A solid Action Search indie game, it doesn't use at all any invisible wall to hide its secret, which is a big plus for me. The game keeps adding new mechanics to make old areas be able to be explorable once again to find new secrets, but as the weakest points I found, are the facts that the fighitng kit doesn't get upgraded a lot, so by the end of the game, it can get a bit dull. There's also the fact that to complete the game, you need to do 4 full playthroughs, which becomes repetitive after the 2nd one.

Don't judge a game by its screenshots! The only reason I bought and started this game is because it was cheap on sale and I'm on a lifelong mission to have played every metroidvania ever made, but I didn't really have high hopes and I procrastinated on this one for nearly a year after buying it. It doesn't look very good in screenshots and gameplay looked stiff and stale in videos. It looks very derivative of Dark Souls, and it is. Happy to report that I was wrong, though, and that this game is actually pretty great!

I don't even know where to start praising this game, because, honestly, nearly everything is impressive and works quite well, with a few notable exceptions. The combat is a little stiff and can feel unresponsive, but the blueprint is obviously the original Dark Souls and I think that game feels pretty stiff and often frustrating as well. Most importantly, I got used to this game's feel quite easily and quickly and didn't have problems with the controls even though the game becomes quite difficult towards the end, and the fact that nearly all of the upgrades you can find increase your mobility or combat capabilities in ways that actually deepen and enrich the experience. Plus it's just fun to air-dash around a bunch. The difficulty is definitely up there with Hollow Knight, and also like Dark Souls, the game offers mostly good and fair bosses with only a few bosses or attacks that make you yell obscenities at the screen, though unfortunately with the obscenities increasing drastically in frequency towards the end of the game. The indestructible floating skull in that one boss fight can fuck right off. You know who you are and what you did, you skull bastard.

Another thing I love is that this game delivers on the -vania suffix of the genre name by actually having XP, stats and equippable loot found in both chests and from monster drops. The game even has a SOTN-style bestiary that shows you which monster drops what; after you've made them drop it, of course. The XP system is your usual Dark Souls style with souls ("karma" in this game) that you lose upon death and you level up by ranking up one stat at a time. It works, but also has the same problem Dark Souls has; it's impossible to know from the beginning what stat to focus on and you will probably end up with kind of a dumb build by the end of your first run. For example, you can't know in advance that you'll get the ability to do three mana-based power attacks and need to upgrade your MP bar to accomodate for the extra attack, so you'll probably end up ignoring that stat for a solid dozen hours because you never end up using the whole bar until you find that upgrade anyway. Never loved that design choice in DS and I don't love it here either. Thankfully, this game does offer respec at least for the messy skill tree, so you can fix specing mistakes on that front, but it comes very late in the DLC and really only helps you tweak up for the final boss. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Level design is mostly fine. Each individual room is perhaps kind of boring in the platforming layout, which is also very similar to SOTN, but the overall castle is mostly fun and compelling to explore, with a solid metroidvania structure that has you running back and forth and exploring every last pixel to find upgrades, loot and the path to the next big boss. People who hate that will be happy to hear that the game has exactly one "fake wall" that you run through, and the game tells you that it's there by marking an opening on the map. You don't need to push or swing against a single fake wall to find secrets in this one! Music is typical orchestral adventure type stuff, but it's also surprisingly pretty good. Not relaly much else to say about that. Oh, one little detail that I quite liked is that the room you just left doesn't stop existing when the next room loaded, so to speak. Any "souls" that were spawned but hadn't had time to make their way to your character is picked up on entry into the next room, and if you for example activate a slow elevator that you want to have reached the bottom floor while you head to the save room real quick, the elevator will be waiting for you when you get back. Very nicely done.

So far I've mixed praise with criticism and I do think this game has more positives than it does negatives, and very much enjoyed my time with the game, but I also think that there are a few major problems that might turn many players off.

First of all, the graphics are kind of a problem. The game looks exactly like an asset flip, which feels very mean to write if the game does indeed have custom graphics. I'm sorry artists, but the Unity asset pack vibe is strong with this game if this isn't actually an asset pack. Most of the monsters look fine and some even look great, and they get better as you get deeper into the game, but some enemies and some of the environments look either drab or outright terrible. That said, the graphics did grow on me and some of the backgrounds look pretty cool and most of the monsters ended up feeling kind of good-bad charming by the time I was done with the game. I was very turned off at first, but didn't mind so much in the end.

The endgame of the base game is also a pretty serious problem, since it's just hours of unfun content stacked on top of itself. In short: the closer you get to the finish line, the more of a boss rush the game becomes. In the first stages of endgame, you're still running around the open world and finding key items, but boss frequency keeps rising steadily until all you do is fast travel between boss doors, and then the final sprint is a straight-up boss rush where you have to re-fight about half a dozen bosses you've already defeated, while climbing a tower as an annoying-ass giant monster chases you between each boss, and you have to repeat this like five times. Fight a boss you've already killed but now in harder and more annoying form, be chased by a super-annoying asshole up a tower, repeat. Doing the same fight again but harder is super boring, and having to re-escape the annoying-ass monster is even more boring (especially since he, unlike bosses you may defeat before dying, respawns every single time you re-enter the room). This is just plain exhausting and, by the end, I wasn't having any fun at all and was fueled exclusively by stubborn determination that I wasn't going to give up one step from the finish line in a game I had loved 90% of my time with.

