Unsurprisingly for such a sprawling game, this demake recreates only one tiny, stripped down portion of the whole. It's more a demo or proof of concept, really. You can play through basically everything there is to do in about 10 minutes. But what's there is really impressive. The way that certain complex aspects of the game's mechanics—from the dice rolls to the thought cabinet—were adapted and simplified was often very creative. And the chiptune renditions of the soundtrack were charming as hell. I wish they'd left in Cuno, but oh well.

Critics: "This game is a masterpiece. A master class in non-linear storytelling. A deep, moving, intelligent exploration of memory and identity. One of the best examples in the medium's history of game-as-art and game-as-literature."

[boots up game]

Floating Skull With Thick New York Accent: "What's crackin', chief? You dead or sumthin'? Let's skedattle outta here before those mummies get a whiff of us, or our ass is grass if ya know whadd I mean!"

Probably the best apocalyptic psychedelic existential communist hardboiled detective CRPG to ever come out of Estonia.

Really though... I always hesitate to use the word "masterpiece" to describe any work of art or piece of media, because it kind of puts things into this rarified category that simultaneously makes them feel stuffy and unappealing and sets expectations too high, making disappointment inevitable. This isn't a perfect game by any means. But it's an incredibly engrossing, well written, and innovative one. It's vast in scope (despite being confined to a very small geographic area), with richly fleshed out worldbuilding. It's also possibly the most intelligent game I've ever played – and not in a clever, purely conceptual "art game" sort of way. I usually find the gaming world to have an extremely low bar for what it considers "literary," but in this case I really did finish the game feeling like I'd just read a really good novel.

The central draw is the game's immersive dialogue tree system, which gives a feeling of open-endedness and non-linearity and which radically emphasizes player choice in a way comparable only to pen and paper RPGs. The truly innovative aspect of the game is the way in which its character stats are not merely attributes, but fragments of the character's psyche, leading to a chorus of voices that advises you (sometimes poorly, sometimes in contradiction to one another) through every conversation and decision. I really hope more games copy this mechanic.

I did have a few gripes:
1. The worldbuilding information dumping was occasionally a little excessive. I realize this may have been partly a result of putting lots of points in the Encyclopedia stat, but I would find myself sometimes quickly paging through long descriptions of things. The Shivers attribute, in particular, while sometimes providing some evocative atmosphere, more often than not left me wondering why the hell I'm reading three paragraphs about the texture of oil and rainwater forming puddles in the pavement or some random old man smoking a cigarette on a neighboring island or whatever.
2. Having character stats be tied so closely to clothing is a fun idea, but it wound up making things more tedious than they needed to be, as I found myself constantly backing out of dice rolls to change my outfit. I also spent most of the game running around with no pants on, since the only pairs of pants I ever found had debuffs I didn't want and buffs I didn't need. The gag of having to find most of your clothes in the literal trash, and then combine them in all sorts of absurd ways to suit your build, makes for an amusing spectacle, but one that sometimes undercut the emotional gravitas of certain scenes (delivering the news to someone that their husband has died while naked from the waist down and wearing an Asian conical hat, a hideous necktie, and the equivalent of a Conan the Barbarian t-shirt, for instance).
3. I mentioned before how one of the most appealing aspects of the game is the sense of player freedom and non-linearity it evokes. Unfortunately this was frequently undercut by dialogue branches staying open after they'd ceased to be relevant (prompting me to ask questions I already knew the answers to, without acknowledging that this was well established information), or when they directly contradicted other branches I'd already selected. For instance, while there were one or two times where me being aggressive toward someone led to them not being willing to talk to me anymore, there were many more times where I could go through the same conversation multiple times in a row, taking a different tact each time. Sometimes you'd get a prompt telling you someone was getting impatient with your questions, but then go on to exhaust every single conversation path with them over the next 20 minutes with no consequence. The game would have been so much more immersive, and my decisions as a player felt so much more real and consequential, and make each playthrough feel wholly unique, if I was left wondering "would this conversation have played out differently had I said something different there?" for basically every dialogue choice.
4. The ending felt a bit abrupt. Not narratively. But just cutting straight from an ordinary dialogue window to the credits. Finishing with a few still images and some voiceover would have done a lot.

None of the above were consequential enough for me to consider this anything less than a 5 star game though. If story-based, atmospheric, or dialog-heavy RPGs are at all your kind of thing, this is absolutely worth playing.

