One True Hero combines 3D platforming and 3D Zelda into a challenging, tongue-in-cheek, adventure game. You play as a farmer who comes into possession of a magical and powerful sword. Clothed appropriately in a green tunic, you set out to defeat the evil that has claimed the land. Right from the start, One True Hero’s writing and character interactions stand out as a strong feature. Characters are genuinely funny and excellently animated, often serving as parodies of Zelda staples. For example, one character remarks early on that every time something bad happens, someone shows up wearing green and swinging a sword.

Gameplay is focused on navigating a primarily linear world full of platforming challenges, occasional small puzzles, and combat encounters. Along the way you’ll pick up collectibles, which can be used to access special challenging platforming stages outside of the primary progression. Platforming is simple but generally feels quite good. Unfortunately, level design is oftentimes vague. It can sometimes feel as if you’re trying to platform your way through a game that wasn’t always designed with platforming in mind. Random pieces of geometry will have no collision detection whatsoever, and I’d often find myself in areas I wasn’t supposed to be simply because I wasn’t sure exactly where the game wanted me to go. Combat is likewise simple but effective, and generally free of the oddities that plague the platforming. As you proceed through the story, you’ll also unlock new combat abilities on a skill tree, which help to keep combat from getting too stale.

The one area in which One True Hero ultimately gets too tripped up is in its bugs. I encountered bugs on an incredibly regular basis. Almost all of these I was able to recreate regularly. Most of them also weren’t caused by doing anything particularly unusual on my end either. At one point I fell off a cliff and respawned as a limp corpse that had an unlimited jump, allowing me to mash the jump button and fly over the level. Another time I respawned underneath the level geometry entirely. At one point, I managed to accidentally move a box into an unreachable position, only to have the game autosave immediately, preventing me from reloading. Luckily I was able to glitch myself past the problem (I guess they’re not all bad). Less dire but still impactful visual bugs are also common, with characters and objects regularly losing their textures mid cutscene. Ironically, the actual performance metrics in terms of frame rate and resolution are both great. This is ultimately a very well optimized yet buggy game.

One True Hero feels a bit like a game in very early-access. There is the potential here for a very good game, but it is buried beneath so many issues that it's difficult to see through the haze. When One True Hero works, I generally enjoy it, but there are just so many issues to push through. Its writing is genuinely endearing, its characters are lively and animated, and even as you moon jump high above the playable areas, it maintains solid frame rate and resolution. With some aggressive patches there may be something here, but it isn’t quite there yet.