Is it bad that Arcade and Rogue modes pretty much feel the same to me?

That being said, it's a fun game. Worst thing I could say about it is that it needs an audio adjustment option for in-game -- for those moments when you pick up The Apocalypse as a weapon and it sounds like a fan engine grinding at ungodly speeds while you're firing it. It was loud and disruptive enough that my dog looked up like, "What the hell are you on about?"

Still, fun times.

A brief list of some things that have happened to me in this game:

-- I shot a zombie and then it magically dispersed into light particles, just like real people do

-- I found a pocket dimension that I use for saving and storing items that is specifically a sofa cushion that only activates when you sit on it

-- I watched a walkthrough of a puzzle because I didn't want to brute force it, only to find the person in the walkthrough brute forced it

-- I got a key to the first floor, but it only works on the second floor

Honestly, the game looks pretty decent and it feels like they really tried to elicit that survival horror feeling through and through (even to the wobbly tank controls that sometimes result in you spinning around in circles on accident because of camera angles). But wow, what a mess this game can be at times.

Feeding this to the Backlog Monster, but with intention to go back and finish it at some point (instead of half-heartedly imagining I will and not doing so).

I've put in twelve hours so far and the game seems alright (a couple bugs aside), but for whatever reason, my brain just keeps wanting this to be Fallout 3/NV and it's clearly not like that beyond the most rudimentary aspects of the game.

So, thanks, stupid brain -- you've made me want to play something entirely different instead. I'll review this with an actual opinion beyond "it's fine" someday, promise.

It's "worse Axiom Verge", for me.

Soundtrack is similar, but uninspiring.
Visuals are similar, but worse (and areas look very same-y, as do room-to-room designs).

Gameplay feels like someone tried to take some solid principles of Metroidvanias and do their own thing with them, resulting in design choices that are either worse or similar but pointless. Bombs that you have to physically attach to things you want to check, rather than being able to just drop them? Being able to rotate between which of two buttons shoots the missile versus the charge beam (as opposed to just...using the other button when needed) -- things like that. None of it feels intuitive, but just like another layer of unnecessary complication tacked on to a game that didn't need it.

I decided to put this one back into the backlog after managing to softlock myself because the game let me travel a LONG distance out of my way to an area I shouldn't have been in because there were no clear indicators of where I should go to get more items for gating progression. Ended up dropping into an area where there's instadeath fire on the ground, no way back up, and the only forward progress is through a boss that is extremely RNG-heavy and everyone suggests bringing a weapon from an entire previous area that I never got. Couldn't even get the boss below 75% health most of the time, so I definitely shouldn't have been there, but there was no clear signposting that I was going about things the wrong way.

So, I guess -- the game is fun when it doesn't get in its own way, but I would hardly ever actively reach for this game when there's so many better options out there. Maybe I'll feel better about this when I pick it back up (thankfully, the game didn't let me save in the area where I softlocked beyond the point of no return).

Some neat graphical flourishes mixed with some fun pixel art mixed with ugly monsters...yeah, everything about this game is a mixed bag, for sure.

Music is catchy at first, but then loops very quickly and you start to get over it after hearing the loop for the fifth or sixth time in a row in a span of several minutes.

Combat and movement in general are where I really have an issue with it. This is a Metroidvania, but it wants me to punch/kickbox with enemies, but the actual actions look like specific animations cut from some fighting games that don't belong with any single character, let alone this one. There are times when she moves like Iori Yagami with certain strikes, then other times where she's doing light attacks that have a range of almost nothing...but none of the moves feel correct. Since you have MP in the form of Demonic Power, special moves require Demonic Power and often don't pop correctly when you initiate the commands for them (I can summon Devilboy with Up>Down>LP all day, but damn if it's not impossible to do Forward>Forward>LK or HK for some reason).

