Shenobi
2020
Five stars if you don't count the Black & White DLC, even if it's supposed to give a definitive ending to the game. I 100%ed all the maps other than the DLC one and beat Chuka in the DLC, couldn't figure out how to progress and peaced out on it with 80% map completion.
I think it's my kind of platforming and exploration-based Metroidvania and I appreciate the potential levels of nonlinearity in it that are tied specifically to your ability to understand your mechanics fully (some of these skill sets can be learned via found notes in some areas).
There were a few minor issues, such as the camera not going back to center when doing the down-dash ability and the lack of ability to have quest markers in case you're looking for someone or something in particular -- this is especially a pain in the case of finding all the robots (which I had already found before I got the quest started, so I just skipped that whole deal), as well as the Subway Depot quest and a generator quest for a particular region -- it asks you to turn on generators and you can 100% the map without finding all of the generators if you're like me and simply didn't look in a particular direction in one room.
I think my only other gripe was very minor and involved a particular ability you eventually get that is really fun, but can make some of your other abilities become a bit more finicky, without going into spoiler territory for some of the cool stuff you get.
Ended up dropping 24 hours on it for 100% map completion for everywhere other than the DLC and gathered all relevant items in the game but didn't finish a couple side quests. Absolutely worth it at full price and I'd say it's worth a look for any Metroidvania player -- if you see a sale, snatch it up!
Also, shout-outs to the dev for being cool in the Steam discussions when a Dutch person called his game "cringe" because in Dutch, "haak" means "hook" and you have a hook weapon, even though the dev speaks Cantonese and "haak" means "black" because your brother (the main quest point of the game has you seeking him out) is "baak", which means "white". The very polite correction followed by dead silence from the Dutch user was golden.
I think it's my kind of platforming and exploration-based Metroidvania and I appreciate the potential levels of nonlinearity in it that are tied specifically to your ability to understand your mechanics fully (some of these skill sets can be learned via found notes in some areas).
There were a few minor issues, such as the camera not going back to center when doing the down-dash ability and the lack of ability to have quest markers in case you're looking for someone or something in particular -- this is especially a pain in the case of finding all the robots (which I had already found before I got the quest started, so I just skipped that whole deal), as well as the Subway Depot quest and a generator quest for a particular region -- it asks you to turn on generators and you can 100% the map without finding all of the generators if you're like me and simply didn't look in a particular direction in one room.
I think my only other gripe was very minor and involved a particular ability you eventually get that is really fun, but can make some of your other abilities become a bit more finicky, without going into spoiler territory for some of the cool stuff you get.
Ended up dropping 24 hours on it for 100% map completion for everywhere other than the DLC and gathered all relevant items in the game but didn't finish a couple side quests. Absolutely worth it at full price and I'd say it's worth a look for any Metroidvania player -- if you see a sale, snatch it up!
Also, shout-outs to the dev for being cool in the Steam discussions when a Dutch person called his game "cringe" because in Dutch, "haak" means "hook" and you have a hook weapon, even though the dev speaks Cantonese and "haak" means "black" because your brother (the main quest point of the game has you seeking him out) is "baak", which means "white". The very polite correction followed by dead silence from the Dutch user was golden.
2023
I bounced off this so hard.
Credit to them for nailing the Bloodborne aesthetic (for better or worse in some cases) -- it's clearly what they were aiming for, even down to that sound you'd hear when arriving in a new area in Bloodborne...which gets really old when you're fast traveling all the time in The Last Faith.
People mention the boss fights as being solid in this game and for me, they were just rather run-of-the-mill experiences, with maybe the exception of Edwyn (which felt like a fun dance) or the Yegor & Leena fight.
People also mention that generic enemies get pretty old and that group battles are a pain and I'm fully inclined to agree -- especially in regard to challenge rooms and a particular icy area of the game. Challenge rooms are supposed to make you deal with threats you've mostly disposed of by themselves in unwieldy groups...which could be fun tactically, but ends up just feeling more annoying than anything. That is, until they decide to add in enemies you've never encountered up to that point, who often will surprise you while you're disposing of the ones you're already familiar with. There's a very "gotcha!" feel to some challenge room fights because it feels like they wanted to take the idea of enemies besting you because you're not aware of your surroundings and then cram it into a 2D game that doesn't give you the ability to really look around quickly when you're dodging enemies (a little more on this later). What should be an "Oh, I should have paid attention to that!" moment often turns into a "How was I supposed to be remotely prepared for that?" moment instead and it gets old.
I mentioned a particular icy area because there are hazards throughout the game that love to deal contact damage to you and you've got that Castlevania knockback going on where you might as well go grab a coffee while you wait to get up, it feels that long. Some of these hazards will be set up to knock you into pits to create an instakill moment (yes, there are pits, but the map is usually good about identifying them, unlike with some specific cases with Blasphemous). Some of these hazards are set up to just bounce you directly into enemies and happen to be on a path of sheets of ice that make you slide everywhere, making the whole trip a cumbersome experience.
The biggest offender for combat, however, is the lack of invincibility frames. If an enemy hits you and you're starting to get knocked back and two other enemies decide to hit you at the same time, you eat all three hits immediately. You can be juggled by an enemy group if you're unlucky and it feels like you just got invited to a mid-tier Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 match, except your lifebar will generally dissipate in 3-4 hits, depending on whether you've been upgrading your Vitality stat at all. One note -- there is a boss that combo juggles you and does significantly less damage during these juggles if they catch you off guard, and I did kind of enjoy seeing it in this respect, as it felt like the potential for what you also should be capable of, but generally aren't. The fact is, most regular enemies die to just slash-spam if you're upgrading weapons at regular intervals, so they become nuisances that drop the usual Soulslike currency when they're not just being challenge room pains.
I think Bloodborne's system works really well for Bloodborne, but shoving the limited storage system into The Last Faith feels just excessive, especially when they decided to forego some of the solid design decisions for Bloodborne in the process. Aggressive combat to promote getting your health back? Not present. Abysmally slow healing that makes Dark Souls II healing look like a speedrun? Yeah, The Last Faith has that in spades. Gun parrying? Nah, just a singular ability that you can try and tick off that doesn't feel as intuitive as it should, but hey, we've got guns still!
Even the exploration feels frustrating because this is a game that absolutely wants to take the Bloodborne concept and shove it into a Metroidvania, so finding explorable places off the beaten path usually doesn't amount to much because you're often going to need an upgrade that you get from traversing the main path of gating bosses that grant you those abilities. I can't imagine how much worse Bloodborne would have felt if every new area you found had the equivalent of a roadblock that asked you to basically go back to the main story for several more hours if you wanted to come back and explore again.
Nearly every aspect of this game is frustrating to me -- even the story, which pretty much everyone mentions as being so very front and center while conveying almost nothing useful about why you're so corrupted, but we're definitely going to let you know that you're corrupted every single chance we get!
I don't see myself ever going back to finish this, and that's disappointing because I was really looking forward to it. It feels, at best, like a middling Metroidvania just wearing Bloodborne's clothing awkwardly and I can't abide by that because it's just not a good fit.
Credit to them for nailing the Bloodborne aesthetic (for better or worse in some cases) -- it's clearly what they were aiming for, even down to that sound you'd hear when arriving in a new area in Bloodborne...which gets really old when you're fast traveling all the time in The Last Faith.
People mention the boss fights as being solid in this game and for me, they were just rather run-of-the-mill experiences, with maybe the exception of Edwyn (which felt like a fun dance) or the Yegor & Leena fight.
People also mention that generic enemies get pretty old and that group battles are a pain and I'm fully inclined to agree -- especially in regard to challenge rooms and a particular icy area of the game. Challenge rooms are supposed to make you deal with threats you've mostly disposed of by themselves in unwieldy groups...which could be fun tactically, but ends up just feeling more annoying than anything. That is, until they decide to add in enemies you've never encountered up to that point, who often will surprise you while you're disposing of the ones you're already familiar with. There's a very "gotcha!" feel to some challenge room fights because it feels like they wanted to take the idea of enemies besting you because you're not aware of your surroundings and then cram it into a 2D game that doesn't give you the ability to really look around quickly when you're dodging enemies (a little more on this later). What should be an "Oh, I should have paid attention to that!" moment often turns into a "How was I supposed to be remotely prepared for that?" moment instead and it gets old.
I mentioned a particular icy area because there are hazards throughout the game that love to deal contact damage to you and you've got that Castlevania knockback going on where you might as well go grab a coffee while you wait to get up, it feels that long. Some of these hazards will be set up to knock you into pits to create an instakill moment (yes, there are pits, but the map is usually good about identifying them, unlike with some specific cases with Blasphemous). Some of these hazards are set up to just bounce you directly into enemies and happen to be on a path of sheets of ice that make you slide everywhere, making the whole trip a cumbersome experience.
The biggest offender for combat, however, is the lack of invincibility frames. If an enemy hits you and you're starting to get knocked back and two other enemies decide to hit you at the same time, you eat all three hits immediately. You can be juggled by an enemy group if you're unlucky and it feels like you just got invited to a mid-tier Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 match, except your lifebar will generally dissipate in 3-4 hits, depending on whether you've been upgrading your Vitality stat at all. One note -- there is a boss that combo juggles you and does significantly less damage during these juggles if they catch you off guard, and I did kind of enjoy seeing it in this respect, as it felt like the potential for what you also should be capable of, but generally aren't. The fact is, most regular enemies die to just slash-spam if you're upgrading weapons at regular intervals, so they become nuisances that drop the usual Soulslike currency when they're not just being challenge room pains.
