Colourful open-world adventure Pine overhauls various gameplay features

Pine sure is pretty and as an open-world adventure, it did the job quite nicely at giving you plenty to explore with some tough combat and now it should be smoother.

The developer, Twirlbound, mentioned that they went back and overhauled some of the more annoying parts of the game based on a lot of player feedback. After checking it out, it all sounds pretty ideal. Some of what's new and improved includes:

• Performance gains and big stutter reductions from garbage collection through upgrading Pine’s engine and implementing incremental garbage collection
• Combat is smoother and much more responsive: added dodge cancel, kick out of any move and fractional directional control
• Camera tweaks: added auto steering settings and removed aimed smoothing
• Platforming is more forgiving due to the addition of ‘coyote time’
• Two new languages added (Dutch and Korean), two more coming soon

Camera changes are extremely welcome, as the auto-steering and smoothing ended up causing more issues than they actually helped with, at least for me anyway but it appears many others felt the same. Coyote time for platforming is a nice accessibility feature too, giving you extra frames to jump after leaving a platform. There's also quite a number of bug fixes and overall it sounds like a really sweet update.

Initially, this big update suffered major graphical issues on Linux which the developer said was a "problem with our builder and it went unnoticed" but they put up a fix shortly after. Nice to see prompt support and hopefully it won't happen again.

You can pick up Pine from GOG and Steam.