I've seen a lot of negative / disappointed reviews of this game, and while I don't think the criticisms being made of it are untrue, they also seem overly harsh. I thought this was a very fun, engaging, beautiful, and rather flawed Metroidvania.

To start with probably the biggest selling point: the art is gorgeous – I love hand-drawn games when they're done well, and this one had a lot of character. The way swinging your sword, dashing, explosions, electric shocks, etc were represented were all really dynamic and nice to look at. And the sound design worked in tandem with this to help sell the immersion. I got a very Crash Bandicoot or Donkey Kong vibe from this, actually – the way your character bounced, or got electrocuted, or broke boxes or barrels apart, or the way you and your enemies both exploded into gears and bits of machinery upon dying all had this kind of charmingly goofy, cartoonish, arcade game feeling that puts it in a different lineage of platformers from many Metroidvanias.

If you're a fan of Metroidvanias in general, I think you'll find the gameplay and level design to be relatively solid, though not particularly stand-out. The balance of discovery, backtracking, non-linearity, secret areas, etc all felt pretty good to me – there was only one non-essential endgame area I had to look up a map to figure out how to access, but I also never felt like I was being handheld or forced down a single path.

One complaint I've seen is that the environments and enemies feel repetitive. While I think there's definitely a point there, I also wonder how far into the game these reviewers got. There are three areas in total, and certainly the look of each area is distinct. But it also takes waaaaayyyy too long before you get beyond the first area, and I think more could have been done to distinguish the areas through introducing new environmental challenges rather than just different backgrounds. I will say the map could be frustrating, as it didn't give a great representation of the actual spatial relationships in the rooms / actual entrance & exit locations, and doesn't give any indication of where within each room you are.

Likewise, the enemies you encounter as you progress are for the most part souped up versions of the ones you encounter at the beginning of the game, but they're not just lazy palette swaps either – I thought the designers did a good job of finding creative ways of creating variation that necessitated finding different ways of combating them. Still, a little more surprise and variation in that department would have been appreciated. One major disappointment was the lack of bosses: there's only two in the entire game, with 3 or 4 areas where it feels like bosses should be, but which instead are filled with tournament-style arenas with waves of ordinary enemies. I think this probably contributed a lot to many player's feeling of repetitiveness in level and enemy design.

Speaking of combat: here's one area where I really have to defend the game against some of the criticisms I've seen of it. I think a lot of people got frustrated that they couldn't just go running in, wailing on everything in sight and expect to survive. But this isn't that kind of game. You figure out pretty early on that you have to use an attack and retreat method in engaging enemies, learning their attack patterns and then using that to your advantage. The cool down meter that limits the amount of consecutive attacking you can do does a good job in encouraging a more strategic approach to combat. The different varieties of bombs and the different abilities you gain as you progress also add variety to the possible combat styles (though I never really figured out the usefulness of the ice or molotov bombs, and the controls for getting the electric wave/punch to work were frustratingly hit or miss).

I enjoyed the RPG elements: leveling up, a skill tree, gear with various buffs... but I do think this could have been extended further. I wish you were able to see your stat totals outright. And it would have been fun to have debuffs on certain gear and a slightly more elaborate skill tree, with slower leveling, to really force player choice and distinguish more sharply between distinct builds (as it is, I acquired every skill by the end of the game without doing any grinding, and I didn't notice a drastic difference in attempting to min-max different stats).

My main complaints with the game were mostly more subtle design flaws. There wasn't a good indication of leveling up beyond the first time it happened, so I went half the game wondering why I hadn't advanced to level 2 before realizing I'd been leveling up the entire time. It also took me halfway through the game before I realized what the teleporter pads actually were. There were many, many small little things like this – aspects where the player should have been nudged toward understanding something, but the nudge was missing – that individually weren't that big of a deal, but cumulatively made for an often frustrating or confusing experience. What's disappointing is that all of this seems like the kind of thing that could have been fixed with just a few extra months of play-testing.

But really the game's biggest flaw is it's complete and total lack of story, lore, and worldbuilding. There's basically an opening cut-scene, and then you play the game, and then there's a (somewhat anti-climactic) closing cut-scene. I'm not the type of person who plays games for story. I usually don't really care at all. But it would have helped create a sense of purpose, variety, and general color to at least have some NPCs sprinkled throughout that you can talk to. (This would have also been an opportunity to explain certain features.) There was actually some really cool environmental storytelling going on – backgrounds filled with discarded appliances, dinosaur bones, etc – which implied a certain amount of world-building which never gets elaborated on.