I think Bloodborne's system works really well for Bloodborne, but shoving the limited storage system into The Last Faith feels just excessive, especially when they decided to forego some of the solid design decisions for Bloodborne in the process. Aggressive combat to promote getting your health back? Not present. Abysmally slow healing that makes Dark Souls II healing look like a speedrun? Yeah, The Last Faith has that in spades. Gun parrying? Nah, just a singular ability that you can try and tick off that doesn't feel as intuitive as it should, but hey, we've got guns still!
Even the exploration feels frustrating because this is a game that absolutely wants to take the Bloodborne concept and shove it into a Metroidvania, so finding explorable places off the beaten path usually doesn't amount to much because you're often going to need an upgrade that you get from traversing the main path of gating bosses that grant you those abilities. I can't imagine how much worse Bloodborne would have felt if every new area you found had the equivalent of a roadblock that asked you to basically go back to the main story for several more hours if you wanted to come back and explore again.
Nearly every aspect of this game is frustrating to me -- even the story, which pretty much everyone mentions as being so very front and center while conveying almost nothing useful about why you're so corrupted, but we're definitely going to let you know that you're corrupted every single chance we get!
I don't see myself ever going back to finish this, and that's disappointing because I was really looking forward to it. It feels, at best, like a middling Metroidvania just wearing Bloodborne's clothing awkwardly and I can't abide by that because it's just not a good fit.
2024
I 100%'d this game. Uhh...I guess that's supposed to mean I liked it?
-- Enemy AI for bosses ranges from bad to just plain screwed up (looking at you, optional bee boss)
-- Moreover, some tactics for boss fights require you to just do ridiculous but simple things in order to get an edge over said bosses. In the case of one boss, you have to repeatedly jump into and out of a death pit (you don't have to fall all the way down into it) because you can't jump over the boss or use your wall jump to get higher than it.
-- The music doesn't loop properly, so every time you enter a room, the music for that area starts over again. Hope you don't clear rooms too quickly!
-- I guess it's a Metroidvania because there is gating, but the gating feels questionable and is tied to new arrows you get that are actually pretty awful for using on regular enemies, so you pretty much just use your new arrows to make progress and stick with your generic arrows for damage.
-- Healing seems to be busted, at least if you want to play with the D-Pad on a controller because it will let you move left and right just fine, but if you press Up, you heal (whether you wanted to or not). This gets worse when you attempt to fire arrows while falling and sometimes the game just decides that what you MEANT to do was to heal right then. Also, if you die while you're healing, don't worry, you'll hear the heal prompt go off on the "FAIL" screen just to let you know that it understood what you wanted to do and just didn't feel like executing it while you were alive.
-- The dialogue is varying levels of terrible and also needed some serious translation work.
-- It really doesn't take much effort to get from the endgame requirements to 100%ing the game (like maybe an extra 30 minutes of gameplay), but I think it says something that about 20% of people that have played the game have beaten it, but only 5% actually bother to 100% it. I am one of those suckers that bothered to do it.
-- There's no final boss. Well, not really. There's A BOSS that's in the way of the last area before you go back to the beginning to finish the game, but it has about as much impact as any other boss in the game and the exact same music.
-- When you die, you're warped back to your last checkpoint you rested at and all progress you made is reverted. Yes, if you beat a boss and died before reaching a campfire, you get to fight the boss again. It's one of THOSE games.
Do I have anything good to say about this? Well, it only took me just over four hours to 100% it, so I guess it doesn't make you suffer for too long!
Seriously, it's not good. But if I 100%'d it, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts and I feel like I could probably write a lot more about the failings of this game, but I'll just say that if you're really in dire need of a Metroidvania, maybe you pick this up at 75% off and punish yourself accordingly. I got it for about six bucks (35% off) and I regret the purchase, but maybe your mileage may vary!
-- Enemy AI for bosses ranges from bad to just plain screwed up (looking at you, optional bee boss)
-- Moreover, some tactics for boss fights require you to just do ridiculous but simple things in order to get an edge over said bosses. In the case of one boss, you have to repeatedly jump into and out of a death pit (you don't have to fall all the way down into it) because you can't jump over the boss or use your wall jump to get higher than it.
-- The music doesn't loop properly, so every time you enter a room, the music for that area starts over again. Hope you don't clear rooms too quickly!
-- I guess it's a Metroidvania because there is gating, but the gating feels questionable and is tied to new arrows you get that are actually pretty awful for using on regular enemies, so you pretty much just use your new arrows to make progress and stick with your generic arrows for damage.
-- Healing seems to be busted, at least if you want to play with the D-Pad on a controller because it will let you move left and right just fine, but if you press Up, you heal (whether you wanted to or not). This gets worse when you attempt to fire arrows while falling and sometimes the game just decides that what you MEANT to do was to heal right then. Also, if you die while you're healing, don't worry, you'll hear the heal prompt go off on the "FAIL" screen just to let you know that it understood what you wanted to do and just didn't feel like executing it while you were alive.
-- The dialogue is varying levels of terrible and also needed some serious translation work.
-- It really doesn't take much effort to get from the endgame requirements to 100%ing the game (like maybe an extra 30 minutes of gameplay), but I think it says something that about 20% of people that have played the game have beaten it, but only 5% actually bother to 100% it. I am one of those suckers that bothered to do it.
-- There's no final boss. Well, not really. There's A BOSS that's in the way of the last area before you go back to the beginning to finish the game, but it has about as much impact as any other boss in the game and the exact same music.
-- When you die, you're warped back to your last checkpoint you rested at and all progress you made is reverted. Yes, if you beat a boss and died before reaching a campfire, you get to fight the boss again. It's one of THOSE games.
Do I have anything good to say about this? Well, it only took me just over four hours to 100% it, so I guess it doesn't make you suffer for too long!
Seriously, it's not good. But if I 100%'d it, I feel obligated to detail my thoughts and I feel like I could probably write a lot more about the failings of this game, but I'll just say that if you're really in dire need of a Metroidvania, maybe you pick this up at 75% off and punish yourself accordingly. I got it for about six bucks (35% off) and I regret the purchase, but maybe your mileage may vary!
2024
UPDATE: Finished the second playthrough, this time as Edward Carnby.
I neglected to mention all the stuttering and texture pop-ins and other graphical goofiness that happened (I think) in the previous review, so let me start with that -- it was present across both runs.
Some other fun things I encountered this time around while playing as Edward:
-- Audio repeating over itself multiple times while trying to have the same conversation with someone.
-- I could no longer use hatchets because the game decided I always had a hatchet, even when I didn't, so I could only use non-hatchet weapons for melee for the rest of the game. On a similar note, the Lagniappe for the Jack-in-the-Box apparently has a limit of one for its quantity you can have, which is interesting, as it's the only Lagniappe you can grab across both runs, as far as I can tell. But I did manage to grab it approximately six times during Edward's run, despite the limitations on inventory for it.
-- Starting from Chapter 3 onward, the map markers for rooms that still had stuff to do in them were all reset back to their flags for the beginning of Chapter 2 and they stayed that way for the rest of the game. This even went as far as things that were already done once that could not possibly be repeated, like in the case of opening the Medicine Box in Lottie's room. The box acts like you can interact with it with a key you no longer have and will tell you that you still need the key, even though you already opened it and got the key item needed for another puzzle.
-- I missed some trophies and was curious about what happened with them, so I went and googled the ones I was missing and found that four of them just straight-up don't work or only work for one character and not the other.
The role swap of using the opposite character results in almost the exact same situations, with the exception of one special scenario unique to each character in Chapter 4. If you play the game once with the character you want and then just watch a playthrough of Chapter 4 with the other character, you're covered instead of spending hours repeating the exact same processes. I guess playing as the other character for a second run does get you the ability to net all the Lagniappes (I did get them all), but there's very little reason to do so, unless you want to see a couple extra scenes that are callbacks to the original game...and one or two other scenes that involved the glitched trophies I mentioned, so you don't even get to see those!
In a sense, despite only spending less than half the hours on AITD this time around, I feel like the overall experience managed to be worse because of the ridiculous repetition with minimal payoff. I'm not going to lower the rating, but what a mess this game is. And I still don't have the trophy for playing for at least eight hours, despite having approximately fourteen hours of gameplay logged because of the weird bug during the Emily run where it just didn't accrue time for about eight hours!
Original update follows below:
--------------------------------------------------
So, quick thoughts on AITD2024 in no particular order because I just took my time through this and still finished it today in roughly one sitting (I apologize for lack of useful clarifications on stuff, I'm tired):
First, combat is absolute ass. And I mean beyond ass to the assieth power of assing. This varies between the few types of enemies you encounter, but generally speaking, you just swing wildly with R1 and hope you do enough damage to ruin them quickly (usually causing stunlock) with your melee weapon. If you're shooting, uhh...pray. Sometimes you can get a headshot and an enemy just drops, sometimes you have the four-legged facehuggers that...simply don't care if you shoot them because they just don't acknowledge bullets, even though bullets should hurt them. But that's more of a bug that we'll go over shortly. Also, there's attacks of opportunity (just called "opportunity"), but I only got one prompt to do so the entire game for some reason and even when I did it, the game didn't give me a trophy. Not a big loss, but it feels like some aspects of this game were more afterthoughts than anything else.
Second, HOLY FUCK THE BUGS AND GLITCHES. Things that happened during my run:
-- The very first time I started the game, apparently the game just stopped counting playtime after 49 minutes and 36 seconds. Why? No clue. But I got the trophy for beating the game in under three hours after spending about nine hours playing the game, with a final time of exactly two hours.
