Recent reviews by Fred Fungus

Very beautiful game, great 2D animation in the cutscenes. Very pretty music as well. Rather short, you can beat the whole game in 3 hours. The platforming experience is kind of disorienting in some of the levels because you travel around so much in these abstract and somewhat minimalist environments, but that's only really an issue if you're trying to get all the optional collectibles. The puzzle platforming is generally pretty easy, I was never stuck on a puzzle for more than a few minutes and I'm not a particularly clever gamer. Absolutely a worthwhile experience when it's on sale. I wouldn't get it for full 15$ price, but yes in a heartbeat for 3/5/8 dollars.

At times a very enjoyable bloody action hack-n-slash. The skill system and the way parry/dodges work means that you need to lock the ♥♥♥♥ in to play well. The biggest point against the game is that some of the later bosses are absolute meat sponges, and take AGES to kill. The art style is pretty cool, the cel shaded 3d korean manhwa style looks at times just okay, and at times dope as ♥♥♥♥. I like Khazan himself's design. The plot is kinda cliche, you'll see all the plot twists coming a mile away, and the characters aren't all that deep, but I still liked it enough. The korean voice acting's pretty good. The music is mostly just ok, with a few bangers.

Some of the mechanics seem poorly thought out. The way gear/loot drops work seems to promote pointless busy work. You'll spend a lot of time dumping gear at the hub area to get crafting materials to make other gear that is quickly outpaced by the next loot drop you get. You can sacrifice high level gear to raise up old low level gear if you want a set bonus, but it is so expensive and real-time time consuming to do that, that it's less of a headache to just craft new gear that will be at your level. I feel like I wasted a ton of time with the crafting system that did not feel fun at all.

BASICALLY: I would absolutely recommend it if you don't want it to be hardcore experience, just set it to a lower difficulty and hack and slash away at dragons, zombies, spiders, and soldiers. It kinda wears out its welcome playing it at a high difficulty and bashing your head against a 1,000,000 health pool wall like I had to do at times.

It's good as a mostly-faithful adaptation of the NES original for modern machines. I wish you could change the sprites and visuals to the original, but then I guess it would be more of a port than a remaster. The sprites are cute, the default text looks like RPGmaker font but you can change to a more aesthetically pleasing pixelized font, and the remixed music is good. I think XP gains are bumped up from the original as well so you don't need to do any grinding, you can just explore and by the time you get to where you need to go you'll probably have enough random encounters to be leveled.

cute short spookable!

Difficult not to compare this game to Dark Souls. Obviously as a 2D dark fantasy metroidvania it's more similar to Hollow Knight, but for goodness's sake, it even has estus flask style healing and the dodge roll! But it's got enough of its own style going on that it's not just aping dark souls. It's got a nice melancholy style, much more storybook fantasy, what with the anime-ish art style and puppet style animation. And the metroidvania is well done, progression feels nice and combat is fluid. The way it's done of having your upgrades being ghosts in your knightly retinue nicely blends the melancholy theming and gameplay. The music is nice as well, sets the mood well and is nice to listen to. It never feels like a slog. Also a very nice length, it took me abt 20 hours to do all the exploration and get all the endings. I really liked this game! Now I have to play the sequel…

A very middling recommend.
The story is, well, pretty anime. You're in anime bloodworld, you get your crew of anime friends and have anime melodrama. It's fun, but I watch anime so my taste is bad. There isn't even a whole lot of homoerotic tension, which is the best part of any shonen anime.

The game is veeery linear. The game I'd compare this most to is Lies of P. A usually extremely linear run-through with occasional very small diversions. This does have a few bonus areas that LoP doesn't, but each one has an almost identical layout, and extra throwaway bosses that are just copy-paste from other areas of the game, so they're not very satisfying to go through.

The graphics are pretty. A full-on anime art style oftentimes doesn't look so hot in 3D, but this one looks decent to good. The aesthetic for the weapons is stupid (ridiculous oversized weapons with tons of greeble and particle effects), but makes sense for visual clarity during combat.