So yeah, long story short, this was enjoyable, but not spectacular. If you're into Metroidvanias, and it's on sale, it's worth giving a try imo. Not sure I'd pay full price.

This is supposedly the designers' first game. I think it's a pretty solid effort, and I'm looking forward to what they make next!

I've only just started getting into the Metroidvania genre (and have mostly played the classics more than I have the more recent crop of indies), so it's possible that what I found unique about this game isn't actually so unique. But for a genre built around exploration, this is the first game of its kind I've played that manages to convey the actual feeling of exploring.

The thrill of breaking open a wall or finding the door a key belongs to and revealing a whole new area to uncover... the anxiety of tepidly venturing into uncharted territory, then skittering back out because the enemies are too powerful and you don't want to risk dying somewhere you might not be able to safely recover your "shade"... the wonder of looking back on the tiny world you began in from the vastness of the world you end up in (the scope of this game is truly incredible)... I never wanted it to end. I wouldn't say I had an emotional investment in this game (certainly not a narrative one: the story is still entirely inscrutable to me), but the atmosphere was enthralling, and the progression, though largely non-linear, was carefully structured to maintain this delicate balance of knowing one's bearings with the joy of discovery and the fear of getting lost.

With something like Castlevania, there always comes a point where the thrill of exploration gives way to the completionist drive to check off every corner of the map, acquire every power-up, defeat every enemy, etc. Here I deliberately avoided the temptation (well... mostly) to look up guides or walkthroughs until I was close to end game. There's a lot to love about Hollow Knight: the combat is smooth, the platforming fun, the boss fights frequently inventive and challenging; the animation is beautiful and the sound design is immersive. But it's that magic of discovery that was for me the game's primary pleasure. And I didn't want to spoil it by turning it into a checklist of achievements.

There is an impressive amount of post-end-game content here – most of it a long succession of souped up old bosses and a few new ones. But it was at the point where there were no areas of the map left to uncover that I began feeling like I wanted to move on. The only sad thing about a game oriented around discovery is that you inevitably run out of things to discover.

[106% completion (out of 112) – might come back to attempt the Trial of the Fool again and beat the rest of the dream bosses, but I don't really see myself going through all the Pantheons]

“I thought, Why would I ever want to play this game again? Partly I just didn’t want to ruin my perfect record, but partly it seemed like a really self-defeating sort of victory. If you’re really good at charades, your friends might end up thinking, Wow, this person is really good at communicating things or at understanding what other people are trying to convey, even in difficult situations. But when you win at Mafia, people just think, Wow, that person is really good at convincing me that they’re being honest when in fact they are lying. Why would I want my friends to think that about me?” — Misha Glouberman, “There Are Some Games I Won't Play With My Friends,” from Sheila Heiti's The Chairs Are Where the People Go

Okay, but like, that's just like, your opinion, man...

Echoing just about every other review: this gets an A+ for concept, A+ for aesthetic, and probably a C for gameplay. I didn't find the combat to be too hard (it skews on the easy side, imo, especially compared to other beat-'em-ups from this era), but you don't get nearly enough heals. The biggest flaw though, as another review mentioned: making it so that you take damage every time you punch through an object when the game also REQUIRES you to punch through objects constantly in order to progress is just insanely stupid!

This is a vast improvement over Secret of Mana, and adds a whole slew of new and complex features that keep it interesting (like a day/night cycle and an expansive class system), but a lot of the flaws of that game are still present here.

In my SD2/SoM review I mentioned how "dead" the environments feel in that game, and how limited your options for interaction with them are. SD3/Trials is sprawling compared to its predecessor, with huge locations for you to explore... but with no reason whatsoever why you'd want to explore them. Every time you end up in any kind of castle, for instance, you find yourself with dozens of completely empty rooms to run through (occasionally peppered with a handful of NPCs who provide incredibly generic flavor text dialogue).

Likewise, while the variety of expendable items you start getting access to once you reach the Black Market were really cool, the equip-able gear follows the same simple pattern as in the previous game, with each new town offering new weapons, armor, and/or accessories that boost one of your stats by a few extra points. It would have added so much more to the game if there had been a little more variety to the gear, with different items offering different buffs or debuffs in addition to the stats, so you'd have to strategize a bit on what gear to equip and what gear to keep or sell.