-- At one point, every time I tried a door that had a lock on it, my journal would update with an extra copy of the exact same page of objectives that I got at the start of the chapter. I added like seven copies of the same page just to test this and it just kept going.
-- The four-legged facehuggers are the only creatures with QTEs involved in their actions, and they can go from QTE -> you recover from QTE -> camera angle sucks so you can't see -> QTE again. Worse still, sometimes they just simply ignore bullets you fire at them. At one point, I emptied two entire clips into a facehugger and it just kept existing, so I reloaded the game and just ran past it. Some facehuggers were just getting stuck in walls or falling into existence from places or humping walls while I shot them.
-- Essentially, everything after Chapter 3 is a mess that needed some extreme polish.
Third -- The story is...a thing?
--------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER-----------------------
It's reality, it's all in your head, it's cosmic horror, it's none of the above, it's all of the above, it can't make up its mind on who the story is actually about.
---------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER END-------------------------
Granted, this was the Emily side of the story and not the Edward half (I'll do that tomorrow over the course of the day, probably). Also, there's only two bosses in the game and one was a total joke and the other was just a pain in the ass that involved enduring frustratingly dumb stuff in order to prevail.
Fourth -- I want to go back to bugs again because there's one room in the entire game that uses a single fixed perspective the whole way where you can't rotate your camera and every time I walked through the room at a certain spot, my character would get drunk and turn right and slam into a wall. It was amazing.
Fifth -- The lore was great, actually. If you want Lovecraftian storytime, it's the one thing this game does really well. I should probably have lumped this in with the general story comments, but I do love that there's so much stuff being covered, even if how it's all handled outside of reading up on or encountering said material doesn't amount to much.
Finally -- This is nothing like an actual remake. The overlap between the original mansion and Derceto is that there's like four or five rooms in the entire game that are similar. About half of the game takes place in "other locations". There is no really neat underground. You will not get attacked by a giant worm that can one-shot you. You will not go mad from reading any books. There are two enemies that can one-shot you, but they both have their own easy sections to deal with them.
Extra Finally -- The "sneak" mechanic is either stupid or broken because some things you need to sneak past can also simply be walked past. Magical.
I can't recommend you buy this at this time of release, it's not even worth it at half off. Maybe wait until the game is 15 bucks or less if you just want to enjoy some creepy lore dumps, but the game is passable visually, sparse in regards to enemies, and combat is extraordinarily bad. But hey, at least the sound design was alright, sometimes...I just remembered that at one point, a radio kept just starting to play for one second and then would cut out again, only to repeat after another ten seconds or so. That might have been unintentionally creepy, but it's just one more bug to acknowledge.
I neglected to mention all the stuttering and texture pop-ins and other graphical goofiness that happened (I think) in the previous review, so let me start with that -- it was present across both runs.
Some other fun things I encountered this time around while playing as Edward:
-- Audio repeating over itself multiple times while trying to have the same conversation with someone.
-- I could no longer use hatchets because the game decided I always had a hatchet, even when I didn't, so I could only use non-hatchet weapons for melee for the rest of the game. On a similar note, the Lagniappe for the Jack-in-the-Box apparently has a limit of one for its quantity you can have, which is interesting, as it's the only Lagniappe you can grab across both runs, as far as I can tell. But I did manage to grab it approximately six times during Edward's run, despite the limitations on inventory for it.
-- Starting from Chapter 3 onward, the map markers for rooms that still had stuff to do in them were all reset back to their flags for the beginning of Chapter 2 and they stayed that way for the rest of the game. This even went as far as things that were already done once that could not possibly be repeated, like in the case of opening the Medicine Box in Lottie's room. The box acts like you can interact with it with a key you no longer have and will tell you that you still need the key, even though you already opened it and got the key item needed for another puzzle.
-- I missed some trophies and was curious about what happened with them, so I went and googled the ones I was missing and found that four of them just straight-up don't work or only work for one character and not the other.
The role swap of using the opposite character results in almost the exact same situations, with the exception of one special scenario unique to each character in Chapter 4. If you play the game once with the character you want and then just watch a playthrough of Chapter 4 with the other character, you're covered instead of spending hours repeating the exact same processes. I guess playing as the other character for a second run does get you the ability to net all the Lagniappes (I did get them all), but there's very little reason to do so, unless you want to see a couple extra scenes that are callbacks to the original game...and one or two other scenes that involved the glitched trophies I mentioned, so you don't even get to see those!
In a sense, despite only spending less than half the hours on AITD this time around, I feel like the overall experience managed to be worse because of the ridiculous repetition with minimal payoff. I'm not going to lower the rating, but what a mess this game is. And I still don't have the trophy for playing for at least eight hours, despite having approximately fourteen hours of gameplay logged because of the weird bug during the Emily run where it just didn't accrue time for about eight hours!
Original update follows below:
--------------------------------------------------
So, quick thoughts on AITD2024 in no particular order because I just took my time through this and still finished it today in roughly one sitting (I apologize for lack of useful clarifications on stuff, I'm tired):
First, combat is absolute ass. And I mean beyond ass to the assieth power of assing. This varies between the few types of enemies you encounter, but generally speaking, you just swing wildly with R1 and hope you do enough damage to ruin them quickly (usually causing stunlock) with your melee weapon. If you're shooting, uhh...pray. Sometimes you can get a headshot and an enemy just drops, sometimes you have the four-legged facehuggers that...simply don't care if you shoot them because they just don't acknowledge bullets, even though bullets should hurt them. But that's more of a bug that we'll go over shortly. Also, there's attacks of opportunity (just called "opportunity"), but I only got one prompt to do so the entire game for some reason and even when I did it, the game didn't give me a trophy. Not a big loss, but it feels like some aspects of this game were more afterthoughts than anything else.
Second, HOLY FUCK THE BUGS AND GLITCHES. Things that happened during my run:
-- The very first time I started the game, apparently the game just stopped counting playtime after 49 minutes and 36 seconds. Why? No clue. But I got the trophy for beating the game in under three hours after spending about nine hours playing the game, with a final time of exactly two hours.
-- At one point, every time I tried a door that had a lock on it, my journal would update with an extra copy of the exact same page of objectives that I got at the start of the chapter. I added like seven copies of the same page just to test this and it just kept going.
-- The four-legged facehuggers are the only creatures with QTEs involved in their actions, and they can go from QTE -> you recover from QTE -> camera angle sucks so you can't see -> QTE again. Worse still, sometimes they just simply ignore bullets you fire at them. At one point, I emptied two entire clips into a facehugger and it just kept existing, so I reloaded the game and just ran past it. Some facehuggers were just getting stuck in walls or falling into existence from places or humping walls while I shot them.
-- Essentially, everything after Chapter 3 is a mess that needed some extreme polish.
Third -- The story is...a thing?
--------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER-----------------------
It's reality, it's all in your head, it's cosmic horror, it's none of the above, it's all of the above, it can't make up its mind on who the story is actually about.
---------------------TINY MINOR SPOILER END-------------------------
Granted, this was the Emily side of the story and not the Edward half (I'll do that tomorrow over the course of the day, probably). Also, there's only two bosses in the game and one was a total joke and the other was just a pain in the ass that involved enduring frustratingly dumb stuff in order to prevail.
Fourth -- I want to go back to bugs again because there's one room in the entire game that uses a single fixed perspective the whole way where you can't rotate your camera and every time I walked through the room at a certain spot, my character would get drunk and turn right and slam into a wall. It was amazing.
Fifth -- The lore was great, actually. If you want Lovecraftian storytime, it's the one thing this game does really well. I should probably have lumped this in with the general story comments, but I do love that there's so much stuff being covered, even if how it's all handled outside of reading up on or encountering said material doesn't amount to much.
Finally -- This is nothing like an actual remake. The overlap between the original mansion and Derceto is that there's like four or five rooms in the entire game that are similar. About half of the game takes place in "other locations". There is no really neat underground. You will not get attacked by a giant worm that can one-shot you. You will not go mad from reading any books. There are two enemies that can one-shot you, but they both have their own easy sections to deal with them.
Extra Finally -- The "sneak" mechanic is either stupid or broken because some things you need to sneak past can also simply be walked past. Magical.
I can't recommend you buy this at this time of release, it's not even worth it at half off. Maybe wait until the game is 15 bucks or less if you just want to enjoy some creepy lore dumps, but the game is passable visually, sparse in regards to enemies, and combat is extraordinarily bad. But hey, at least the sound design was alright, sometimes...I just remembered that at one point, a radio kept just starting to play for one second and then would cut out again, only to repeat after another ten seconds or so. That might have been unintentionally creepy, but it's just one more bug to acknowledge.
2023
I'm not really fond of writing reviews about something shelved unless I need to make a note to come back to it for technical reasons at some point, because I would honestly like to finish a game before writing up a full commentary of thoughts on it (or any witty zingers, were I able to muster any).
I think it's worth talking about TEVI (it's in all-caps on Steam, so that's how I'm going to refer to it) because I got deep into the fifth chapter (out of eight, I think?) and put 15 hours in already.
The difficult part about talking about TEVI is that there are really only two ways for me to talk about it:
1. Pretend like I've never played Rabi-Ribi (and pretend like I didn't see the cameo appearances of Erina and Ribbon or the Rabi Smash game in the back end of my playthrough)
2. Compare this game to Rabi-Ribi and expect some of the best exploration-based design in the history of Metroidvanias.
Well, I guess there's option 3: Why not both?!
