Moved back to the backlog for awhile. I like the relaxed pace of the game, but it feels like the trade-off is that some stuff takes substantially longer to do.

More importantly, the lack of polish in this is magical. The first load screen says "Loadning" and I've also been able to complete some of the side goals in Life Tasks by doing the wrong things for them. Every time I collected Water from the City Water Source location, my "Break X Barrels" count went up.

At one point, I finished a fight and it updated my info to tell me I had completed 50 jumps and was on track to complete 100 swings outside of combat, so I proceeded to jump around for awhile to try and get more jump counts (since there's no penalty for doing so), only to note that each time I jumped, the "X swings" value would update in real time and kept updating until I completed the "100 Swings" goal. Haven't tested it further, but that's kinda bad.

Currently in Chapter 3, will update someday if/when I go back to it.

Although I appreciate the different approach this game took to almost everything (from exploration to acquisition of items to lack of mandatory bosses until the end for the most part), this game just didn't gel with me like the first one did.

I really liked the first one a lot and I think the overall direction this took just wasn't quite what I'm looking for in a Metroidvania. It's...fine? I'd elaborate more on design choice thoughts, but I just don't want to spend more time on a game that left me feeling underwhelmed. It does its job, there's enough content to warrant its price point, and that's about all I'm going to say.

If you're on the fence about it, get it on sale. You could do worse, you could do better.

It seems more interesting plot-wise than Rorona was, but man...coming into this after all the QoL improvements of Rorona DX makes this game feel especially awkward.

No fast travel, sorting is awkward, guidance is practically absent. I appreciate that hiring is free (at least, I think it is?). Wish combat gave me some idea how close I was to leveling, instead of just smashing my face into enemies and waiting for a "Level Up!" notice or going in and physically checking my status for characters.

If I had played this right after the original Rorona, I probably wouldn't have such gripes, but as it is, this just feels too unwieldy for me. From what I've read, Meruru DX is much the same, but I intend to give that a try at some point, as well.

EDIT: Finally finished this and it's mostly fine.

Didn't bother getting all the hidden souls.

I can state that the game has a hugely obnoxious section that is skippable near the end (you're quite literally about five minutes from endgame when this hour-long borefest is thrust upon you). It's about controlling much weaker bots than yours on the fly and getting booted back to previous checkpoints if you can't do it fast enough. It even includes a boss fight that is just repetition ad nauseum for the sake of padding out a section. I think the fact that you can pause the game and just skip that entire section of the game speaks volumes to how lacking in quality it is compared to the rest of the game.

I didn't realize I was most of the way through the game last time I played, as there was literally only one real boss left when I came back to it and the final fight, which is more of an enhanced alarm battle (which you should be used to by that point).

Still think it's worth getting, but it's not going to hurt you to wait and grab it in a sale. Original review follows below.

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There's a lot of potential here as Metroidvanias go. The idea of possessing your enemies is a great one, but as another reviewer pointed out, it really is underutilized. Using them to fulfill the "Hidden Souls" qualifications is nice, but that means you're using them more for puzzles and less for taking control of difficult situations.

I think the only times I really got to enjoy control beyond puzzles was when I would jump into a room with a horde of bots and would safely hang out somewhere while controlling the other bots to fight each other. Great as that is, it's less frequent than you'd hope and completely not happening if you trigger any alarms because there's nowhere good to hide.

The writing is passable and I appreciate the level of commitment to nerddom with the "Geek" items you can find in some rooms to simply mess with aspects of the game for fun (I REALLY loved the Batman one...for about five minutes).

Several of the boss fights were fun and creative, but puzzling out the bosses wasn't quite what I anticipated and in at least one instance (the boss of the Labs), I feel like understanding what was asked of me wasn't intuitive and that I succeeded more because I just gamed the system...unless what I did was accidentally what was intended of me? That's how unsure I am.

Other notes: I like the soundtrack -- I'm not sure if I'd just heard the tracks before or not, but I feel like at least one or two of them either reminded me of other tracks from other games or at least felt really familiar. That's not a bad thing, per se -- I'm down with a good soundtrack because it really does elevate a game and there's nothing more detracting for me than subpar music.

Creature diversity is probably fine -- I spent a lot more time than expected in areas because I wanted to find all the Hidden Souls in each room, so diversity FELT less distinct than it might have been. Realistically, if you push through the areas quickly, I imagine creature diversity feels a lot more natural.

