its literally just dark souls but 2d. its still actually fun, unlike dark souls, but very overinspired? is that a thing?
apparently this was in demon souls too but im gonna voice a complaint about an absolutely STUPID mechanic
theres an npc in the main hub area that tells you about the world and the people in the hub, and as you progress you meet more people who go to the hub. however, a lot of people there start dying, and that guy is the one who warns you about it. soon it gets to the point that they die before you can even use them as vendors, and you realize this npc has been killing them. ofc you kill him back, but it wont undo the locking you out of learning useful skills.
core gameplay is fine enough, its not really hard but then again neither is dork souls. very OK soulsvania, id recommend blasphemous a lot more, and so far ender lillies isnt too shabby either.

A huge improvement from the original, but still lacking in a lot of areas like weapon variety. The bosses are fun, but the refights are... not great. The combat isn't super responsive and theres not a lot of options you have, and the refights are just insanely ramped in every direction. It felt more like I was expected to exploit the rpg mechanics as opposed to treating it like an action game.

The story is better than I expected, but it also feels super top heavy; basically everything after you unlock the gate is what you'll remember, and everything before that feels like empty wandering plot-wise.

Anyways, it's decent. Worth checking out, at least.

super underrated, the game was fantastic, loved it almost the entire way through.

the combat's great and I like how gear and abilities can be customised, though the game lacks weapon variety, with each weapon type only having a few options, some of them being the exact same.

the bosses were great, and there's some really cool and creative ones in there. same for areas. music is also great.

enemy animations can sometimes be really wonky, but when they're hand animated, they're some beautiful animations.

(non specific spoilers ahead I guess)

I also like the ridiculously cryptic requirements for the secret boss, felt like a classic creepypasta.

only thing I really didn't like was the secret requirement for the ending, which can lock you out of the ending you want depending on player skill.

So I decided to play this after watching one of my favourite streamers stream a little of it. This is a very fun souls-like game that has some funny dialog moments, like with the lubberkin who speed through societies everytime you visit them, generations going by in a matter of hours.

This was highly enjoyable and unlike Dark Souls, you don't lose all your shard used for leveling and even gain a portion every time you manage to cut down the boss's HP better than last time. This makes the game less frustraiting that Dark Souls and it means everytime you re-enter the battle area, you get that much more powerful!

Here's my stream if you're interested in watching it

I hope you all enjoy this game like I did!

For anyone who played this game before the "Afterlife" updates, I can confirm that it is much improved, in fact as far as I'm concerned it's pretty much a different game. It's not just a balance fix here and there but complete redesigning of many things. For one it actually feels like a metroidvania game now with abilities gained after bosses and actually needed to access areas and it's not just in a linear fashion anymore. It's actually quite open, I have to rate this as one of my favourite metroidvanias. It's also been given great improvements to the story. The story is pretty damn good, in fact I cried a bit during the true ending it was fantastic. The combat is also really good and I did not feel it was inaccessible, except for one point. This brings me to the one downside, the true ending is somewhat skill-gated and I think it's horrible practice to gate off narrative content, especially endings. To access it you need to defeat 5 Heroic Bosses, which are souped-up refights against previous bosses. As is often the case when souping-up bosses some of them become quite inaccessible. I was able to do it, but there are definitely people who would not be able to. And while this can be watched via youtube, the path towards the true ending really is amazing and something everyone should get to experience for themselves.

As someone who tend to dislike most Metroidvania games I'm really impressed with the fact that this one is so superb considering that initially it wasn't even designed as one and this incarnation of it is the product of years of reworking the initial release as a free expansion. Incredible job.

It has everything I want in one of these. Good, thoughtful world design. Great pacing with areas that are only as big and populated by enemies as they need to be. Very meticulous encounter design and enemy placement, and just incredible (and plentiful) boss fights.

The fact that it's so pretty and the soundtrack so consistently beautiful adds a lot too.

It's worth mentioning that the game takes a lot after Souls too, but I think it's pretty successful at borrowing some of its elements. There's a meaningful leveling system with stat allocation that makes builds matter, varied weapon types and even classes, all with their distinctive features.

The writing is surprisingly good and poignant as well, but has the caveat that, for some reason, they decided to add a lot of humor to this expansion that, while funny in isolation, is really jarring in how terribly it clashes with the tone of the rest of the game. Feels straight up out of a different game altogether... But it's really worth ignoring for the interesting narrative and of course, the wonderful package the rest of the game is.

I have very mixed feeling with this game.

I played it for 17 hours and loved almost every second of it.

The pixel art is beautiful, the soundtrack is amazing, the controls feel really good, and the boss fights are great. The story was honestly pretty appealing and well narrated. It also has a very nice touch of humor at some points, with Death making fun of you when you die, and some characters having funny dialoges.

The regular enemy combat is ok, but It ended up feeling kind of boring at some points. I guess there's a limit to how interesting you can make 2D combat and not every game can be Hollow Knight.

I guess a lot of people will complain that you get fast travel too late, and yes, you get too late, but I still think that's better than getting it right away and missing out on a lot of exploration. Still, they should give it to you a bit earlier imo.

The menus are pretty terrible. The way you equip and unequip stuff is kind of meh, and the fact that you can't use consumable from the manu sucks. Instead you have to equip them to your quick bar and use them that way. The map is also really bad. It works, but it could be a lot better.

So, everything was pretty great, I was enjoying my playthrough a lot, until I reached what I can only guess is the end of the game.

I was feeling like I was a bit underpowered for the Endless fight, so I went back and challenged some of the juiced up versions of the bosses I had defeated (I think they're called heroics?) and holy shit was I disappointed.

I still wonder -with all due respect to the devs- how can you turn something so good into something so obnoxious and unfun?

I LOVED almost all the boss fights in this game. They were by far the best part of it for me. They felt really good, well balanced, interesting, punishing but not too pushed... The heroic versions were the complete opposite: they basically gave the bosses a bunch of adds, projectiles and/or AoE abilities, which combined with the insane upscale in health and damage they get, basically turns all the fights into DPS races, because you can't just play careful, avoid attacks and get damage in when you can, because it's basically impossible to avoid all the crap that's going on.

After this experience I could've just gone back to Endless and finish the base game ignoring the heroic fights, but I felt so bad and frustrated I just dropped the game altogether. I'll probably go back and finish it at some point.

This doesn't take away from how great the game had been up until that point tho, so I'm still giving it a good rating, but I'm still really disappointed with the direction they took when designing these endgame optional fights.

Pela minha infelicidade eu não consegui fazer o 100% por que entrei no new game+ sem querer................... mas cara, foi uma experiencia sem igual. Entendo que muita gente odeia o jogo por causa da versão original, mas como a Afterlife foi a minha primeira experiencia, cara... foi incrível.

Uma exploração rica, com um mapa gigantesco e diversificado, cheio de inimigos irados e bosses de tirar o folego de tão épicos (o ultimo do final C é simplesmente um maximo) acompanhada com uma trilha sonora que entrega exatamente o clima que os bosses e as areas merecem.

O jogo é meio confuso em progressão em VÁRIOS momentos, o que é muito tosco, mas é o unico problema desse jogo em minha opinião, o resto.... o jogo me agradou em tudo que ele mostrou, exploração, lore, gameplay, dificuldade, musica, graficos... esse jogo é sensacional.

Foi uma decisão bem honrada o pessoal do original continuar ele e colocar muito conteudo novo, que valeria o preço de um jogo novo só que de graça, como desculpas pelo original, isso foi sacada de gênio, uma pena que não vamos ver muita gente falando dele por agora.

Espero que um dia o valor dele seja reconhecido.