I mentioned the movement above, but I really need to touch on why it's uncomfortable as can be. You mostly just walk and jump places, but the jumping is a nightmare. When you jump, you move forward until you either 1) stop, 2) move backwards (and only minorly, at that), or 3) touch a wall. The first two are self-evident in their behaviors, but if you touch a wall, you cling to it and can jump off said wall in the opposite direction with increased height. This means triangle jumping is a thing, but this only sounds good in practice. In execution, level design has lots of ledges that you can't reach with your normal jump, so you end up hugging an edge instead of getting onto a platform, then flinging yourself in the opposite direction regardless of if that was your intent. Coupled with the fact that there's a lot of floating indestructible enemies that cause HUGE knockback and you find yourself spending a lot of time flying away from potential ledges and falling back onto the ground, only to wait several seconds to get back up, recover, and try again. This can culminate into spending minutes on the same "simple" jumps again just to cross a single room in some instances. Some room designs include multiple floors of distance so that if you are working across several ledges (sometimes using the Jump+HK to get a little extra air-time) and contact an enemy, you fall all the way back down one floor and have to climb back up to try again. It's frustrating, to say the least.

Fought one boss so far and it was basically throwing strikes at it while it sat in one spot for a bit, then moved to another spot, summoned some projectiles that followed a pattern that had no interest in your location, then rushed back and forth across the screen once before repeating the process. It had three phases, and the only thing that changed in each phase was how difficult it was to hit the boss without dealing with knockback. Since you only had ~10 seconds to get your hits in before the whole projectile phase came, one knockback basically cut out about half your time and meant you'd have to do some jumping to get back into place. Good luck with that.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that there are doors that gate you from exploration (not sure if any affect progression) and require you to deal a certain amount of damage to said doors in one shot in order to get through. The game uses a leveling system with stats and an equipment system that affects certain stats, so you're almost incentivized to exclusively dump all your points into ATK so you can potentially open those doors sooner. Kinda takes away some of the variety of the game when you're supposed to decide between a different build or useful items.

Not a bad game, but very uncomfortable to play with all its awkward control issues, for sure.

This game is a tough sell for me. It's fun enough, at times. I enjoyed the bosses I've fought so far -- not so much the enemies, as they feel mostly identical save for one different move in each of their repertoires.

First, you fight a sword guy. Then you fight a sword guy with a shield that doesn't use the shield to block. Then you fight a spear guy with a shield that doesn't use the shield to block.

Then you fight long range snipers, but it's easy to dodge their shots and when you get close, they become sword guys. They also like to swing at you if you jump up near them from below, which makes them walk right off the ledges they're guarding. Then you fight rocket snipers, but they do all the same things. Then you fight guys who look like sword guys but have the ability to use the beam from their swords and home in on you / go through you. You just roll like you normally do. Then you fight guys who are like the sword guys but can fire a purple wave at you that travels horizontally only. This is hilarious when different levels of terrain come into play.

The boundaries for where the game wants you to go are a little unclear at times, but not that big of a deal. The platforming is the real fault of this game, though. There's a lot of bugginess and a lot of ledges you can land on that are too far down to jump back up, so you have to kill yourself or use your bonfire-warp ability and go back and run through again. The side-scrolling platforming sections are extra weird and feel unnecessary, like they just wanted to try out some ideas and rolled with them.

The absolute offender of all offenders though is trick platforms that collapse under you over instadeath pits. No warning, no color differentiation or details to spot -- you land on/walk onto the platform, it drops, and you either reflex fast enough to not die or you die. My instinct to sudden changes in the game is usually to roll forward. This just makes you dash into what is usually the next safe platform at chest height and look up at it longingly as you plunge to your untimely death AGAIN.

That was the last current straw for me in my current run of the game, as I had beaten a boss and was looking for the next bonfire-type-thing and saw an item to collect, walked over carefully and right before I got there, platform drops and I die. Respawn a fair ways before the boss fight. No thanks. Maybe another time, I've got plenty of backlog to play without that garbage.

Also had a bug where the forge menu spazzed on me and just kept shifting between multiple weapons I had when I was trying to pick one to upgrade. Only notable bug I can think of outside of HUGE enemy AI goofs that is worth noting.

Beat this back on the PS3, but ended up getting a copy on Steam to give it another go. This game does not live up to repeat playthroughs (at least for me). It's very bare bones in its nature and you find out quickly that the simplest solutions to problems is often brute force tactics. I don't mean to just attack over and over with characters, though.

You'll notice shortly after you get through making your party (the usual rigamarole of rerolling until you get the bonus points you like, only with the complication of not knowing what stats are needed to choose particular classes) that you're way too poor to afford anything. The good news? You don't need 90% of it. Buy your top floor maps, buy some vulneraries just for the beginning, and then gain a few levels.

