Really enjoyable but sadly cut short, this is basically an indie castlevania clone with its own flourishes so if you like sotn style castlevania games (with multiple weapons and spells and such) you’ll probably love this. Infact, gameplay wise, I may even like it more than sotn and aria of sorrow, which is high praise, because it offers a really interesting and unique elemental spirit system that is fun to use and a bunch of welcome quality of life changes like being able to strike diagonally and upwards. The bow is also a great addition but can be a little awkward to control. There’s a great range of weapons, and though its very linear, the action is constant and rewarding, encouraging aggressive, close quarters fighting instead of hunkering down and fighting from a distance, since you want to keep your elementals’ ‘meters’ up to dish out max damage and gradually restore hp.

This is also a gorgeous looking game with some really wonderful pixel art and animations. There’s weight and intensity behind all attacks and genuine expressiveness in its characters and sentimental moments which is often missing from similarly styled games. Deedlit is a cool character with a fabulous design and the story is quite lean and easy to follow, but still meaningful and drives the game forward nicely.

Despite the lovely animations and effects in isolation though, boss fights can be a bit of a visual mess, with too much busyness to keep track of things, especially when you need to watch your tiny hp, ap and both elemental bars whilst you’re fighting. Its nice having enemy health bars onscreen mind you, and sometimes the cluttered visuals were cool in their own right during particularly frantic encounters, but there’s also times where the very intentional, methodical vania style combat verges on being a bullet hell game and it doesn’t really work too well. This, the length and maybe some grating audio does hold it back a little, but not enough to make this anything but a great metroidvania that is 100% worth checking out.