After completing this game 100% twice now, I can definitively say it is truly a masterpiece. A beautiful and extremely well-designed platformer that everyone should get the chance to play. The visuals are gorgeous, with amazing pixel art and vibrant colors. The music is just plain fantastic. The gameplay is super tight, and very smart in its approach to game design. Each new mechanic introduced blends in seamlessly with the rest, and gives a nice, steady difficulty curve that never feels unfair. A beautiful story about mental health and overcoming the obstacles within yourself. Every single aspect of the game comes together perfectly. One of the best indie games of all time.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, but holy hell is it an unpolished, horribly designed mess. It had good ideas, but all of them get snuffed out by the horrendous enemy design and lack of polish on every aspect of the game.

Let's start with the good, or at least somewhat good: the art. The art of Eastern Exorcist is pretty great, actually. The 2D painted look works really well for the game, and the visual designs of the enemies specifically stand out as being really interesting. I wish as much detail and effort was put into the rest of the game's presentation. The game's UI and menus could use some work. I had to deal with tutorial pop ups for information the game already told me about three times too many, and the layout/information in the games' menus is needlessly overcomplicated. Also, the game's cutscenes are videos caked into the game that play at super low resolution, with a little note in the upper right hand corner telling you how to fix the video player if it breaks - needless to say, not a good look. The story is just fine, I thought that Lu's story was a bit more compelling than Xue's, but they were both pretty simple and fine enough. A lot of the game's environments are just bland and boring, at least half of them are the same dull grey and green color palette. And the game is strictly linear, which I guess isn't a fault in itself, but for a soulslike just feels off. There's a couple of opportunities to do some optional things in both stories, but they're extremely simple. To top it all off, I'm pretty sure the developers just used the default Unity font for the game's text, which does not fit AT ALL with the Eastern theming. It makes me sad because the art was this game's saving grace, but more time was needed to add in all of the extra details that make the entire experience seamless. Unfortunately, I was constantly reminded of the game's rough edges throughout the whole game.

Then we get to the combat. It's not bad, and I think it had the POTENTIAL to be super fun, but it gets ruined by a couple of things. For one, the parry is extremely inconsistent, and made fighting bosses a slog sometimes because I just could not reliably land a parry. I completed this game all the way through and got all of the achievements, so I had ample time and skill with the parry, it really was just super finnicky, which felt awful. Secondly, the game allows the player some expression by letting them choose four out of seven playstyles for their character. But, in reality, it doesn't make sense to be constantly swapping between different styles. Both characters had one style that was just clearly better than all of the others, so it's in your best interest to just use that one style the whole time, and only use your resources on that and upgrading your character. And again, the developers needlessly complicate these styles by shoving a wall of text in front of the player, so they have to decipher how to even play the game through translation errors and unknown terminology. Finally, some of the boss and enemy designs in this game, from a combat standpoint, are just some of the worst I've ever seen, plain and simple. Many times you will do something skillfully and correctly, and still get punished for it. And for some reason fire and projectiles are going to be your worst nightmare playing this game. The game lets you parry those too, but half the time it gets you killed because you automatically do your follow-up attack when you parry them, and then get hit by the rest of the projectile volley or other enemies while you're stuck in that animation.

Besides all of that, there are just a bunch of little things that add up to make the game look and feel extremely unpolished. It's not buggy, but its very amateurish, its pretty clear the studio was either rushed or inexperienced at the very least. This one really just needed a LOT more time in the oven so it could become something that would be at least decent. The art is beautiful, just sad its wasted on a pretty frustrating experience.

This game was not what I expected, but in a good way! Right off the bat the visuals are breathtaking, with gorgeous 2D sprites blending in seamlessly with a 3D environment. And the gameplay loop is surprisingly addicting. It was very easy to just keep completing side missions instead of putting the game down and going to bed.

I think the highlight of the gameplay is the combat, which is surprisingly open-ended and fluid, especially as you unlock more and more upgrades. The developers did the best job with CJ, who allows for some really cool combos, and when fully upgraded, can just lock enemies down in infinite strings, which feels amazing. She's also the most agile of the three party members, making her the obvious pick for best character to play as. I like Garoo and Isha as well, but it definitely feels like CJ got the most attention, she is the main character after all.

I do have a couple of gripes that keep this game from being rated higher in my mind concerning gameplay. For one, I don't really like the decision of having enemies damage you on contact. It interrupts the flow of combat in ways that feel unintended, like weird trades with enemies or accidentally halting your attacks. I also think that the way status effects are implemented is poor. They last for way too long, and locking you out of switching characters when affected for that entire duration is really frustrating, and slows the game down significantly. I didn't really mind these things at first, but the final boss of the game really exacerbated these two issues for me, as I didn't really struggle with the other fights as much as this one because of these two pain points.

But overall, the game was a blast, and has a really nice gameplay loop that feels rewarding, even if it starts to get a bit repetitive towards the end. The presentation is top-notch, with stunning visuals, pretty good music and environments, and a simple but-fun-story. The gameplay was what made this game for me, definitely the highlight, but there's always room for improvement. Looking forward to playing the sequel!