Sooner or later, you start picking up equipment with your levels and (assuming you started with a Bishop) you'll be pooling in money that you COULD spend on other stuff...or you could just save in case you really need it. For my party, I bought one katana and one claymore after a time and never spent another dime on anything other than resting at the inn or reviving characters.

If you keep saving money, you can burn that money at the temple with the "Tithe" command to get EXP instead. Those levels will come nicely early on and you'll be smashing enemies left and right while making headway in the dungeons as you figure out the intricacies of each level.

And then the monsters finally stop playing around. This starts probably around Shiin's Dungeon Level 4 with Dark Crusaders. If you brought a Bishop with you and you're high enough to have learned Magic Wall, fights are still pretty manageable. Without Magic Wall, you'll learn very quickly how susceptible you are to a lot of problems, be it status effects or just mass damage spells coming through unblocked.

Thankfully, you can save at any time -- though there's only one save slot, so be careful that you don't inadvertently save after your healer bites it if you want to explore (or worse, lose your mage too and have to walk back out). This means that if you do end up in a bad scenario, just close your game and reopen it (really useful on later floors when the enemies might be worth the experience but not worth the hassle that comes with them). You can also just run but later floors have enemies that will often make running an absolute chore, so you might end up doing a mixture of these tactics to make forward progress.

And that's the brute force -- slogging through fights after practically every doorway you pass through, resetting until you don't get annihilated on the lower floors while you try to complete the story. Advice for completing the story: just check GameFAQs because depending on when you initiate certain quests, the main story will open up for you well after you've already made progress beyond the floors you needed to be on for earlier portions of the story.

There's no markers or indicators as to where you need to be going for each aspect of the story quest beyond knowing which floor to go to for the first two story quests. The final quest has you hit certain places on the third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and tenth floors of Shiin's Dungeon, I believe. I didn't even activate that quest until I had already mapped the first eight floors, so without any indicators, my choices were an FAQ or simply retreading EVERY SINGLE STEP of each floor of those dungeons until you run into the next flag for the quest.

There are two different final bosses you can fight in Shiin's Dungeon (the Dungeon of Trials that acts as a companion has no final boss normally) for the main quest, but with only one save slot, that means you need to do a runthrough at least twice to see both fights unless you can manage to hit all those flags I mentioned in ONE shot and beat the boss in one try. Otherwise, any save after you hit the first flag(s) in the last story quest locks you into a specific final boss based on the choices you made prior to saving.

It's not a bad game, but it's a lot of sideways design decisions that will make you raise an eyebrow a few times and it wears its late-80's/early-90's mask poorly, as you can see lots of cases where it's simply going through the motions of trying to replicate that old-school feel and instead just creating frustration without warrant.

I still had fun, though...and I completed Human Female's Scenario (in order to "beat the game", you have to complete every race/gender combinations' scenarios...good luck).

Get it on sale if you're digging for a dungeon crawler on Steam. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better.

It's not a terrible game, but there are some unpleasant components to it.

What's good?

-- Once you acquire the power-ups, there are two different gun modifications that feel really smooth.

-- I think that's it.

What's average?

-- Level design is somewhere between okay and bad depending on where you are. Save points are located in precarious places in relation to teleporters, so for most of the game, expect to do some awkward backtracking sometimes (especially the forest, which is annoying to slog through when you're trying to figure out what you're missing next).

-- Basic enemies. They're fine, they have enough behaviors and variety for a short game that they don't wear out their welcome in parts.

-- Exploration. It's a Metroidvania, so it's what you're here for (along with bosses), and this game has a decent number of power-ups waiting around corners or past bosses for you to enjoy and use to overcome gating.

What's bad?

-- Boss design isn't great. One boss you'll end up fighting three times and with only marginal differences between each iteration, and then four other bosses that vary between pushovers and annoying because of certain power-ups you won't have yet. Regardless, none of them are challenging.

-- The climbing power-up. This is a two-fold issue, because being able to basically go almost anywhere is nice, but the real problem is that the areas designed specifically around using it are designed poorly to be an exercise in frustration. Moreover, if you touch a wall, you cling immediately and if you jump off, even if you have double-jump, your jump off isn't long or high, so you essentially lose about half-a-jump of distance. The sticking to walls when you don't want to is especially annoying.

