Bland is the word that describes almost all of this game. It all feels like it's going through a checklist of mechanics approved by comitee almost like any AAA game does, and doing the lamest possible execution of all of them, resulting in a gameplay devoid of absolutely any personality.

The spritework and visuals are indeed gorgeous and nicely animated, but even the illusion of a pixel grid gets shattered the moment you take a look at the hud or even the sprites themselves, and notice the abundance of resolution inconsistencies.
The hud is full of bars that fill up with pixel perfect accuracy, instead of respecting the pixel size of the hud. The revolver gauge isn't like this, why can't the rest be as well?
Everything across the screen has a different pixel size: sprites, scenery, overlapping elements in the hud. And more often than not, none of these follow any kind of pixel grid.
The font is specially godawful, they just picked a font that looked retro enough and slapped it in. Of course, when rendered, the font has it's own pixel size and the dialogue loves to abuse italics with it, making it look ugly as sin. And you'll be constantly reminded that you're playing a lazy and fake imitation of what it claims to pay homage to, since you'll be looking at this font both in the menus, and the cutscenes and dialogue; which the game loves to constantly have in order to develop it's story, rich of lore and suspense.
Except the story just forgets half of it's own elements set up in the prologue just to have a uninteresting "chosen one" and "fantasy racism" story in which nothing really happens and then unceremoniously and abruptly end the game at the climax it's been building up to, all for the sake of sequelbaiting. No payoff, no answers.

I would say this game should have been a VN instead, but then they would have had to write an actual ending.

[h1]It's like Blasphemous but instead of having slow and frustrating combat and bad platforming it's just bland and painfully uninteresting in it's execution.[/h1] Bland is the word that describes almost all of this game. It all feels like it's going through a checklist of mechanics approved by comitee almost like any AAA game does, and doing the lamest possible execution of all of them, resulting in a gameplay devoid of absolutely any personality. The spritework and visuals are indeed gorgeous and nicely animated, but even the illusion of a pixel grid gets shattered the moment you take a look at the hud or even the sprites themselves, and notice the abundance of resolution inconsistencies. The hud is full of bars that fill up with pixel perfect accuracy, instead of respecting the pixel size of the hud. The revolver gauge isn't like this, why can't the rest be as well? Everything across the screen has a different pixel size: sprites, scenery, overlapping elements in the hud. And more often than not, none of these follow any kind of pixel grid. The font is specially godawful, they just picked a font that looked retro enough and slapped it in. Of course, when rendered, the font has it's own pixel size and the dialogue loves to abuse italics with it, making it look ugly as sin. And you'll be constantly reminded that you're playing a lazy and fake imitation of what it claims to pay homage to, since you'll be looking at this font both in the menus, and the cutscenes and dialogue; which the game loves to constantly have in order to develop it's story, rich of lore and suspense. Except the story just forgets half of it's own elements set up in the prologue just to have a uninteresting "chosen one" and "fantasy racism" story in which nothing really happens and then unceremoniously and abruptly end the game at the climax it's been building up to, all for the sake of sequelbaiting. No payoff, no answers. I would say this game should have been a VN instead, but then they would have had to write an actual ending.