Let me get the good out of the way: If you enjoyed the touhou aspect of bosses from Rabi-Ribi, you're not going to be disappointed here because the boss fights are easily the best part of the game. I didn't get to measure the differences in difficulty to see how vastly the bullets are applied over any given boss fight, but I'll always offer a shout-out when a game decides to modify difficulty based on actually affecting interaction and not just adding extra health, armor, or whatever. I played on Normal, I died a couple times, it felt like an okay difficulty, take that as you will.
The soundtrack is also pretty solid in some spots (I absolutely love the opening and Morose Town). Most stuff was fine and I think the soundtrack might be on par with Rabi-Ribi.
The game is huge, which I was rather expecting. I wasn't expecting that I'd only have 56% map coverage by the back end of Chapter 5, though. But also, this is where I need to bring up some gripes.
First, regarding level design: TEVI does something interesting with its room designs that I had to note, even if I absolutely don't like it -- there's almost always one-way paths forcing you in a direction away from the exploration that you're probably used to doing while playing a Metroidvania and these one-way paths often require you to go through some very roundabout traversing to get back onto what seems like the regular route you're taking. What makes this interesting is that this one-way funneling IS the regular route and is often the quickest way to the boss / next area while also showing you a significant amount of the area you're in. It's fascinating because you're getting probably over 50% of the map for the area completed just by being forced down these windy paths, but the act of being forced/corralled/funneled just leaves you feeling like you're not really that much in control of your movement through these areas. It's like a busted escalator that you can't go back up and you can't jump over the sides, either -- get to the bottom and see what's coming!
Some of the one-way pathing is peculiar because there are blocks you can occasionally bomb, but some blocks that look exactly the same can also just crumble and cause you to lock into an animation that looks like you stumbled as you fall through them slowly to the next room. Sometimes, you can just touch a crumbling block and move past it without falling in. Sometimes, you just get locked into it and you're going to the next level down and working your way around to the next big moment. Sometimes, you can get into that seeming funnel and work your way out of it, only to find yourself going back up to the exact same spot, with you probably opening up a shortcut back to the area you started from, with the notion that you never would have been able to continue in that direction if you had wanted to go your own way. The game has determined that YOU WILL GO SEE OUR BIG STORY DEAL THAT WE WANT TO SHOW YOU. YOU MUST. BY ANY MEANS.
I love exploration and solid bosses, so that's probably why I'm drawn to Metroidvanias (and Souls-likes). Exploration is paramount to me, with the more options available equating to a better experience overall. Rabi-Ribi gave me this in a way that few Metroidvanias (I'm also looking at you, Environmental Station Alpha!) ever have. So, it's with great disappointment that I share how very little there is in the way of enjoyable exploration in TEVI.
I mentioned the whole thing about the story by any means necessary, and I wasn't joking -- your gating abilities are locked behind storyline moments or areas leading to the next storyline beat. And not only are they locked behind those moments and beats, the game will go out of its way to let you know in multiple ways. In some instances, the game will actively tell you that you don't need to go somewhere right now if you try and take a path that's open to you (at first, I thought this was just because of the merchant conversation in the Prologue, but it happens with multiple areas throughout the game). In other instances, if you try to go into an area that's in the same direction as the story marker on your map, you'll get a warning that if you go into that area, you won't be coming out for a while and that you better prepare yourself. Not really sure what preparation entails, because crafting is silly in this game and healing items are one of the few things that don't really take much effort to craft. More on that later. But in one other way worth noting, should you decide that you want to go exploring with any newfound power-ups you have to check out places you haven't been yet, you will generally find yourself stuck and unable to progress further until you have YET ANOTHER story-based ability that you're likely missing. And if you're like me and went back to the first area of the game after every new ability you got, then you're also probably like me and gave up after you got multiple bombing and movement abilities and had come back FOUR TIMES without being able to get back up to the area where you started. And nearly every new area is like this even when backtracking to them after getting an upgrade, you'll just make a tiny bit more headway than before and be stuck all over again. No bosses (I don't count the Elite Battle challenges given by a particular NPC as a side quest among these), no neat looping back between areas by linking multiple places together in unrealized ways, no cool power-ups (maybe a random stat potion or a sigil if you're lucky). If this were one of my first Metroidvanias, this kind of thing wouldn't bother me but when I heard about this game being made after playing through Rabi-Ribi's POST-POST-POST GAME, I expected the kind of loose and wild craziness of a game that absolutely understood just how much you could break it while still being able to move around it freely if you just understood the mechanics well enough. TEVI is the exact opposite of that.
I mentioned crafting briefly and the sigils in this game are very much in the same vein as the badges from Rabi-Ribi. Some sigils are found in plain sight, some are hidden in rooms on maps, some are purchased with a limited money resource (money is found through destruction of certain blocks and is never dropped by monsters), and some are crafted via elementals and essences. Some of your other orbitar (little shooty-assist-things for a spoiler-free description) upgrades and some of the abilities themselves can be upgraded through crafting. How do you get resources? Kill enemies, hope they drop what you need, and if they don't, spend nine of one resource to get two sets of three of another elemental or essence resource and hope you get what you need. This whole system feels like an afterthought because you're given the ability to wade through enemies in hopes of getting what you need and just gambling for less resources if things don't go your way. It's padding that could have been usefully spent searching for those same sigils and ability upgrades as drops in some of those paths that you just were never allowed to go further down until you have every ability in the game. There was a real chance to put some real rewards down alternate paths of exploration and instead, you're just killing enemies and praying to the loot gods that you inevitably get what you need after a time. I don't like crafting in games where it feels like it's shoehorned in and this seems excessively so, especially since they let you burn resources to try and RNG your way to more resources.
I forgot in the midst of my rant on exploring (I'm not going back up to reinsert this!) that the worst offender for how the world design is set up is the Freeroam Mode. This is an option you can enable when starting a game that lets you skip the story entirely and gives you a move that Erina from Rabi-Ribi initially had that allowed you to sequence break into areas you couldn't reach previously. This mode originally wasn't available until you beat the game, but I'm guessing after some push-back about the lack of functional exploration with gating abilities from reviewers, it was patched to become unlocked at the start. I've seen arguments that the level system (experience is given through exploration and beating bosses, I believe) and the limited supply of coins and occasional sigil or stat-boosting potion make up for the fact that you're constantly only able to make slight headway further into these areas you're retracing your steps back to, but these arguments also seem to come from people who are playing on the highest difficulties and found themselves needing every edge to compete with the bosses. It's an argument I understand, but I don't think it justifies the stilted exploration experience, especially if Freeroam Mode is a thing in the first place.
I haven't really talked about the story and that's because since I didn't finish it, it's hard to really comment on how it all fleshed out without being speculative. I'll say that the all social and political commentary feels VERY heavy-handed, but that didn't really bother me -- your mileage may vary.
I feel like there was more I wanted to talk about, but I've been writing this for way too long instead of actually playing more games. Even though this game is lukewarm for me due to design decisions, I'm kinda all for supporting these devs and hoping the next game feels more fun (for me). Also, UP+DASH in the air is the most unintuitive choice ever for making a down-smash attack with the spanner weapon. WHY?!
If you read this far, you're obligated to go buy Rabi-Ribi and then either give this dev the equivalent money for TEVI and not play it or buy it and then tell me how wrong or right I am later. I just needed to rant and ranting to my spouse and friends about this wasn't enough. Rant over, get it on sale next summer when Steam inevitably has a sale with it at 50% off. It's still better than your average Metroidvania just for the bosses alone, despite all my disappointment with it. I hope to maybe decide to come back and finish it eventually.
I think it's worth talking about TEVI (it's in all-caps on Steam, so that's how I'm going to refer to it) because I got deep into the fifth chapter (out of eight, I think?) and put 15 hours in already.
The difficult part about talking about TEVI is that there are really only two ways for me to talk about it:
1. Pretend like I've never played Rabi-Ribi (and pretend like I didn't see the cameo appearances of Erina and Ribbon or the Rabi Smash game in the back end of my playthrough)
2. Compare this game to Rabi-Ribi and expect some of the best exploration-based design in the history of Metroidvanias.
Well, I guess there's option 3: Why not both?!
Let me get the good out of the way: If you enjoyed the touhou aspect of bosses from Rabi-Ribi, you're not going to be disappointed here because the boss fights are easily the best part of the game. I didn't get to measure the differences in difficulty to see how vastly the bullets are applied over any given boss fight, but I'll always offer a shout-out when a game decides to modify difficulty based on actually affecting interaction and not just adding extra health, armor, or whatever. I played on Normal, I died a couple times, it felt like an okay difficulty, take that as you will.
The soundtrack is also pretty solid in some spots (I absolutely love the opening and Morose Town). Most stuff was fine and I think the soundtrack might be on par with Rabi-Ribi.
The game is huge, which I was rather expecting. I wasn't expecting that I'd only have 56% map coverage by the back end of Chapter 5, though. But also, this is where I need to bring up some gripes.
First, regarding level design: TEVI does something interesting with its room designs that I had to note, even if I absolutely don't like it -- there's almost always one-way paths forcing you in a direction away from the exploration that you're probably used to doing while playing a Metroidvania and these one-way paths often require you to go through some very roundabout traversing to get back onto what seems like the regular route you're taking. What makes this interesting is that this one-way funneling IS the regular route and is often the quickest way to the boss / next area while also showing you a significant amount of the area you're in. It's fascinating because you're getting probably over 50% of the map for the area completed just by being forced down these windy paths, but the act of being forced/corralled/funneled just leaves you feeling like you're not really that much in control of your movement through these areas. It's like a busted escalator that you can't go back up and you can't jump over the sides, either -- get to the bottom and see what's coming!