I like the subweapons and item concepts, but I found myself less interested in using most subweapons instead of just upgrading one and sticking with it as much as possible.

Also of note (as was stated by the other reviewer here), losing all your currency when you die is the worst. And sometimes the save points are far enough apart that you're just going to eat a death by being caught unaware at a bad time. I was trying to save up currency after leaving The Labs to head to the next area of the game so I could see any new shops that might show up and I got diced by an alarm room that just got out of hand. Went from 4500+ cubes to respawning with just 500. Take that as you will, since I guess you can chalk it up to risk vs. reward.

Is it worth purchasing? On Steam, it goes for 13 bucks. I'd say it's worth a full price purchase just for the amount of content I've experienced so far. If it's on sale, snatch it immediately if you have any passing interest in Metroidvanias, because the core concepts are at least fun enough to merit a dozen hours of fun potentially (or less if you decide you're not interested in fishing for Hidden Souls). I'll come back to this and finish it after I shave down some more of my backlog, for sure.

EDIT: Just noting that no updates have come since June of 2021 still, so if you're seeing this review and reading it all the way through, be aware that nothing has changed and on top of that, their website that's supposed to have game details on it (accessible from the "visit the website" link on the Steam store page) takes you to a dead site that says the account for said site has been suspended. Caveat emptor, original review below.

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I know this is currently in Early Access, but just playing this for a short time, there's a lot of issues.

1. Running jumps off ledges in this game are of the kind where you're not completely sure where the game is going to assume you've gone too far and drop you off the ledge instead of letting you jump. These games always feel awkward to me because I end up falling at points where I normally would expect to be able to jump.

2. Although the art style is nice, the style gets in the way of the gameplay at times. Sometimes foreground objects completely obscure your sight to enemies, hazards, and projectiles. Some hazards aren't obvious because the game does little to make them visible -- an example of this is the wooden platforms you find early on that will have spikes rise out of them occasionally.

The spikes rise about half the height of the platform, have no sound effects on rising, and are the same color as the platform itself. You will inevitably land on one simply because you aren't noticing them.

3. Monster behavior for six of the first seven monsters I met has almost zero dependency on the player. Most of them just wander aimlessly, hopefully getting lucky by just accidentally running into you before you can get enough swings in to kill them. The slimes on the ceiling will at least fall if you're close enough, but that's the end of their interest in you. The bees are evil bastards that will shoot perfectly accurate projectiles that will seek you out and usually hit you mid-jump, knocking away most of your progress up a series of ledges that were already difficult to navigate because of the jump mechanic. Haven't reached the first boss, so I can't speculate as to whether this gets better or not.

4. You can't drop through ledges with a down-jump. This isn't a game breaker by any means, but it seems really weird when you can jump up through a ledge to reach the top of it, but have to walk off the side in order to get down to a lower level.

5. I feel like there's no real sound representation in this game. Be it music beyond some ambience, or sounds from creatures to represent their presence or their awareness of you -- it just feels really quiet and empty other than you slashing bushes and other objects.

6. Just a weird observation -- they give you the ability to equip hotkey items to use to heal or buff yourself as needed, but the game pauses while you're in the inventory menu anyway and allows you to eat those healing items there. I mention this because there's a distinct delay where you're stuck in the eating animation before you heal when in the game itself, but eating an item in the inventory menu doesn't penalize you at all, so why would you ever want to eat during actual gameplay?

-- In all, the game has some questionable design choices and it's already one month past the projected release date out of Early Access. The last update came back in June and was just a bugfix for a UI issue. I feel like either the devs might be hitting some walls or outside problems, or this could be a game that's being walked away from with whatever profits can be salvaged. I hope it's not the latter, but I guess we'll see.

If you see it on sale with a deep discount (like I did when I picked it up), check the discussions and dev activity to see whether it's still being updated before you decide on making that purchase.

UPDATE: Finally went back to this in my backlog and played it to completion. I had a lot more fun this time around, though I don't know that I could tell you why.

Exploration gets a little crazy with this game because the non-linearity of it and the ease of fast travel between locations can leave you missing out on entire sections of the game by complete accident. I kept trying to figure out how to get into the mines for the longest time and ended up doing the lake and mines right next to each other long after I was already so overpowered from exploring everywhere else by accident because I just missed some simple paths.

The bosses were still a mixed bag for me -- there's a huge difficulty spike toward the end of the game, but the game felt way too easy before that point.