-- Cryptic information regarding keys. This is an optional part of the game, but there are some keys you can try and find to get access to a walled off area. The clues for these are bad. One suggests that the area you're in changes, but it turns out the clue is to tell you that you just need to walk in and out of the room several times for the key to appear. Another says it's near a save point, but the phrasing of the clue made me think it was in one of a couple save points that were in a completely different location.

-- Indestructible enemies. Hazards like the electro ball, I get. Bonefish and the tank? Why? They behave just like other stuff, why can't you kill them?

-- The interface in general. It's hard to really tell how you're doing with picking up power-ups and the pause menu has a decent map, but there's no markers on it, so you better remember everywhere you've been (and you WILL wander).

-- The gusting wind bits where you have to ride wind up in order to reach certain areas. These things were very finicky and resulted in me crashing back into hazards a lot.

Bottom line:

The game is already available on the cheap and it's an okay Metroidvania, so if you don't want to pull the trigger on it at full price, wait for a sale. You might get about 3-4 hours out of it if you take your time and wander around as much as I did.

Finally started this up again to give it a second go. My initial experience with this was my wife and I laughing at how absurd the "lore dump" is at the beginning of the game, where they just throw out fantasy terms left and right and expect the player to just somehow remember all these terms for later like we've got a notebook on-hand or something. Coupled with the atrocious voice acting from Viola and Terrence's feathered companion, it was already off to a bad start.

Combat felt very basic, but otherwise fine. The real crime is the dodge mechanic -- backwards is fine, as it gives you good coverage overall. Forward, though...it's this awful hop that's miserable and does nothing for covering distance if you want to try and go past an enemy. You would actually be better served trying to dodge an enemy by turning away from them and then just rolling backwards twice. It's really that awful.

The bloom effect from sanity loss is annoying, especially since it becomes even more difficult to see over time with the tendrils of darkness that outline the bloom.

For some strange reason, even though the game gives you tutorial screens for stuff that you have to read through, it has "Hold (A) to Skip" at the bottom of the screen...but since the tutorial screens are just a screen popping up and nothing else, there's literally nothing to skip, which equates to a really silly design decision.

There hasn't been much music outside of cutscenes and it's all way louder than you'd expect for settings. Attacks don't feel like they have proper impact from their sounds (from you or against you).

Level design is actually pretty good, with some looping multi-leveled areas that allow for shortcutting while also making a smaller area feel larger than it really is. The Lunatic system for sanity is a nice touch for making bosses more difficult, but it leaves me wondering if you can just cheese bosses by getting enough sanity potions and bringing them with you to a boss fight. Without using a single one, I took the first boss down to half health before hitting zero sanity and activating Lunatic state.

Beyond that, there are some other notable things worth mentioning:

-- multiple characters (your mileage may vary on this, especially with the knowledge that your starting character is also the character you use for the final boss, which means upgrading other characters doesn't impact your final game state)

-- craftable relics-of-sorts that you can place on your character to gain stat increases

-- health and sanity potions are crafted (or sometimes found)

-- there's a skill system for each character that you can use certain items to acquire...skills can range from stat boosts (like sanity increases) to potion functionality (better potion results from your crafted items) to combat (backstabbing, different kinds of special attacks that use your Rage gauge), and so on.

Is it worth it? On sale, it might be worth a check if you're a fan of Souls games. I don't think it's as terrible looking as everyone seems to suggest, but that voice-acting really is A-W-F-U-L for some characters and forget about the dodge command.

Bit of a mess of a game. At first, it's off-putting because the jumping feels awkward due to ledges having that strange feel where you're not quite sure where the actual edge is, so you end up running off the side like an idiot sometimes. Also unsure about the early design decisions for platforms in general. Two ledges of equal length stacked over each other so the player has to jump out and back around to get to them can be a pain, but it's extra frustrating in this game with the weird edge distance uncertainty.

Anyway, that gets resolved fairly quickly as you eventually get yourself a double jump in short order. At that point, 99% of your jumping grief is gone.

The rest of the issues with the game, not so much.

The maps are awful -- each area displays on its own with no way to look at the linking of previous areas to it, and all the maps are just differently-sized blue squares with little spaces missing on the edges of the squares depending on where exits are. There's also red squares to indicate save points, though this isn't immediately intuitive.