Some of the one-way pathing is peculiar because there are blocks you can occasionally bomb, but some blocks that look exactly the same can also just crumble and cause you to lock into an animation that looks like you stumbled as you fall through them slowly to the next room. Sometimes, you can just touch a crumbling block and move past it without falling in. Sometimes, you just get locked into it and you're going to the next level down and working your way around to the next big moment. Sometimes, you can get into that seeming funnel and work your way out of it, only to find yourself going back up to the exact same spot, with you probably opening up a shortcut back to the area you started from, with the notion that you never would have been able to continue in that direction if you had wanted to go your own way. The game has determined that YOU WILL GO SEE OUR BIG STORY DEAL THAT WE WANT TO SHOW YOU. YOU MUST. BY ANY MEANS.
I love exploration and solid bosses, so that's probably why I'm drawn to Metroidvanias (and Souls-likes). Exploration is paramount to me, with the more options available equating to a better experience overall. Rabi-Ribi gave me this in a way that few Metroidvanias (I'm also looking at you, Environmental Station Alpha!) ever have. So, it's with great disappointment that I share how very little there is in the way of enjoyable exploration in TEVI.
I mentioned the whole thing about the story by any means necessary, and I wasn't joking -- your gating abilities are locked behind storyline moments or areas leading to the next storyline beat. And not only are they locked behind those moments and beats, the game will go out of its way to let you know in multiple ways. In some instances, the game will actively tell you that you don't need to go somewhere right now if you try and take a path that's open to you (at first, I thought this was just because of the merchant conversation in the Prologue, but it happens with multiple areas throughout the game). In other instances, if you try to go into an area that's in the same direction as the story marker on your map, you'll get a warning that if you go into that area, you won't be coming out for a while and that you better prepare yourself. Not really sure what preparation entails, because crafting is silly in this game and healing items are one of the few things that don't really take much effort to craft. More on that later. But in one other way worth noting, should you decide that you want to go exploring with any newfound power-ups you have to check out places you haven't been yet, you will generally find yourself stuck and unable to progress further until you have YET ANOTHER story-based ability that you're likely missing. And if you're like me and went back to the first area of the game after every new ability you got, then you're also probably like me and gave up after you got multiple bombing and movement abilities and had come back FOUR TIMES without being able to get back up to the area where you started. And nearly every new area is like this even when backtracking to them after getting an upgrade, you'll just make a tiny bit more headway than before and be stuck all over again. No bosses (I don't count the Elite Battle challenges given by a particular NPC as a side quest among these), no neat looping back between areas by linking multiple places together in unrealized ways, no cool power-ups (maybe a random stat potion or a sigil if you're lucky). If this were one of my first Metroidvanias, this kind of thing wouldn't bother me but when I heard about this game being made after playing through Rabi-Ribi's POST-POST-POST GAME, I expected the kind of loose and wild craziness of a game that absolutely understood just how much you could break it while still being able to move around it freely if you just understood the mechanics well enough. TEVI is the exact opposite of that.
I mentioned crafting briefly and the sigils in this game are very much in the same vein as the badges from Rabi-Ribi. Some sigils are found in plain sight, some are hidden in rooms on maps, some are purchased with a limited money resource (money is found through destruction of certain blocks and is never dropped by monsters), and some are crafted via elementals and essences. Some of your other orbitar (little shooty-assist-things for a spoiler-free description) upgrades and some of the abilities themselves can be upgraded through crafting. How do you get resources? Kill enemies, hope they drop what you need, and if they don't, spend nine of one resource to get two sets of three of another elemental or essence resource and hope you get what you need. This whole system feels like an afterthought because you're given the ability to wade through enemies in hopes of getting what you need and just gambling for less resources if things don't go your way. It's padding that could have been usefully spent searching for those same sigils and ability upgrades as drops in some of those paths that you just were never allowed to go further down until you have every ability in the game. There was a real chance to put some real rewards down alternate paths of exploration and instead, you're just killing enemies and praying to the loot gods that you inevitably get what you need after a time. I don't like crafting in games where it feels like it's shoehorned in and this seems excessively so, especially since they let you burn resources to try and RNG your way to more resources.
I forgot in the midst of my rant on exploring (I'm not going back up to reinsert this!) that the worst offender for how the world design is set up is the Freeroam Mode. This is an option you can enable when starting a game that lets you skip the story entirely and gives you a move that Erina from Rabi-Ribi initially had that allowed you to sequence break into areas you couldn't reach previously. This mode originally wasn't available until you beat the game, but I'm guessing after some push-back about the lack of functional exploration with gating abilities from reviewers, it was patched to become unlocked at the start. I've seen arguments that the level system (experience is given through exploration and beating bosses, I believe) and the limited supply of coins and occasional sigil or stat-boosting potion make up for the fact that you're constantly only able to make slight headway further into these areas you're retracing your steps back to, but these arguments also seem to come from people who are playing on the highest difficulties and found themselves needing every edge to compete with the bosses. It's an argument I understand, but I don't think it justifies the stilted exploration experience, especially if Freeroam Mode is a thing in the first place.
I haven't really talked about the story and that's because since I didn't finish it, it's hard to really comment on how it all fleshed out without being speculative. I'll say that the all social and political commentary feels VERY heavy-handed, but that didn't really bother me -- your mileage may vary.
I feel like there was more I wanted to talk about, but I've been writing this for way too long instead of actually playing more games. Even though this game is lukewarm for me due to design decisions, I'm kinda all for supporting these devs and hoping the next game feels more fun (for me). Also, UP+DASH in the air is the most unintuitive choice ever for making a down-smash attack with the spanner weapon. WHY?!
If you read this far, you're obligated to go buy Rabi-Ribi and then either give this dev the equivalent money for TEVI and not play it or buy it and then tell me how wrong or right I am later. I just needed to rant and ranting to my spouse and friends about this wasn't enough. Rant over, get it on sale next summer when Steam inevitably has a sale with it at 50% off. It's still better than your average Metroidvania just for the bosses alone, despite all my disappointment with it. I hope to maybe decide to come back and finish it eventually.
I might come back to this one, but if I'm going to, I'll have to start a new game. This game definitely has some issues that aren't completely apparent until you're already in the thick of it and it's too late to take back the mistakes you've made.
You're doing a job for a professor of a university, whose students apparently went to conduct some scientific experiments at an abandoned institution...and vanished. Cool.
I picked the Journalist of the three classes, because I saw that I get a Master Key that unlocks all doors and based on my stats, I knew I'd probably just be trying to avoid monsters as much as possible while trying to solve what's going on. As an additional skill to bring with me, I took Investigate (it made sense, I'm a journalist!) so I could find clues more easily, and off we went!
I arrived, I was told to find the night watchman and see about having him let me in, and then I was given freedom to do my thing. So, I did what any sensible individual would do, and used the Master Key on the front door. In with no issues, and I was off to the races!
...or so I thought. I looked around for a couple minutes and found some items, but found myself stuck with a door that wouldn't open because it needed some unusual kind of device to get further. No biggie, I go out and head south, find the night watchman, and then find out that he had lost his keys anyway and they were somewhere in the juvenile ward that was apparently left unlocked, so I just needed to waltz in there and find them for him because that guy definitely did not feel like doing his job.
And then I went inside that ward and found that I couldn't unlock any other doors because the Master Key was a one-use item. Whoops. Guess the whole "being weak" thing wasn't enough of a trade-off to warrant more than one door's worth of free openings. I find some clues, I get some experience, I eventually fight a single goofy dog and beat it and get more experience.
I kill some more enemies and make my way back to the save room that I accidentally missed on the way -- and it's worth noting that the reason I missed it is that there are no visible doors for any adjoining side passages from rooms. You have to walk over to what looks like an alcove/enclosure and just investigate it to find out if there is a door, if it's locked, and if you can go in if it isn't. But yeah, I made it to the safe room and discovered that you can buff your stats and learn new skills by spending experience. So, I burn all my experience gained so far on a new skill (Subterfuge, which lets me pick simple locks to make up for my missing key!) and a few Combat Runes that permanently buff my combat damage.
I go to rest and heal. The game goes, "That will cost you 1XP!" I have zero. I save, quit, and think about the mistakes that were made leading me up to this point.
I should also note that the controls (at least for my 8BitDO controller) were rather awkward and unable to be remapped. I'm fine with using the analog stick for movement, and having the menu be the same as the cancel button is whatever...but why does the START BUTTON simulate the same effect as UP on the analog stick? Weird stuff.
If I do go back, I will start a new game and I might still do the Journalist thing, but I've clearly learned some valuable lessons in my short while I've played. As always, I will update the review if I do make another trek.
You're doing a job for a professor of a university, whose students apparently went to conduct some scientific experiments at an abandoned institution...and vanished. Cool.
I picked the Journalist of the three classes, because I saw that I get a Master Key that unlocks all doors and based on my stats, I knew I'd probably just be trying to avoid monsters as much as possible while trying to solve what's going on. As an additional skill to bring with me, I took Investigate (it made sense, I'm a journalist!) so I could find clues more easily, and off we went!
I arrived, I was told to find the night watchman and see about having him let me in, and then I was given freedom to do my thing. So, I did what any sensible individual would do, and used the Master Key on the front door. In with no issues, and I was off to the races!
...or so I thought. I looked around for a couple minutes and found some items, but found myself stuck with a door that wouldn't open because it needed some unusual kind of device to get further. No biggie, I go out and head south, find the night watchman, and then find out that he had lost his keys anyway and they were somewhere in the juvenile ward that was apparently left unlocked, so I just needed to waltz in there and find them for him because that guy definitely did not feel like doing his job.