I loved how they played up the arcade beat-'em-up vibe: the "VICTORY!" message after clearing a screen, the roulette wheel when opening a chest, etc. But at the same time, the melee combat leaned a bit too much toward mindless, repetitive A-button smashing, while at the same time also maintaining a lag between attacks that slows down the combat (the charge bar from SD2 is gone, but the lag is still there - only whereas in SD2 you could attack before the charge bar filled for a lesser amount of damage, here there's a hard limit to how frequently you can attack). Just about the only element of strategy in melee combat is if and when to use your tech, although very often you'll end up clearing the screen before your tech even activates.

Oh well. It is what it is, I suppose. Overall, this was a bit of an odd mix of overly simple and needlessly complex elements for me. I can see why people love this game. I had fun playing it, but eventually got bored.

Damn. This is a LOT rougher than I remembered from my childhood. Could have been so much better if they'd just focused more on smoothing out some of the mechanics: hit detection is garbage, ally AI is continually frustrating, and the having to wait for weapons to 'charge' thing feels like it just gets in the way of making the battles as fun as they could be. Also may possibly win the award for most confusing and unintuitive menu interfaces in any video game ever.

The story and characters are pretty forgettably boilerplate; the art style is cute and charming (but has me wishing it captured some of the beauty of the cover art); the music is one of the strongest things about the game, and is downright weird in some parts.

What I found most disappointing though was how oppressively linear it all felt. It's not like I was expecting an open world game or anything, but so many RPGs from that time managed to guide the player in much more subtle and elegant ways, where it didn't end up feeling like the only worthwhile things I could do at any given moment were either grind, or do the exact next thing the game just told me to do. Combine that with the fact that so much of the maps are empty and non-interactable (not so much as an unlocked treasure chest in some villager's house to pillage!) and the NPC dialogue being so rote and bland, and it makes the world feel sort of... dead. (Then again, I just came off of playing Chrono Trigger so maybe I'm just expecting too much here.)

All in all, this definitely feels like an RPG for kids.

Might come back to this another time, but for now I'm going to try the sequel (Seiken Densetsu 3 aka Trials of Mana) - just started and already it seems like an improvement.

Gorgeous, but goddamn is this frustrating. I gave up after about an hour.

The platforming mechanics are clunky and extremely limited, and the "puzzle solving" isn't really puzzle solving at all. Most of the time you advance either by sheer luck, or by dying over and over again as you try each possible path only to be surprised by some threat that would have been impossible to predict. The game doesn't reward ingenuity, reasoning skills, or motor skills / hand-eye-coordination – it mostly just rewards sheer persistence through the endless slog of repeated, meaningless failure.

Prince of Persia (which this game clearly takes a lot of inspiration from) succeeds because its basic mechanics are so incredibly simple that while particular puzzles may be difficult, the solutions to those problems can always be clearly comprehended given the consistency of how character, environment, and this limited toolkit of player input all interact. And so although the player's continual failure is frustrating, you learn to play the game better with each attempt. Here I didn't feel like my failures were teaching me to play the game as a whole, I just felt like they were teaching me the particulars of each level design. There were so many new elements being introduced all the time that I never could get a grasp on the rules of this world (so many of which felt completely arbitrary anyway – which heights would kill you if you fell from them, for instance).

I can see why this was so widely admired when it was released. Unfortunately it definitely doesn't hold up.

Sort of unique genre mashup that blends side-scrolling mech shooter gameplay ala Cybernator or Metal Warriors with RPG elements. The RPG aspect feels pretty slight, tbh, with leveling only increasing your HP (which maxes out at lvl 40 anyway) and unlocking new equipment or upgrades for purchase (equipment also levels up as you use it). But it definitely makes the gameplay more fun and more strategy-oriented than a more straight forward shooter.

It also leans into the storytelling aspect a lot more than most other games of the mech shooter genre, with a narrative that's a little bit like 'Metal Gear for dumdums', with some heavy cold war hangover vibes ("anyone attempting to make the world a better place must be secret evil masterminds!").

Graphics are gorgeous, level design is so-so, game mechanics are pretty smooth and fun despite a few annoying drawbacks like bad AI, an underutilized ally unit system, and the fact that exploding enemies injuring you really limits your options for play style and makes certain weapons and ally units worse than useless.

Anyway, I haven't seen this combination of elements in any other game before or since, and they really work well together! This was a worthwhile playthrough for sure, and I wish there were more games like it.