And the main draw is the combat. It looks very stylish and anime and pretty, even with the goofy aesthetic. And... it's fun-ish, but has weird issues that hobble it. It's super fast-paced action, but things like heavy attacks and your Veil attack take so, SO long to charge that you can only use them when bosses are staggered at half-health thresholds, and when enemies are recovering from a backstab. Multi-attacks from gifts like the phantom assaults are suicide to use during any time you'd actually WANT to use them, like a gap-closer to reach a boss or enemy. Because they're from light weapons they dont stagger, and they have super long animations that leave you wide open to be instagibbed by bosses. Healing also is almost impossible to use effectively. If you get hit by a boss, you'll usually be chunked for 40-70% of your health. And even if you find every healing upgrade, during most of the game your heals will heal you for 25-35% of your health. So getting hit EVER leads to a death spiral unless the boss switches targets to your NPC partner. Your stamina depletes quickly having to dodge fast attack patterns and get quick hits in, and you're supposed to fill a "focus" meter by dodging at perfect windows (to refill your stamina and get bonus effects based on certain upgrade Gifts) but through the whole game i struggled to get it to work consistently. And i play a lot of souls games! I'm decent enough at learning windows to dodge through attacks. All the parry animations have very weird timing, so the only one I got good at is the Claw parry that you have from the beginning.

The customizability is honestly a little much. Instead of getting new abilities from RPG levelup, the levelup just flat increases all stats, and you can switch between "classes" that change your stat spread and have a roster of abilities at any time in the pause menu. Most abilities from each class can ALSO, if used enough, be used with any class, and many are usable with all classes from the jump. Only a handful are permanently locked to a particular class. Once I got like halfway through the game, and there are like 12 classes that it's hard to tell which is good with a particular weapon, or a particular spell, it just got too annoying and confusing and I tuned out. And I still KEPT GETTING MORE CLASSES AND SPELLS. It's too much! It's not easy to compare the damage numbers from particular classes per weapon, and even per-weapon in a given class! So IDK what's ideal! Frustrating!

SO all in all, it has the exciting highs of a good action hack-n-slash, but other design decisions make those highs appear less often than they should. I think I need to see what's going on with God Eater to get this game better.

cute game! it executes well the feeling of playing through a corny mech anime. very short and you can't play the multiplayer anymore, but it has an endless wave mode if you like the gameplay.

Presentation. is. everything! I very much enjoyed this game. The music is boppin, the art is kinda cute (I'm not big on pixel art generally, but it's done well!), the animations are fluid and great. The writing is so hammy that it's adorable, everybody is talking like 90's hackers. Very much plays up the corniness of cyberpunk, and it's goofy enough that it works. Any time it tries to get emotional it's eye-rolling, but it's not a big deal.

As a game though? It's pretty unimpressive. It does very little to differentiate the gameplay of a jrpg. It only has 2 gameplay hooks to sell: the eponymous Jack Move, your super move that your super meter builds, is pretty bare-bones. It does a little 3-move d-pad rhythm minigame, and then does a big bout of damage in one of the 4 damage types. And your RAM loadout. You can only have a few skills equipped at a time, and you have to either spend a turn swapping them out in combat, or do so out of combat. And you can upgrade how much RAM you have with in-game currency. Kinda interesting, but I never had to use it much until the very final dungeon. Every other game mechanic is pretty bog-standard for an RPG. Which is, acceptable, not every game can push boundaries. The great presentation can make the lackluster gameplay acceptable. But I was left a bit wanting.

The only real COMPLAINT I can have about the gameplay is that several sidequests feature items people give you, but there is no inventory to view these items, only the actual capital-i Items you use in combat. This made completing a few quests confusing because I would talk to someone, realize a few minutes later that I already had the item they needed, and need to go run around to find them again. The game's short, so this wasn't an enduring problem, but it was a minor annoyance.

