so the game doesn't have many enemies beyond types that run at you and attack or that stay back and shoot. There are some really neat designs like the swords that fling themselves at you and get stuck in the ground, and some of the power-ups you collect will encourage you to think about when you spend your mana/power/whatever on healing vs keeping it stockpiled for later. You can definitely feel the Dark Souls and Hollow Knight influences in the game insofar as managing your healing and magic.
Personally, I love the feeling of exploration and being left to my own devices; one of the things I enjoyed about the Souls games was the large portions of raw gameplay that were only briefly interrupted by cutscenes or story beats, and Pseudoregalia feels the same way. There are exactly two cutscenes, one at the start and one at the end, which last for a total of perhaps 45 seconds.
Sybil is pretty. She has a nice butt and legs. I like how some of the power-ups you acquire appear on her as items of clothing, but I also appreciate the dev giving you the option to enable or disable each one of them. There are also a couple alternate costumes, one of which is available at the start if you're some kind of faggot who wants to put stupid-looking pants on Sybil.