Your progress is hard-tied to the save locations and it's a little strange because they feel like bonfire concepts like in Dark Souls, but in actuality, they're more like just pulling up a menu and hitting a save slot and saving that way. This means the game isn't auto-saving when you pick up useful power-ups, currency, or even beating bosses and that you MUST go back to a save point when you want to confirm your progress in any fashion.

You can smash lanterns that are hanging in the ceilings to get currency or healing stuffs, but sometimes the items don't fall from the ceiling and just hang out there -- or in the case of underwater sections, can get stuck in the ceiling and you can't actually pick them up at all.

Hitboxes on enemies are weird. Sometimes you stun them and they don't get a free attack, sometimes you don't, and it's a mystery as to how things are going to turn out and discourages close combat since you can't be certain you won't just eat a hit because you thought you had the stun instead of dodging in and out for one hit over and over to be sure you get the kill safely.

Your dash is tied to your Essence (MP). Essence regenerates, but since using your strong attack and a number of special moves uses this also, it can be minorly prohibitive for no real reason.

Some moves ask you to put in command similar to fighting games. This was really off-putting for me because I love fighting games, but I couldn't do the Backward->Forward->Light Attack 90% of the time when I tried to do it. As soon as I got the power-up, I sat there and tried to do it a few dozen times and it didn't work, so I re-read the monolith that gives you the power because I thought I was doing it wrong. Nope, the timing is just strange for it. The Down->Up->Light (or Strong) Attack ones weren't quite as annoying to pull off, so at least there's that. Unfortunately, these commands also affect the ability to access some areas of the game, so if you can't get a handle on them, it's going to be a LONG DAY trying to play Demon Peak.

There are progress crystals in the game that unlock sliding doors for you to go through -- but some of them are only temporary crystals and there's no way to tell other than trial and error (you can essentially put yourself in a position to be stuck on a one-way path that hopefully will terminate somewhere you can get back from without too much trouble).

Music is nice, at times, but some tracks overlap between areas (I think? Maybe they're just very similar).

Bosses are -- well, that's tough to define. The first one I encountered had a variety in its moves, but due to the nature of how it appeared on screen and its speed in doing so, it felt very overwhelming. A couple times, hitboxes worked in my favor and it didn't hurt me when I would be contacting it. Other times, it would knock me over with even the slightest graze or just juggle me to my death. Another boss I fought had me striking them to start the fight, but then I couldn't seem to land hits on their body anymore and they eventually bounce-juggled me into a pit of lava. Difficult? Unsure because I was dodging their attacks just fine for most of the time until I gave up on trying to move around and just tried striking their body, to no avail. The save point for that area in relation to the boss is in a location that is cumbersome to get to from one side or the other, so it discouraged actively trying again to get back into it quickly.

I feel like there was something else to mention, but it's eluding me now, so I'll just say that the game is alright, but not without a number of issues to overcome. If you're wanting to pick it up, get it on sale and SAVE REGULARLY.

This game is a masterclass in unintuitive design. On my first run with the game, I fumbled my way through getting into a few rooms and jumping down some cliffs, got a weapon that has projectiles somehow and managed to cheese some enemies I don't think I should have been able to cheese with some projectiles.

Eventually died and ended up in the first chamber again. Repeated this a few times and didn't make a great deal of progress. How do the controls work? I guess that's part of the lore of the game, because (A) causes some kind of weird glowy effect around the character, (B), (X), and (Y) seem to use items that are mapped to the inventory (healing or throwing stuff, I guess), (RB) launches a projectile that you can control the angle of by using (LT) to place an hourglass icon on the screen and direct where to shoot towards, (RT) does a swing with the weapon, and (LB) brings up a menu that lets you swap to other character forms, I think?

Start uses the time manipulation ability, I think? Not sure because I think I was using it on accident at first and then I no longer had enough "tide" to keep using it (the game tells you this, there's no visible bar to show how much you have). Select brings up your inventory.

Why do I mention all these controls? Between all of that and the analog sticks and the D-pad, the next time I loaded the game, I was unable to figure out how to open the door to leave the first room because the game has no tutorials or useful insight about what things are for AT ALL.

Just isn't worth banging my head against a game that feels it's too smart to explain itself to the general populous. Also, not particularly great looking and music is just kinda eh, but gameplay is a flat zero for me. Only not half-starring it because I didn't play enough (due to being stuck) to say I gave it a fair shake.