And then I went inside that ward and found that I couldn't unlock any other doors because the Master Key was a one-use item. Whoops. Guess the whole "being weak" thing wasn't enough of a trade-off to warrant more than one door's worth of free openings. I find some clues, I get some experience, I eventually fight a single goofy dog and beat it and get more experience.
I kill some more enemies and make my way back to the save room that I accidentally missed on the way -- and it's worth noting that the reason I missed it is that there are no visible doors for any adjoining side passages from rooms. You have to walk over to what looks like an alcove/enclosure and just investigate it to find out if there is a door, if it's locked, and if you can go in if it isn't. But yeah, I made it to the safe room and discovered that you can buff your stats and learn new skills by spending experience. So, I burn all my experience gained so far on a new skill (Subterfuge, which lets me pick simple locks to make up for my missing key!) and a few Combat Runes that permanently buff my combat damage.
I go to rest and heal. The game goes, "That will cost you 1XP!" I have zero. I save, quit, and think about the mistakes that were made leading me up to this point.
I should also note that the controls (at least for my 8BitDO controller) were rather awkward and unable to be remapped. I'm fine with using the analog stick for movement, and having the menu be the same as the cancel button is whatever...but why does the START BUTTON simulate the same effect as UP on the analog stick? Weird stuff.
If I do go back, I will start a new game and I might still do the Journalist thing, but I've clearly learned some valuable lessons in my short while I've played. As always, I will update the review if I do make another trek.
2013
This game is a mess. I had originally abandoned it, but something about it on my last circling of my unending backlog caught my attention and I had to play it to completion. I cannot state it enough, though -- WHAT AN ABSOLUTE MESS.
It's a first-person dungeon crawler that has an aesthetic I can get behind, but everything else is muddled in some fashion.
-- The equipment UI is busted and requires you to jump back to the EQ list in order to see what you're putting on vs. what you're wearing because it won't show the stat differences for every aspect of the equipment while you're cycling through potential stuff you can wear.
-- At one point, I got a Long Sword I really liked and those swords can be equipped with Shields. For whatever reason, this sword could not...and it erased my shield I was wearing in the process.
-- There's stuttering when moving through your room in the house, making it feel like the game's going to hard freeze at any point.
-- I actually got softlocked while trying to leave town because the menu for town never opened up one time when I left my house.
-- Combat is slow and not all skills detail exactly how they work or who they target properly.
-- Music loops every 60-90 seconds (I think) and it's the kind of loop where it just ends on one note and abruptly goes back to the beginning and it's not a clean loop, so enjoy that jarring sensation over and over.
-- At one point, I discovered that combat actually takes place above the dungeon floors because I went to open a door when a fight started and it caused me to be able to move around while in the combat screen...so I walked and fell out of the combat area and onto the open ceiling of the dungeon floor I was on, and then fell back into the dungeon area. Since this was a fixed fight I could visibly see on the screen, I couldn't actually go back to fight that fight again because, well...I had no way to get back up into the sky where fights take place.
-- Some secrets just don't even work. I beat one of the strongest monsters in the game and it dropped the item I needed to unlock some secret doors, but the item left my inventory so I couldn't even open the doors. What was behind those doors? The best spells in the game. Whoops!
-- Spelling errors galore.
-- The credits might be my favorite moment, because I'm most certain that they asked the people in the "Special Thanks" section to write what they want their names credited as and we got a number of "Anonymous", but we also got "No", "No, thank you.", "No thanks", and my favorite: "I don't want my name to appear in the credits." I hope I got that last one right, because I was too busy cracking up to make sure I remembered it properly.
It's not a great dungeon crawling RPG, but for some reason, I got obsessed enough to plow through it and read a really poorly-written and goofy ending. I'm not changing my rating on this game, but at least I finally dealt a blow to The Backlog Monster. Yay for small victories!
(pass on this game unless you're desperate)
It's a first-person dungeon crawler that has an aesthetic I can get behind, but everything else is muddled in some fashion.
-- The equipment UI is busted and requires you to jump back to the EQ list in order to see what you're putting on vs. what you're wearing because it won't show the stat differences for every aspect of the equipment while you're cycling through potential stuff you can wear.
-- At one point, I got a Long Sword I really liked and those swords can be equipped with Shields. For whatever reason, this sword could not...and it erased my shield I was wearing in the process.
-- There's stuttering when moving through your room in the house, making it feel like the game's going to hard freeze at any point.
-- I actually got softlocked while trying to leave town because the menu for town never opened up one time when I left my house.
-- Combat is slow and not all skills detail exactly how they work or who they target properly.
-- Music loops every 60-90 seconds (I think) and it's the kind of loop where it just ends on one note and abruptly goes back to the beginning and it's not a clean loop, so enjoy that jarring sensation over and over.
-- At one point, I discovered that combat actually takes place above the dungeon floors because I went to open a door when a fight started and it caused me to be able to move around while in the combat screen...so I walked and fell out of the combat area and onto the open ceiling of the dungeon floor I was on, and then fell back into the dungeon area. Since this was a fixed fight I could visibly see on the screen, I couldn't actually go back to fight that fight again because, well...I had no way to get back up into the sky where fights take place.
-- Some secrets just don't even work. I beat one of the strongest monsters in the game and it dropped the item I needed to unlock some secret doors, but the item left my inventory so I couldn't even open the doors. What was behind those doors? The best spells in the game. Whoops!
-- Spelling errors galore.
-- The credits might be my favorite moment, because I'm most certain that they asked the people in the "Special Thanks" section to write what they want their names credited as and we got a number of "Anonymous", but we also got "No", "No, thank you.", "No thanks", and my favorite: "I don't want my name to appear in the credits." I hope I got that last one right, because I was too busy cracking up to make sure I remembered it properly.
It's not a great dungeon crawling RPG, but for some reason, I got obsessed enough to plow through it and read a really poorly-written and goofy ending. I'm not changing my rating on this game, but at least I finally dealt a blow to The Backlog Monster. Yay for small victories!
(pass on this game unless you're desperate)
2009
Finally sat down and beat this...and then felt really stupid when I finally got to the last area of the game and only then realized that I had a button that shielded my ship from blocks that were leaving the screen. I was taking strategic hits instead for the entirety of the game up to that point. I don't know if that speaks more to my adaptive skills or my foolishness for an unwillingness to just look at the control scheme before jumping back into this game.
Awesome soundtrack and I kinda love the boss fights. The levels in between that make up each world are...fine. I could enjoy an alternate version of this game where it's just bosses all day.
Awesome soundtrack and I kinda love the boss fights. The levels in between that make up each world are...fine. I could enjoy an alternate version of this game where it's just bosses all day.
2015
I'm not sure what my favorite part was:
1) Having the autosave crash the game at one point
2) Riding the Ferris Wheel a second time and having an out-of-body experience as I got to float around in the sky while overlooking the Ferris Wheel (in the same circular motion as said ride)
3) Riding the Roller Coaster ride, getting off, getting the flashlight, then having the game softlock me into a state of not being able to exit the ride until I closed and reopened the game and continued
4) Deciding to skip a number of rides you were expected to take, opening up some paths by interacting with stuff near those points, then going back to the previous rides, then coming back to those paths to find them closed off and discovering that even reloading would not reopen the path you needed to progress the game
5) The amazingly bad PT loop at the end of the game.
My wife when the game was over: "This is it? This is really it? This was not worth staying awake for, at all."
I can't even say I mastered the game because I checked and two of the trophies were locked off past the Roller Coaster section, so I would have had to play all the way back through to that point from the beginning if I wanted to 100% it that badly. AND I DO NOT.
1) Having the autosave crash the game at one point
2) Riding the Ferris Wheel a second time and having an out-of-body experience as I got to float around in the sky while overlooking the Ferris Wheel (in the same circular motion as said ride)
3) Riding the Roller Coaster ride, getting off, getting the flashlight, then having the game softlock me into a state of not being able to exit the ride until I closed and reopened the game and continued
4) Deciding to skip a number of rides you were expected to take, opening up some paths by interacting with stuff near those points, then going back to the previous rides, then coming back to those paths to find them closed off and discovering that even reloading would not reopen the path you needed to progress the game
5) The amazingly bad PT loop at the end of the game.
My wife when the game was over: "This is it? This is really it? This was not worth staying awake for, at all."
I can't even say I mastered the game because I checked and two of the trophies were locked off past the Roller Coaster section, so I would have had to play all the way back through to that point from the beginning if I wanted to 100% it that badly. AND I DO NOT.
2022
I'll give some short thoughts on this before pointing out the best softlock ever.
-- The pixel art is fantastic.
-- The horror aesthetic is great.
-- The initial descent into the facility works really well.
-- A particular point in the game where you learn more about your REPLIKA unit was probably my second-favorite moment of the game.
-- Kinda hate that the inventory is only six slots and you're using one of those slots for a necessary item for about half of the game, because it creates a lot of needless backtracking and pushes you to just run through areas instead of engaging enemies (or even dispatching them with tools).
-- The puzzles are a little obtuse at times, but it's not too hard to figure out what's going on most of the time.
But really, I'm here for when I beat the game and it softlocked during my ending. It was such a WTF moment because I'm sitting there on a screen that's not-quite frozen, with the words "YOU SELFISH MONSTER" just stuck on the screen while occasional artifacting happens. I waited ten minutes and then had to go look up the endings to confirm it was a softlock and not something else, since no buttons would give any sort of response to move it along.
