There is clearly so much effort and passion and heart put into this that it kind of pains me to say it's one of the most miserably frustrating experiences I've had playing a game in a long time.

First, the positive: the whole aesthetic is top notch. I'm not the biggest fan of pixel art, but this is how it's done. The whole visual design drips with such a wonderfully moody feel, elevated more by the brash, gothic music.

The problem in this game, for there is only one, is the controls. This is not roleplaying as an eldritch god controlling the armies of evil, it's a simulation for herding cats. Your rally point is not saying "go here", it's saying "go in this vague, general area", and even then, units will just wander off the complete opposite direction for literally no reason. This is made even worse by the fact that units engage enemies as soon as they see them. This means if one happens to feel like wandering too far away and engages the enemy army, it'll peel off from your main force to be slaughtered on his own little kamikaze. The vague movement controls and complete lack of any targeting system makes strategy essentially non-existent; ranged units would frequently decide to focus fire on pointless barricades while they're being shelled by multiple enemies. Every encounter boils down to throwing everybody into a mosh pit and hoping you kill them first, so any unit meant to be more clever than that is useless. Cats in particular feel worth mentioning as being completely unusable; as soon as you run into an enemy behind a barricade, every cat will leap over the defenses straight into the meat grinder.

I played Pikmin, a fairly similar game, after playing this (review soon tm). That game had the good sense to make pretty much all of its enemies "big guy that just kind of swats at you", as that's about all you can deal with when you have an army of the stupidest soldiers known to man (or whatever Olimar is). In this game, meanwhile, they expect you to deal with Bloodborne players dodge rolling and shooting and big heavies unleashing AOE attacks at a moment's notice, amongst other things, while you're trying to get your fishman to stop dry humping a fountain. You watch helplessly as your troops are massacred, continuously restarting the section until enough of them manage to fight back that it's even possible to move on.

There's a decent variety of content, but most of it is underwhelming, to say the least. Only one of the other cult leaders seemed even remotely usable (the idea of expecting me to go through this slaughterhouse capped at one lich and nothing else is laughable). Most of the units you unlock are either pretty weak (droghers, maggots) or too niche to ever be useful in a game where you can't actually plan your attacks at all (toads, black cats). There are more branching paths with more unlocks and levels to see, but I honestly struggled to find the motivation to finish this once. It's four hours long and it felt like a lifetime.

A neat little reverse-horror Pikmin-esque rougelite. The lovecraftian elements are fun and seeing all of your little deep sea horrors trample across the screen tearing up the poor townsfolk feels very satisfying. Though some units definitely feel stronger than others, there's enough variety to make your armies feel fairly different each level. Actually controlling your mob of creatures can feel a smidge frustrating which wouldn't have been so bad if the difficulty was just slightly easier but as it is there were a couple moments where I ended up frustrated that the little guys just kinda kept running into their death due to the controls feeling like the "brush" you're using is just a bit too big. Overall, though, it's a pretty fun mob game that doesn't overstay its welcome.