Recent reviews by Keith

A perfectly reasonable soulslike metroidvania that seemingly got marred by a late-in-development drinking game to purposefully turn the game into a frustrating slog.

“Let’s make it really ambiguous when you take damage so it’s hard to tell what’s happening when multiple enemies are on screen.”
“Let’s make ‘use ladder’, ‘use door, ‘pick up item’, and ‘sprint’ the same button with no ability to remap it! And let’s have challenge rooms with rare treasure that spawn the exit on top of your loot so you can leave by accident, and not let the player back in!”
“Let’s have hazards that do damage, hazards that respawn the player nearby, and hazards that are instant death, and not have any indication which is which! Oh, and let’s also make it inconsistent what ledges are grabbable, and make it so that mantling and dropping down are inconsistent!”
“Let’s have have a spell system that requires an off-hand item, requiring a player to either abandon shields, abandon two-handed weapons, or abandon 2/3rds of the game’s abilities! Also we should make it so two-handed weapons can’t block or have any attack string more complex than a sweeping overhead.”
“Let’s make it so you can’t pause cutscenes, and every time you restart the game you have to recompile the shaders.”
“Let’s make a half-dozen bloated skill trees and give each class one decent ability so cherrypicking gives you a bunch of garbage stats.”
"Let's have a detailed bestiary with enemy drops, weaknesses, and location, but only let you view it from the hub."
"Let's add an XP track for every single vendor but lock what they can craft behind finding blueprints instead of giving the player that item in the blueprint chest!"
"Let's have a map where sometimes when you add a map market, it'll instead delete a random one you've already placed!"

The second-to-second gameplay is fine but christ almighty it’s less death of a thousand cuts and more death of two dozen really solid punches to the head.

Other reviews have explained in depth so I won't rephrase, but this is a damn solid dungeon crawler in the vein of King's Field and while it does have its snags and peculiarities on the whole I had a wonderful time.

A damn fine A-Arrrr-PG. Sure, there's small snags like unclear keywords, a wildly lopsided skill tree, clunky boat steering, and occasional deaths out of nowhere. But especially for $5 it's a ton of fun running around with double pistols, a hand cannon, or just slamming an anchor into people. Spells are evocative and the rune system is a neat take on the Diablo gems. The endgame is a little shallow but the game itself is a fun romp.

A much more polished version of the first game. It's a shame parries no longer take off chunks of the health bar as that lead to a unique combat rhythm, but overall the movement and combat are much smoother. High stamina is now a nice damage boost instead of suddenly eating your attack or dash input, enemy abilities can be recovered after death, and ground movement has a fun dash->leap cadence. I have some small gripes with the game thus far but the devs have been rapidly patching the most annoying ones, so overall I highly recommend it.

---

I wrote my review when only partway into the game. My opinion of it has now shifted.

To the devs - It is considered polite to inform the players when your game is in Early Access. The final act is nakedly unfinished, with hallways full of unbalanced enemies, platforming gauntlets predicated on movement abilities that are too inconsistent to use reliably, bosses which do not distinguish between attacks which must be parried and must be dodged, and one boss in particular which I could believe is only able to take damage from parries as it invincibly flies from attack string to attack string.

I'm not going to mark the review as negative, as it does spend 10-20 hours as a solid metroidvania, but the game is not done. I'll come back when you finish it.

Come for the bunny, stay because the time trials are an excellent test of movement, sequencing, and aim. Wonderful little game, though I wish it was more of a collectathon than a speedrun platformer.

Unless you're already a fan of this developer's other work, stay away. Combat is stiff to the point of dysfunction due to inconsistent range and hit detection, and the lunge will send you seemingly a random distance forwards. Movement feels like the character's ankles have been bound while enemies zip around you with no restraint. The music is short loops of blaring trumpets, the textures give no sense of space or direction, and above all else the game just feels abhorrent to play. I'm a big fan of overambitious jank with low budget and obvious concessions. Just this week I played Bargalian Regicide and that's just as rough in a lot of ways. The difference is that it was $2, felt good to move in, and wasn't endlessly dripping in delusions of grandeur.

"Good" is such a strong and myopic word to describe things. Bargalian Regicide has an aesthetic unlike anything else I've played, at once evoking Zeno Clash, Oblivion, and the alien sections of Half-Life. The music is ethereal, haunting, and instills a pleasant sense of confused unease. The combat takes some getting used to but is frantic and enjoyable, especially firing magic attacks while strafing through crowds. There are vistas and moments in this game unlike anything else I've played, and at $2 that's a ludicrous bargain regardless of the amount of jank in the tank.

The main reason I recommend against this game isn't the bevy of other options for dungeon-heavy Zelda clones, be they Link to the Past randomizers or games like Pipistrello or Fountains. It's not the stiff combat with sword swings that are easily punished, few i-frames when hit, and against respawning enemies with janky hitboxes. It's not the puzzle design that's deliberately a laborious maze of switches and sluggish backtracking (and god help you if you have to walk with a torch) rather than actual puzzles. It's not even the fact dungeons are structured like levels so if you miss a chest and don't get the gem you need to progress or if you need to take an alternate exit for a second path, you can't just go back in and grab what you missed, you have to redo the entire dungeon; every puzzle, every chest, every fight, top to bottom.

No, the main reason I recommend against this game is that in the level summary it describes the number of times you ran out of health and had to respawn as "Times Unalived". How utterly capitulatory and craven. There is absolutely no place for that insipid newspeak driven by paranoid alignment with a social media algorithm. You have endless words to spare for the generic dialogue and plodding lore of this game, whether it's in text boxes I have to slowly plink through the map back to camp to read or in a nauseatingly rote english-letter cipher. You can use the correct one to tell the player when they DIED.

Hollow Knight by Kyle Thompson is the overall aesthetic here. The game starts you off with jump, wall jump, omnidirectional airdash, a sword and shield that use stamina, a shuriken that uses magic, and that's before you get to the charms. So far the best phrase I could use to describe it is "rough-hewn", there's a lot of ideas and ambition here but they're buried by blind mimicry and unfocused design in a way that seems to be missing more than polish. I've certainly played worse and for what it's worth I'm bemused by the overall clumsiness, but come into this with a little more patience than you might otherwise.

--
I beat the game in one sitting, which on the one hand means I clearly found it compelling but it's also quite short at under 4 hours for a fairly completionist playthrough. I'm not sure whether to count the fact that it's very easy to pour resources into leveling up your damage and then use the axe and caltrops to absolutely churn through bosses as an upside or a downside. I wish the enemies weren't very shallow reskins of Hollow Knight enemies because the times when the bosses were more unique there were some cool designs even if the fights themselves boiled down to 'big guy rushes you with sword' or 'big guy teleports around shooting fireballs at you'. Overall it's definitely more of a soulslike than a metroidvania given all your movement abilities are available from the start and the overall emphasis on combat, but it's a short game by a solo dev. There's going to be limits in scope and scale. There's heart here, but there's also serious gaps. If you're the sort of person who managed to see this game's store page it's probably in your wheelhouse and you can definitely do worse.

Every puzzle game should have a Midna