In all, it ended up being a worthwhile venture and I'd say for the sheer amount of time you can spend with this with exploration alone, it's probably worth picking up at full price and definitely worth picking up on a sale. I finished the game just shy of 20 hours and that was while missing out on at least one extra boss and separate ending.

Previous review below:

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Metroidvania taking some Souls-like elements and trying to cobble the best parts together to make a good game but accidentally making it worse (for me).

PROS:

--Whether intentional or not, you can go quite a bit non-linear in your exploration if you master the art of swinging an axe weapon multiple times at the top of an arc when jumping. You cover about double your single-jump distance when jumping left-to-right or vice versa. You also move slightly upward vertically on the first swing if timed right and this opens up access to some places you probably shouldn't be at first. But that's why we explore!

-- Once you get the double jump, jumping feels more enjoyable. More on that later.

-- There's some fun flavor in the item descriptions.

-- I appreciate that there isn't an encumbrance level in this game, though that might actually be why there's a bit of a problem for me with it, too. More on that later, as well.

CONS:

Metroidvanias have a lot of things to measure in order to feel good. Controls, interesting bosses, neat abilities for gating, a good soundtrack, etc. Vigil fails here for me, and here's why:

-- Regarding controls, there are two big issues I have with Vigil. The first is that the single jump feels raw and clunky. It's very off-putting and I had to try and enjoy the game in spite of the jump. Once I got the double jump, I noticed this significantly less.

-- Also regarding controls, the choice to set a dash ability as mapped to your analog movement stick isn't a great one. Worse still, is the decision to put in a significant time delay check for when those motions are executed. The end result is that quickly double-tapping analog left or right to dash just results in walking, while trying to ease Leila to the edge of a ledge can result in inadvertent dashing. Also, the fact that the dash can't be executed after a jump seems absurd, but that's just me. It would have been an easy choice to set item usage to one of the other three directional slots that wasn't healing and let your Circle/B button be dash or remappable.

-- Bosses...are okay. They have a few interesting abilities in some cases, but they most fail because of the nature of this game for achieving damage. More on this shortly.

-- Gating is fine in this game other than the dash ability (at least up to where I've played). Which is ten hours in, with the Mines and the top of the Depressing Forest as the next areas to check. This isn't really a negative, but I needed to talk about how much I hate the dash ability again based on how it was implemented, so here's me complaining some more.

-- The soundtrack starts and stops randomly. Like, REALLY randomly. At first, I thought it was tied to moving in or out of certain areas, but it will just suddenly cease for no reason. I had thought maybe non-combat music was significantly quieter than music when enemies were on-screen, but I eventually found that it would just stop while enemies were on-screen, as well. Weird.

-- Not a big deal, but there's some text issues where an editor proofreading would have been nice. Encountered at least two instances of "I heard from (missing name) that X happened."

-- The UI is really clunky, at times. This is one of the "less great" things that this game copped from the Souls series, because nothing is worse than thinking you've backed out of a menu as you start running only to try and jump and find yourself back in a menu. You can argue this is on the user, but with the menu being shoved all the way over on the side, it's not always apparent if you've left or not if you're just trying to get right back into the game. It's also not a colorful menu, so it's easy to miss when you have dark-on-dark.

-- Another minor issue, but sometimes you can walk way too far into a wall that has no secrets. Spent way too many times swinging at or sliding into pointless walls because it just seems like I should be able to get further in.

-- Monsters sometimes spawn in inaccessible areas off-screen and just die. This is really noticeable in the cult area that you return to later in the game, with some monsters that can poison trying to make attacks from off-screen, then just instantly dying and you getting currency and experience for it. Whoops.

-- The skill systems is broken in both directions. Part of this is because the poise system is so powerful that it makes using anything other than an axe/halberd pointless. If you can do enough poise damage, you smash through anything that isn't a boss.

-- Continuing on the skill system, some skills will have hardly any impact on things while others will straight-up break the game. Reflecting 100% of damage received if you strike an enemy within three seconds? Big impact. Increasing recoil on an enemy from an additional 0.1 seconds to 0.15 seconds? Not so much.

-- One more thing regarding the skill system is that there's no explanation of how some abilities work. With the halberd, I invested in an ability that gave me a finishing move after a "whirlwind attack". I had assumed it was just part of my regular swing combo until I realized there's no actual swing combo for the halberd...you just press Square/X over and over to keep wailing on enemies. Looked to see if I had unlocked another ability that was whirlwind attack -- nope.

