Man, I really wanted to like this game more than I did.

The game just felt monotonous and unsatisfying to me. I started off with a lot of good will towards the game, but my mood quickly soured in my second or third play session when the penny dropped about the gameplay loop: it's three dungeons of four three-phase enemy gauntlets that unlock a big gauntlet to a mediocre boss with set patterns. I never want to see another enemy gauntlet in my life after playing this game.

Aside from an NPC that upgrades your damage, dexterity etc., there is no visible sense of progression or growth in this game. Despite finding most collectibles in this run, I only found one quarter of one health upgrade and three quarters of a magic upgrade. Yeah you get two new magic weapons, but you still have to aim them and they all have the same wind-up time, so you just end up seeing different colour magic on the screen. No visible or tangible feelings of progress, combined with the entire game following the same gameplay loop, just felt so damn unsatisfying.

I keep hovering between 2.5 and 3/5, but I've decided on 2.5 for the simple fact that the deliberate choices made in the creation of this game have made me not want to play another game made by the creators. Cycling through the indie games I've played recently, I want to play more from the Pseudoregalia dev, I want to play more from the FAITH dev, I want to play more from the DREDGE devs, I don't want to play more from the devs of this game.

At least it looks cute and the music is great.

You ever look at something and think 'No this is fine, I'M the problem'? For years, this was me with Sekiro.

I'm trying not to get into 'my life story in a recipe' territory, but I dropped this game three times before this successful fourth attempt. My puny dex brain struggled with sweeps punishing my dodges, I struggled to work the vertical axis into my gameplay, and I suck at parrying and am the biggest choke artist you'll ever meet. I couldn't even get past minibosses.

After playing Elden Ring, a part of me wondered if I would be better at the vertical aspect of the game. I'm so thankful for this little theory because this fourth attempt was now way more successful. I still sucked at parrying, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

I went way off the beaten path before returning to the main objectives and had a blast. I know there's a certain boss people say will teach you parrying, but I spent a day or two learning how to parry from an optional sideboss. I think I much preferred doing this as I felt less pressure knowing how bad I sucked wasn't keeping me from progressing the game, I was choosing to do this.

I would go as far as to say that Sekiro has made me a better and more confident gamer. I've beaten some hard ass bosses and super bosses in games, but I think the knowledge, confidence and composure you need to get far in Sekiro is one of a kind. This game made me feel good because the game was communicating to me that I was good.

I have some minor gripes with the game but I think they're far too subjective to detract from the quality of it. For example, I personally hated a series of bosses because I felt it was a dumb tonal shift from the shinobi fantasy I was enjoying, but I've heard I'm in the minority here so I'll take that L. I'm also sad that we didn't get more content for at least two characters because they sounded so damn cool, but I'd feel like a rat reducing the score because their writing was too good. Plus part of me wonders how influential Daddy Activision was in that decision.

I think the funniest compliment I can give this game is that I simply didn't approach it the way I usually approach Fromsoft games. I'm not afraid to read guides, find important items, make sure I have the good shit etc. I ended up missing a bunch of stuff (like the umbrella) simply because I didn't want to pause the game and read, I just wanted to keep playing. Another playthrough maybe!

Fromsoft cooked, holy shit. I'm so glad I could get over my dumb brain worms.

Between this and Super Metroid, it's a big year for me finishing games where everything's said that's needed to be said.

I can't stop thinking about what this game would have been like to play when it came out. I admit it's hard to say this removed from decades of context, but the game feels like it knows it's genre-defining, especially with the mic drop of the ending. Having some of the most memorable and hard-hitting dialogue about grief in a game written in 1997 is just incredible.

I think two powerful markers of an amazing game are not wanting it to end (I felt this in spades) and not being able to think of 'that part' that you don't want to replay. Not only would I happily replay it today, but I'm probably gonna go install Remake.

Also Red XIII got the final hit in the game THAT'S MY BOY RIGHT THERE.

I'm a big fan of the Girls Mode/Style Savvy/Style Boutique games and have longed for something to fill the hole. This fills the hole with many caveats.

Do NOT expect this to play like Style Savvy. There is no story mode, no store to build, no contests, no money, no narrative. The entire focus of the game is dressing people up, whether it's NPCs that wander around the world or actual players that load into the world in the online mode.

The pros for me are how you now get clothes. You see it? You like it? You want it? You got it. If you see someone wandering around in something you like, you can 'Like' it and it's yours to keep forever and to use as many times as you want. As someone who hated keeping a stock of items I detested the look of incase a sporty NPC walked in, it's nice not to feel so obliged to stock stuff you hate, it's just in your inventory already.

The cons for me are...how you get clothes. Everything in this game just seems incredibly random. While the method of getting clothes is nice, it's entirely subject to whoever is wandering around or whatever players load into your game. I've heard people gush about NPCs that I haven't encountered, instead I have mom NPCs who just love every outfit I put together and then say they're 'saving it for Date Night'! Outfits are random. NPCs are random. The amount of likes and followers you get seems to be pretty random. I feel like people's experience is completely dependent on RNG in this one, and that doesn't really sit well with me. When can I expect to see those fun NPCs? Will I ever?

I LOVE making outfits for actual players and having them make outfits for me, it genuinely does make me smile and I try my hardest to craft outfits for people that will make them smile. It only took me around 4-5 hours to reach the credits on this game which is why I've decided to review it, but this will be a pick-up-and-play game for me for a while as I boot up online mode and make outfits for players.

Cute little game. It seems redundant to call it Cat Simulator, but it's funny how accurate it is. I feel that the developers designed puzzle solutions with the insight that players would automatically be little cat jerks when playing. I'm trying to keep this spoiler-free, but I did find the introduction and quick removal of what I thought would be a key gameplay mechanic to be quite confusing. Thankfully the game is quite short (most people say 6 hours but I clocked 8 exploring), otherwise it really would end up feeling repetitive.

I'd recommend knocking this off your backlog if you've just finished a huge JRPG or open world game, the game is fairly linear apart from two times, and even then it's quite linear in its deviation from the main plot.

I'm at the final stretch of the game and I sadly can't bring myself to finish it. I was a Kickstarter backer so it's bittersweet to abandon it, but as other reviewers have said I'm very conflicted on this game.

In my time online I've seen my fair share of Devil May Cry 4 combo videos on Scarecrows. The combo potential for this game is certainly cool and I've even seen some Vernal Edge combos on Twitter, but I feel that things suffer for this. It's been 10+ years since a game's enemy variety has bored me so much. I feel that treating enemies like dummies for combo videos has ultimately led to a boring and repetitive gaming experience. The other element of it, the platforming, can be very floaty, frustrating and unsatisfying. As other people have pointed out, this is a Metroidvania without a double jump.

There are other elements that are either confusing or frustrating. It can take a frustratingly long time to find a map in an area. At one point I spent ~40 minutes traversing an area without a map, I entered the screen that contained the map, a cutscene played, and I got teleported to the overworld! Why would you dangle the map in front of me like that? I genuinely don't understand, it just seems cruel and removed any motivation I had to return to that area. A sadly frustrating, albeit more subjective element, is how I just don't care about the story, characters or the overworld. I'm not the type of person who needs a compelling story to power me through an action-oriented game, but if I'm bored by enemies and bosses and there's nothing else keeping me hyped for the ending, I may as well abandon it.

With the wealth of amazing Metroidvanias out there, I'd recommend only picking this up if the game is on sale for >50% off. It's my opinion that this is a Metroidvania game for people who combo the Scarecrows in DMC4's Bloody Palace -- make of that what you will.