Inferior Sekiro-inspired game to Lies of P.
The souls leveling up mechanic seems like an attempt at familiarity to draw in soulsborne players, as it adds nothing to the experience. There are 3 stats to level up. You clearly are not choosing a "build" like in a souls game.
Enemies, even the weakest starving peasant, take ages to kill. Everything is a hitsponge. Not only that, but they are almost all, without fail, FASTER than you too! From starving peasant to heavily armored guards that you can hear their chainmail clinking as they walk, every. single. one. Swings faster, moves faster, recovers from hits faster, than the lithe plague assassin. It feels jarring to play something that controls like a souls game (and I will credit it where it's due, it controls fluidly) but there are... no mooks? Every enemy, like in Sekiro, has 2 health bars, a vitality bar and a health bar. But unlike in Sekiro, they do not present two alternate methods to kill, but are both REQUIRED to kill an enemy. It makes all combat a slog. It also makes it so trying to analyze enemy attack patterns, you know, learning and and improving the way dark souls games intend for you to do, INCREDIBLY punishing. Because the enemy vitality bar refills up to the health bar underneath, so any progress on the first half can be instantly undone if you dont keep up constant aggression. So you need to wail and wail and wail on enemies. If you stop hitting even for the length of time it takes to dash back, take a sippy, and dash back in, if the enemy does a pattern that lasts 2+ seconds, they will start regening health.
Additionally, your basic attacks don't stagger any but the weakest enemies, and even then not always. Every. Single. Enemy. Attack. Has hyper armor. The player ALSO has hyper armor on the special energy weapon attacks, and your default heavy claw. Funnily enough, this is actually INSANELY counterproductive, and makes using the energy weapons a death sentence against minibosses and bosses, because they will wail on you for a full attack pattern while you swing your axe, spear, or hammer, and melt away 3/4 of your health bar. The charge-up for most energy weapons, and your claw heavy, are so, so, SO, agonizingly long for a game that seems to want to be fast-paced and kinetic like Sekiro. And their reward, with how little stagger and extra damage most of these heavy attacks do, is so small that it feels like you're better off just continuing to wail and wail with your basic attacks.
The first main boss is a ridiculous brick wall, that instead of testing how well you've learned the combat mechanics the game has spent the last 45 minutes teaching you, instead is only defeated by memorizing parry timing. To chip away at 2 huge health bars. And then there's a second phase. With 2 more huge health bars. It is insanely disappointing.
Speaking of parry timing, it also feels really awkward. It feels like a dark souls parry, where the parry doesn't start exactly on the frame of the button press. But this is a sekiro game, where you need to parry multiple times on every boss and miniboss attack pattern. Mashing L1 is actually way more productive than trying to learn timings. I don't know if there is a staling mechanic like in sekiro, where mashing L1 makes the window shorter (im inclined to think there isn't, because the parry animation actually has a combo-like pair of alternate swings!), but it doesn't feel like it.
Basically, it feels like every tool in your arsenal as a player is counterproductive to the enemies you have to fight. It's frustrating.
The animations are pretty. The main character looks cool doing sekiro executes. I'm not a huge fan of Plague Doctor aesthetic, but that's a personal quibble, if you think he looks cool on the steam store page you'll appreciate how badass he looks in-game. The general aesthetics of the game itself are pretty uninspired. Areas look generic, and are kind of hard to place spatially despite the game being incredibly linear.
The story is almost invisible. Fantasy kingdom blah blah memories blah blah plague blah blah.
The framing device of having it be the player character recalling events with his companion (the princess) is actually kind of charming, but it is kind of clumsily executed, due to the game trying to keep the Soulsy atmosphere and making it not immediately obvious (even though the actual story the game is trying to tell is not nearly as complicated as dark souls, so that kind of presentation isn't necessary at all).
Worth it if it's on sale, otherwise just get Lies of P if you're really itching for a Soulslike. It understands the design decisions behind Sekiro/souls games and tries to iterate on them much more than this game (and Lies of P is far from a perfect game).

EDIT: I have beaten the game. My views, as they always do, soften. This isn't a good soulslike. It's too short. The combat, while kind of pretty, with cool animations and decent vfx, is not designed well. The story is unexceptional. The non-boss music is goofy as ♥♥♥♥ and sounds like a kid's game. But it is still satisfying to beat the bosses. The music is cool, the kill animations are cool. And being as short as it is, it doesn't feel like an insane waste of time to just gun it from boss to boss (another head-scratching decision is that non-boss enemies drop almost no souls, from start to finish they all drop less than 100) and experiment with the different plague weapons and talents. My recommendation remains the same, get this if it's on sale for like 10 dollars, otherwise buy Lies of P, but I'm less annoyed now.

Very very very cautious recommend.
Visually gorgeous, great and fun animation and art style. always a treat to see real-life photo/video used in games, and part of the game feels like going through an I Spy book.

Unfortunately, I really think that the actual GAME attached to that just isn't that interesting. It's a point and click adventure game, which, while not necessarily outdated, isn't used in a really interesting way. Navigation is as clumsy and awkward as older ones due to pretty limited movement paths through the surrealist environment (how you interact with things is also awkward and unexpected due to, you know, surrealist environment). Because movement and interaction is so clunky and awkward, the timed puzzle at the end is honestly a bit frustrating.

It also is surprisingly buggy for how light the gameplay is. I had to restart the game twice. Once because the legs walked to another screen, the head wouldn't follow, and the cursor disappeared so I couldn't interact with anything. Another because the legs moved to one spot and just kept shimmying in place as if starting the movement animation, stopping, and starting again, once again making the cursor disappear. The hint book also wouldn't update during puzzles several times.

Lastly, and I hate to use this as a negative, it's super duper short. The full game is basically a demo. And says as such with a to-be-continued at the end! And I know, 2D animation is crazy time-consuming, and game length isn't usually something you should weigh too heavily in the value of a game. But someone more adept at solving point and click adventure puzzles could finish this game in less than an hour. 15$ is a STEEP price for a game of that length.