This is also where the design begins to fall apart, as the developers lose themselves in obsession over trying to make things difficult and forgetting to also make it fun or engaging. Many of the latter boss fights, especially the DLC, just feel like unfair bullshit and I think the perfect example of the developer obsession is in the "soul patch", the thing you fetch to get your "souls" back. In this game, they decided that it should be a hostile enemy that chases you, has more HP than some low-level enemies and does damage to you. Not symbolic 1HP damage, but actual big-boy damage on par with a medium hit from an enemy. On top of that, the game does not have the decency to leave your "soul patch" outside the boss room, so every re-attempt at a boss has you scrambling to dodge and get rid of the annoying pink orb that chases you as the boss also destroys the universe around you. This really makes no sense and is so bafflingly stupid in an otherwise very good game. You already were punished for failing at the boss; by failing at the boss and having to try again! Added punishment in making every subsequent run a little bit more difficult and annoying because the pink orb is screwing your flow up is just plain nonsense and should never have been in the game.

Another very unfortunate thing, as well, is the fact that this game saves constantly, and changes to your character and inventory will remain after death. Only your "souls" and, for some reason, weapons found through drops (but not ones found in chests) will be lost. Items found in chests, used items and rooms explored will all save even if you die. This means that if you spend healing resources on a boss and fail, those resources are permanently gone, and the shop will only sell you the base-level ones that aren't good enough for late-game bosses so the shop is basically useless. This leaves you in the frustrating position of knowing that you have a half-dozen of the item that refills your ultimate magic attack and that you could potentially cheese this very frustrating boss that you just want to be rid of so you can move on, but what if you die with one boss hit left and all of those refills spent? You now have zero for your next attempt, and worse, the rest of the game, and you don't know if there will be an even worse boss later on, so you just end up with item paralysis and don't use anything. That said, it's possible that there are enemies that will drop the high-level magic refills, which is the specific item I mostly have in mind here, but this game is unfortunately unpopular and that information does not appear to be on the internet and when I'm frustrated on a boss, I'm obviously not going to grind every single enemy in the game to try to find which drops what. This problem is mildly mitigated by the fact that you do finally find an upgraded shop towards the end of the DLC, so you can at least gear up properly for the final few fights, but that is obviously too little and too late.

In summary, a fantastic game that is criminally underlooked, but suffers some major problems that hold it back from me giving it the highest score and praise. Some might like it less than I do and I might be overrating this one because I haven't yet played similar titles like Ender Lilies, but I always love it when a metroidvania goes FULL metroidvania and includes stats, loot and XP and I always have a good time with asian-style games with lots of air-dashing around. I had a good time with most of the bosses and very much enjoyed exploring the castle. Some consider it too linear in that you stay in one area until you've mostly beaten it and then move on with little reason to go back, aside from some minor secret-finding, but I thought the castle design was just involved enough to never get boring. This is one of the longest reviews I've posted in years and I'm still coming up with more things I should've mentioned, good and bad, but I'm just going to stop now and say that this is very worth checking out for the miniscule price I paid on sale.

It's a very competent but very derivative soulsvania hindered by odd design decisions.

The presentation is uneven, featuring good visuals but music that sounds like a Korean MMO ad. It nails the gameplay well enough though it does very silly things like respawning the player at the last save statue with all the souls intact upon quitting and reloading, which negates a lot of the soulslike element: in trouble and carrying a lot of souls? Just quit and reload with no harm done.

Another is locking important perks and upgrades (most notably estus upgrades) behind a plethora of arbitrary walls such as raw linear progression, exploration of optional areas and plain old level grinding: not being able to unlock the skills from the next tier until you waste enough tokens on the ones you do not want from the previous one is never fun.

They also made magic way too overpowered and to balance it out severely limited the number of its uses in combat, which leaves a sour taste in your mouth, as you know the shiny new spell you found is so MP-expensive that you'll only be able to use it twice unless you waste rare recovery items.

That aside, we are looking at a very dynamic game with a quality map to uncover (albeit they avoided using breakable walls entirely), mostly quality bosses with reasonably masterable patterns and a real wealth of weapons and equipment to combine. It starts out as a slightly more mobile Salt and Sanctuary but by the halfway point onwards the mobility upgrades will see the player double jumping and triple airdashing around in eight directions, which is a lot of fun, especially when the levels are designed with that in mind.

A really sore point is that the final third of the game is essentially an uninterrupted string of boss fights, literally minutes apart, which will inevitably tend to tire the player out as the exploration buffer between an intense boss encounter and the next is removed. At the very end it even turns into a lazy boss rush, recycling many of the defeated ones from before, which definitely cheapens the experience for the sake of padding.

Well worth playing for fans of the genre but newcomers have better choices.