A very well designed and unique card based roguelike. This genre really blew up after Slay the Spire, but unfortunately none of them really innovated enough for me to get into them. This game is simple, well designed and fun to play. Building a run requires a bit of skill, luck, and knowledge of the game, and its a pretty perfect balance of each. My biggest gripe with the game is some of the card descriptions can be confusing, at times its hard to tell if a game means cards in your hand, your hand played, or left in your hand, for example. Otherwise though, its a wonderful game and i'd highly recommend it even if you've fallen off of the roguelike deckbuilders after StS.

This game is absolutely sick. The melee combat feels chunky and satisfying with great animations and very solid combos that feel amazing to execute. The roguelike progression is also very good with a nice variety of things to unlock including new combos, weapons, base upgrades, ect. My only real negative is the artstyle, and its not so much a negative as i think it looks great but I can't play it for very long without getting eye strain/headaches, even after fiddling with the settings. There is a dark grey mode that does go easier on the eyes but it REALLY takes away from the asthetic to me so I don't want to use it. Its unfortunately a game I have to play an hour at a time then take a break from it for a few hours at least. Everything else about the game is fantastic and thats really just a me issue, I'd highly recommend this to any fast paced action game fans/roguelike enjoyers.

So I'll start with what I liked: I thought the art direction was pretty great, and the soundtrack quite good. The combat and movement was initially fun. Thats about all the positives for me personally. I found the metroidvania elements tacked on for no real reason, and the story that it was presenting to be pretty mediocre with uninteresting characters and a pretty run of the mill revenge-esque story, at least at the bit I stopped. The crafting and cooking are also like... why? Your just filling the game with unnecessary bloat when you had a really good innitial gameplay setup. The issue with the gameplay and movement is, it doesn't really evolve and gets old FAST. after doing a few cool spins and parrys you pretty much experienced the highlights from what I could tell. Its not a bad game, especially if you dont mind the 10,000th metroidvania, but its not what I hoped. I wish they had focused and evolved the core gameplay and movement, evolved it in interesting ways and cut out all the crud. As it stands I have no desire to finish it.

I dont know if this is just a demo for a larger planned game but even if its meant to be just a solo standalone thing, its quite good actually. The hook movement feels great, the combat is fun and satisfying, and the art direction is pretty decent. The biggest issue is the performance, I couldn't get it to run very well unless i turned everything down to medium, but i can forgive it since its free and plays fine on medium.

Surprisingly good, hopefully theres a full experience of this eventually but even if there isn't this stands on its own for a quick hour.

So I wouldn't say its a 'bad' game, but its just not that engaging. Aesthetically, very cool. I really liked the world and enemy designs, the weapons aesthetically were cool, the level design mostly flowed together well. My biggest issue was the impact and feel of the weapons was just, very unsatisfying. It didn't help that the story that was kind of being told was really generic dark fantasy stuff. It could be totally fine, and if the actual combat was more than very basic this stuff would probably even add to it for me, but when the combat is so boring I tend to focus on other aspects more, and it makes the issues more glaring.

Not a bad game, not good enough for me to want to finish it after playing for about 3 hours