-- Minor gripe and this might only be with the Smithy, but having EXACTLY 3000 gold on hand when going to enchant your weapon will cause you to not be able to enchant your weapon. I thought maybe I had not unlocked the actual ability to enchant things yet and ended up spending about 30 minutes online looking through threads to solve this before thinking about it and selling an arrow to bring myself up to 3003 gold, at which point it suddenly worked.

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In conclusion, I might go back to this and finish it someday, but five or six bosses in with no real excitement beyond exploring and lots of little frustrations have kinda put this on the backburner for me. I've got too much backlog to focus on this at the moment. If you're going to pick it up, do it when it's on sale. Probably 50% off.

Finally went back and completed this and 100%'d achievements. Not sure if playing in Windowed mode resolved my previous issue, but there weren't any problems this time around.

In all, it's a much easier FF1 than most previous iterations and although it's missing some fun additional content that was put into the GBA and PSP versions, I still found it to be an enjoyable time.

In all, probably about 11 hours taking my time to get 100% of the Steam Achievements if that's something you care about (filling out the bestiary and getting all the chests is the most time-consuming aspect of this).

Original review is below, not that it really applies anymore.

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Original Review:

I appreciate that they attempted to make the game more serviceable for people in various ways (lower prices for items and spells, sprint ability from the outset, etc.), but until they update the game to allow for an option to enable VSync, I can't rate it higher and will probably sit on the game for a bit for said update.

Seriously, without VSync, I get to watch lots of nasty screen tearing while moving around in the world and that's not a pleasant sight. Currently options are just resolution and fullscreen versus windowed or borderless window.

I actually found this game pretty fun and then set it aside so I could clear some backlog and then come back to it and enjoy it some more.

Came back to find that my save file no longer existed (maybe from the most recent update?). So...now it's in limbo again.

Worth checking out, assuming that your save file doesn't randomly vanish like mine did.

Control scheme is a little weird-feeling at first, but once you get used to it, it's fine. The game is a walking sim at its core, but the interactions at terminals with Kaizen-85 can be very interesting.

In fact, this is probably where the game both excels and fails the most -- Kaizen can either have some very fruitful conversations with you or just sound strangely obtuse when trying to talk about relevant topics.

Not a specific spoiler given the nature of the game, but I was trying to track down a particular item and inadvertently triggered a clue from Kaizen, so I went off to suss out that clue. I remembered seeing the item Kaizen mentioned at one point but not giving it much notice, so I figured I'd go back to try and see what I missed about said item. Found said item, found nothing useful about it. Went back to the specific terminal where Kaizen talked about said item and it mentioned a separate item altogether in the current location.

Went and checked around the current location and it gave me more prompts about other possible locations or options in lieu of my current search. The thing is -- there's nothing wrong with the fact that it did this and remembered the locations where it was offering this advice. The problem was that even if I'd bring up a separate topic during this search that wasn't relevant to said search (but may or may not be relevant to the story/game itself), it just ignored talking to me about said topic and focused more on what it expected me to do to progress the game in that particular instance.

This happened a few other times resulting in some really awkward conversations where I felt like I was talking to an old Interactive Fiction parser more than an "AI", and it kinda took me out of the game.

Additionally, some things did not function quite as intended -- one particular section of the game sees you dealing with an issue under a time crunch and when I made it to the door I needed to open, even though I was standing where the icon suggested the terminal was, the terminal would not activate, so I went elsewhere to try and find a different door and terminal, assuming I had made a mistake. When other possibilities failed, I went back to said door and suddenly the terminal worked properly as if it were never an issue.

The game isn't a polished work, but it's definitely worth your time to check out. Your mileage will likely vary based on your interest in engaging with Kaizen and walking simulators in general. It's definitely not worth the twenty dollar asking price, but if you got it on sale for ten bucks (I believe that's what I got it for), you probably wouldn't feel cheated.

Just didn't really scratch the dungeon crawling itch I had.

If this game needs one thing improved without a doubt, it's the really goofy mapping system. It draws like it's on a sheet of paper, but it won't fill in rooms unless you step into every single square in the room and make sure you're looking at the appropriate walls.

Why yes, you can walk backwards into a room and into a wall and it will simply suggest that there aren't walls there because you haven't turned around yet!

Other than that, it's very...eh. I've got too much backlog to go through to be interested enough to finish it, though it definitely wasn't difficult in any fashion up to as far as I progressed (end of Floor 3).