YOU SELFISH MONSTER. Yep, that's me! Fun game, but also a real dick for calling me out like that. I got it on sale for 20% off and I think it's worth it at that price, given I got about eight hours out of it for 15 bucks. There's better survival horror out there, but this one definitely feels like a rather unique experience, if nothing else.
-- The pixel art is fantastic.
-- The horror aesthetic is great.
-- The initial descent into the facility works really well.
-- A particular point in the game where you learn more about your REPLIKA unit was probably my second-favorite moment of the game.
-- Kinda hate that the inventory is only six slots and you're using one of those slots for a necessary item for about half of the game, because it creates a lot of needless backtracking and pushes you to just run through areas instead of engaging enemies (or even dispatching them with tools).
-- The puzzles are a little obtuse at times, but it's not too hard to figure out what's going on most of the time.
But really, I'm here for when I beat the game and it softlocked during my ending. It was such a WTF moment because I'm sitting there on a screen that's not-quite frozen, with the words "YOU SELFISH MONSTER" just stuck on the screen while occasional artifacting happens. I waited ten minutes and then had to go look up the endings to confirm it was a softlock and not something else, since no buttons would give any sort of response to move it along.
YOU SELFISH MONSTER. Yep, that's me! Fun game, but also a real dick for calling me out like that. I got it on sale for 20% off and I think it's worth it at that price, given I got about eight hours out of it for 15 bucks. There's better survival horror out there, but this one definitely feels like a rather unique experience, if nothing else.
2022
Without going into spoilers, I'll say that this game has very okayish combat, but it goes hard on exploration and the boss fights are largely a delight.
After a few upgrades, you feel ridiculous in terms of your vertical and horizontal mobility and it feels like the game encourages you to try and maximize your movement -- even to the point that there are some ability upgrades you can acquire early simply by understanding the combinations of movement gained from beating bosses. But even without those, you can discover that Iko will run after a certain distance and that roll-jumping from another ledge (above or below) will facilitate this -- meaning that if there's a room that's just out of reach normally by jumping from the ledge you're on, you can create your own rolling/running start and do another roll into a jump off that final ledge to get just a slight bit more distance or height to reach places that are slightly out of the way. And that's just one example out of several.
Of course, the level design is largely tight and what feels like lots of potential paths is actually just dead ends with upgrades or items (some of which might be required) or loops around to the same space, but I can't overstate that the FEELING of good movement in a platforming space was nearly always present throughout the game.
Of praiseworthy notion for me, as well -- bosses. I feel like the bosses were all over the place for difficulty, but outside of one on a later island that was gating a particular movement upgrade (this boss had some moves that you could dodge roll against but you'd still take damage and I never understood how to avoid damage against said boss), the patterns were actually pretty fun and I never felt like deaths had anything to do with poor telegraphing, frustrating mobility issues, or anything else of that nature.
The soundtrack is so very chill and I loved most of the island music. Boss music and overworld music was less impressive, but it did the job.
Things I had gripes with -- even though some of the ability upgrades could give your more currency or make enemies drop more currency and I explored nearly 100% on all five islands, I still had a bunch of grinding for currency to unlock everything by the time I reached the endgame, so I passed on that. Also, I purchased a particular upgrade that's supposed to facilitate teleporting between both teleporters and save locations (I think?), but I wasn't paying solid attention to how the upgrade worked and when I got it, it never told me again how to use it and searching online for info gave me nothing useful about it, so I just kept using shrines to teleport myself everywhere and left it at that.
Also, the last island does feel hollow compared to the first four and one particular boss lair feels frustrating because it felt like they were out of good ideas for puzzles, so it was just room filler for the sake of room filler.
I guess I'm supposed to say something about visuals, even though that usually doesn't matter much for me when playing a Metroidvania, so...hey, it looked pretty good. High-five!
I imagine the last bit of grinding for currency would probably put 100%ing the game at around 12 hours, maybe less? I don't know how difficult Boss Rush mode is, so I can't really speak on that. It took me a little over 8 hours to beat the game.
At 20 bucks, I'd say it's worth a full purchase, but at least as of 8/10/23, Islets is 30% off (14 bucks) until 8/16/23, so maybe if you've got a little loose cash around and want to give a Metroidvania some love, consider giving this a shot.
After a few upgrades, you feel ridiculous in terms of your vertical and horizontal mobility and it feels like the game encourages you to try and maximize your movement -- even to the point that there are some ability upgrades you can acquire early simply by understanding the combinations of movement gained from beating bosses. But even without those, you can discover that Iko will run after a certain distance and that roll-jumping from another ledge (above or below) will facilitate this -- meaning that if there's a room that's just out of reach normally by jumping from the ledge you're on, you can create your own rolling/running start and do another roll into a jump off that final ledge to get just a slight bit more distance or height to reach places that are slightly out of the way. And that's just one example out of several.
Of course, the level design is largely tight and what feels like lots of potential paths is actually just dead ends with upgrades or items (some of which might be required) or loops around to the same space, but I can't overstate that the FEELING of good movement in a platforming space was nearly always present throughout the game.
Of praiseworthy notion for me, as well -- bosses. I feel like the bosses were all over the place for difficulty, but outside of one on a later island that was gating a particular movement upgrade (this boss had some moves that you could dodge roll against but you'd still take damage and I never understood how to avoid damage against said boss), the patterns were actually pretty fun and I never felt like deaths had anything to do with poor telegraphing, frustrating mobility issues, or anything else of that nature.
The soundtrack is so very chill and I loved most of the island music. Boss music and overworld music was less impressive, but it did the job.
Things I had gripes with -- even though some of the ability upgrades could give your more currency or make enemies drop more currency and I explored nearly 100% on all five islands, I still had a bunch of grinding for currency to unlock everything by the time I reached the endgame, so I passed on that. Also, I purchased a particular upgrade that's supposed to facilitate teleporting between both teleporters and save locations (I think?), but I wasn't paying solid attention to how the upgrade worked and when I got it, it never told me again how to use it and searching online for info gave me nothing useful about it, so I just kept using shrines to teleport myself everywhere and left it at that.
Also, the last island does feel hollow compared to the first four and one particular boss lair feels frustrating because it felt like they were out of good ideas for puzzles, so it was just room filler for the sake of room filler.
I guess I'm supposed to say something about visuals, even though that usually doesn't matter much for me when playing a Metroidvania, so...hey, it looked pretty good. High-five!
I imagine the last bit of grinding for currency would probably put 100%ing the game at around 12 hours, maybe less? I don't know how difficult Boss Rush mode is, so I can't really speak on that. It took me a little over 8 hours to beat the game.
At 20 bucks, I'd say it's worth a full purchase, but at least as of 8/10/23, Islets is 30% off (14 bucks) until 8/16/23, so maybe if you've got a little loose cash around and want to give a Metroidvania some love, consider giving this a shot.
2005
Kind of a PS2 Chrono Cross-like game, it feels like. I've only spent a couple hours with it, and I've also done a bit of searching around for info on it outside of the game and it's kinda wild.
Multiple possible starting locations that influence how your story gets going, different party members to start with for each of those locations, tons of recruitable party members, and based on events that transpire over the course of the game (or events you actively choose to engage in or not), you may have to fight some of those characters and some may even die.
I also read that the final boss section of the game can vary between two and six bosses based on the actions you've taken up to that point, and it seems like most of the playable characters you gain also have specific endings for them based on your affinity with them over the course of the game.
All of that is kinda cool, but the general combat system feels rather generic and I can't get past how awful the translation is, at times...although shout-outs to the one translation gaffe where an NPC says, "We're going to arrest Euris for blowing the academy." Damn, Euris -- you live your life, but that's a lot of mages.
More than anything, playing this makes me wish that Koei would port this to a current gen system with just a translation and a minor bit of polish, because I'd probably be more inclined to delve deeper into this if the translation was better.
If you're looking for a classic JRPG with a ton of potential party members that may or may not die based on your actions and a ton of endings, maybe go dig up the translated version of this.
Multiple possible starting locations that influence how your story gets going, different party members to start with for each of those locations, tons of recruitable party members, and based on events that transpire over the course of the game (or events you actively choose to engage in or not), you may have to fight some of those characters and some may even die.
I also read that the final boss section of the game can vary between two and six bosses based on the actions you've taken up to that point, and it seems like most of the playable characters you gain also have specific endings for them based on your affinity with them over the course of the game.
All of that is kinda cool, but the general combat system feels rather generic and I can't get past how awful the translation is, at times...although shout-outs to the one translation gaffe where an NPC says, "We're going to arrest Euris for blowing the academy." Damn, Euris -- you live your life, but that's a lot of mages.
More than anything, playing this makes me wish that Koei would port this to a current gen system with just a translation and a minor bit of polish, because I'd probably be more inclined to delve deeper into this if the translation was better.
If you're looking for a classic JRPG with a ton of potential party members that may or may not die based on your actions and a ton of endings, maybe go dig up the translated version of this.
What a mess. For a game that takes place in a location that feels a bit out of the movie The Collection (2012), you would expect a maximum number of ways to die and all the agency to get yourself ruined. Instead, it's one of the most linear "walk your way to our next trap" situations you can possibly get.
One of your characters can't even die for about 80% of the game and actively uses information they can't have access to based on what others have found out because that information never got shared with this person, but since the developers didn't account for certain permutations in who lives and dies, that information just gets used like it's common knowledge anyway.
I don't care if the Obol system allows you to purchase dioramas later on, it's just a worse Totem/Whatever system because its sole purpose is collectible currency for Extras.
Why are some of the doors marked with "locked" symbols on them, but some aren't, but neither can be entered in either case in any of the scenes where these things happen?
Why can I play through the game to completion but not get the trophy for completing the game unless I actively sit through the entirety of the credits without skipping through them, even though the game drops a gigantic prompt that urges me to skip the credits?
What a mess. Despite my complaining, I'll still play the Sci-Fi Space Horror game they drop for their Season 2 Premiere. Maybe we can get another House of Ashes in terms of fun. Here's to hoping.
One of your characters can't even die for about 80% of the game and actively uses information they can't have access to based on what others have found out because that information never got shared with this person, but since the developers didn't account for certain permutations in who lives and dies, that information just gets used like it's common knowledge anyway.
I don't care if the Obol system allows you to purchase dioramas later on, it's just a worse Totem/Whatever system because its sole purpose is collectible currency for Extras.
Why are some of the doors marked with "locked" symbols on them, but some aren't, but neither can be entered in either case in any of the scenes where these things happen?
Why can I play through the game to completion but not get the trophy for completing the game unless I actively sit through the entirety of the credits without skipping through them, even though the game drops a gigantic prompt that urges me to skip the credits?
What a mess. Despite my complaining, I'll still play the Sci-Fi Space Horror game they drop for their Season 2 Premiere. Maybe we can get another House of Ashes in terms of fun. Here's to hoping.
Decided to go back and really give this a go, since it has a full translation and I'm a sucker for Shining Force-style games where I get to see back-and-forth reactions for combat.
It's...an okay game. It suffers more than anything from just being cumbersome about everything it does. Some examples:
-- Text is SLOW and there's not really a way to speed it up unless you're just fast-forwarding on an emulator.
-- Some text prompts are bugged. When you first meet Eris, you're asked if you'll accompany her to the next area of the game and you're given the option to say NO, so you can resupply before you leave. If you say NO, you mention needing to resupply, she tells you that she understands, and as soon as the dialogue ends...it takes you back to the beginning of the dialogue exchange you just had again, forcing you to keep saying NO until you give up and say YES to move on without resupplying.
-- Enemy behavior is largely poor and skills are super-strong. AI will give you every reason to cut it down with very little resistance. I won the major boss fight at the end of Chapter 2 in two hits, and I didn't need the first hit. The boss waltzed right up to attack one of my slow-moving units after I moved him first, so I just brought the hero up as the last action for that turn, then when everyone re-cycled and became available again, I just moved the hero over next to him and used the special ability to do exactsies. Two potential healers nearby could do nothing about me one-shotting him and didn't even try to remedy the damage done by the hit that didn't matter.
-- The Law and Chaos emblem alignment system is a neat idea, since it rewards you with unique party members that will come hang with you if you're far enough in one direction or the other...except it's not always apparent as to where you stand with some characters. I got one early in Chapter 1 who just left after I cleared a mission by following the mission rules, but I was too CHAOTIC because I had been killing enemies up to that point and not escaping from battle -- something the game doesn't even tell you about. Then I got another character in Chapter 2 who left after the first fight he was involved in because I became too LAWFUL, even though I had no idea I was even close to that point because again, no warning.
-- To add to that, this means that upgrading character equipment is a risky venture because you don't always know who might just peace out on you. A few spell out their rules, but if you're not consulting a guide, good luck.
-- Equipment is really just weapons and healing items, but even this is convoluted, because it doesn't feel obvious as to whether there are equipment limitations or not, and it's never clearly stated that in order to equip something, you simply need to buy it and you automatically can select it in battle because NOTHING IS ACTUALLY EQUIPPED. If you're like me and spending extra turns camping out so you can use the storage system to check stuff, overworld enemies could come up on you simply because of how pointless the equipment system is along with storage at campsites.
-- The alternating turn system for characters and enemies seems interesting at first, but it becomes apparent quickly that since you can control your order, you're never really in any danger if you think about tactics because even when there's less enemies and the smaller number start getting multiple actions, there's gap periods where they still have to wait on enough of your units to go, so you can always stack formations in your favor to avoid leaving a healer or archer open to major damage.
I didn't make major headway into the game because it just felt like a slog to deal with the first several chapters, but I'll also say that IF the translation is remotely accurate, the dialogue is kind of a mess and feels like something out of some really bad anime. Some of the exchanges are just beyond goofy and apparently, every dude is a horndog, I guess. I won't fault the game for that since I don't know what the original dialogue was like, but the translation definitely didn't do me any favors for enjoying it.
I doubt I'll ever go back to this again, but it was nice to spend a little time with a different attempt at a Shining Force-type game, even if it never seemed to live up to that caliber of quality.
It's...an okay game. It suffers more than anything from just being cumbersome about everything it does. Some examples:
-- Text is SLOW and there's not really a way to speed it up unless you're just fast-forwarding on an emulator.
-- Some text prompts are bugged. When you first meet Eris, you're asked if you'll accompany her to the next area of the game and you're given the option to say NO, so you can resupply before you leave. If you say NO, you mention needing to resupply, she tells you that she understands, and as soon as the dialogue ends...it takes you back to the beginning of the dialogue exchange you just had again, forcing you to keep saying NO until you give up and say YES to move on without resupplying.
-- Enemy behavior is largely poor and skills are super-strong. AI will give you every reason to cut it down with very little resistance. I won the major boss fight at the end of Chapter 2 in two hits, and I didn't need the first hit. The boss waltzed right up to attack one of my slow-moving units after I moved him first, so I just brought the hero up as the last action for that turn, then when everyone re-cycled and became available again, I just moved the hero over next to him and used the special ability to do exactsies. Two potential healers nearby could do nothing about me one-shotting him and didn't even try to remedy the damage done by the hit that didn't matter.
-- The Law and Chaos emblem alignment system is a neat idea, since it rewards you with unique party members that will come hang with you if you're far enough in one direction or the other...except it's not always apparent as to where you stand with some characters. I got one early in Chapter 1 who just left after I cleared a mission by following the mission rules, but I was too CHAOTIC because I had been killing enemies up to that point and not escaping from battle -- something the game doesn't even tell you about. Then I got another character in Chapter 2 who left after the first fight he was involved in because I became too LAWFUL, even though I had no idea I was even close to that point because again, no warning.
-- To add to that, this means that upgrading character equipment is a risky venture because you don't always know who might just peace out on you. A few spell out their rules, but if you're not consulting a guide, good luck.
-- Equipment is really just weapons and healing items, but even this is convoluted, because it doesn't feel obvious as to whether there are equipment limitations or not, and it's never clearly stated that in order to equip something, you simply need to buy it and you automatically can select it in battle because NOTHING IS ACTUALLY EQUIPPED. If you're like me and spending extra turns camping out so you can use the storage system to check stuff, overworld enemies could come up on you simply because of how pointless the equipment system is along with storage at campsites.
-- The alternating turn system for characters and enemies seems interesting at first, but it becomes apparent quickly that since you can control your order, you're never really in any danger if you think about tactics because even when there's less enemies and the smaller number start getting multiple actions, there's gap periods where they still have to wait on enough of your units to go, so you can always stack formations in your favor to avoid leaving a healer or archer open to major damage.
I didn't make major headway into the game because it just felt like a slog to deal with the first several chapters, but I'll also say that IF the translation is remotely accurate, the dialogue is kind of a mess and feels like something out of some really bad anime. Some of the exchanges are just beyond goofy and apparently, every dude is a horndog, I guess. I won't fault the game for that since I don't know what the original dialogue was like, but the translation definitely didn't do me any favors for enjoying it.
I doubt I'll ever go back to this again, but it was nice to spend a little time with a different attempt at a Shining Force-type game, even if it never seemed to live up to that caliber of quality.
2019
95% of this game is solid diamond execution.
The boss fight for The Conduit and the entirety of Ardur's Domain? Absolute exercises in frustration.
If you put a place to heal in a platforming room that's obtuse to try and make it through because the player keeps taking damage, it's probably a sign that you made the platforming too annoying for the room and didn't need a healing station there. Retread sections to pad out the last area just to open a single door? Give me a break.
The last boss is mostly fun, but talk about a deflating experience up to that point from meeting The Conduit. I think my deaths were only in the double digits, but I wish I could attribute that to a lack of skill, rather than dealing with a cumbersome setup over and over.
The rest of the game? Absolutely aces. As a Metroidvania, the exploration is excellent -- secret areas, secret bosses, secret equipment upgrades, they're totally on-point with the level design and boss design for the rest of the game (even if everyone treats the Necromancer like it's Ornstein & Smough).
If you don't mind beating your head against a brick wall for the last hour or two of the game, I highly recommend paying full price for this because it's SO GOOD the rest of the time.
The boss fight for The Conduit and the entirety of Ardur's Domain? Absolute exercises in frustration.
If you put a place to heal in a platforming room that's obtuse to try and make it through because the player keeps taking damage, it's probably a sign that you made the platforming too annoying for the room and didn't need a healing station there. Retread sections to pad out the last area just to open a single door? Give me a break.
The last boss is mostly fun, but talk about a deflating experience up to that point from meeting The Conduit. I think my deaths were only in the double digits, but I wish I could attribute that to a lack of skill, rather than dealing with a cumbersome setup over and over.
The rest of the game? Absolutely aces. As a Metroidvania, the exploration is excellent -- secret areas, secret bosses, secret equipment upgrades, they're totally on-point with the level design and boss design for the rest of the game (even if everyone treats the Necromancer like it's Ornstein & Smough).
If you don't mind beating your head against a brick wall for the last hour or two of the game, I highly recommend paying full price for this because it's SO GOOD the rest of the time.