So I tried it, and I just didn't like it. In fact, it left me kind of pissed. I literally just had to stop playing it after probably around the ten hour mark because I just had enough.
My rant is below because I want to vent my frustrations. I do want to clarify that I'm pretty certain a lot of these are the result of having really shitty luck in the places I happened to go to first, which I think just a risk in the design of something as open-ended as this. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that while I hated my time with this game, I don't want people to assume I'm just out here aiming to diss something they like. (also if I swear it's just because that helps me vent)
With that out of the way:
! I think it's definitely like a mix of a gigantic metroidvania with dark souls mechanics, but as someone who doesn't particularly feel truly excited about either of those genres, it just wound up annoying me more than half the time I was playing. Decided to try it because it sounded like it was more rewarding than the usual by having secret boss encounters around the corner instead of the usual boring upgrades, but I had exactly the opposite.
! Every time I chose a path and stuck to it, it ended in a roadblock. To the unbearable point where I had multiple roadblocks at any one time and no solution to get past them. When I finally would stumble onto a boss or a significant area of sorts, I would finally get an upgrade… only to discover it was a fucking combat upgrade that either unblocked only one of several roadblocks or served no purpose whatsoever in unblocking my paths.
! It's the thing where it takes HOURS to explore an entire area before having a clear idea of where I'm going and how to get there. This isn't helped by the fact that multiple times I would explore an area for a loooong time before finding the map asshole, and when I finally DID find him and looked at the map, I had already explored literally all the areas he had marked AND MORE.
This in turn made it extremely exhausting to backtrack to find areas where I was previously stuck. I get the high in discovering a power-up and then suddenly realizing a lot of options just opened up, but I just could not feel it because any power up I got was followed by "ok, so where was it again that I could do something with this?"
Cue 30-45 minutes of moving around before finding a spot I could open up, only to open up and discover... a seal or charm. Soooo.... bullshit. Like, I get how charms can be rewarding, but they're hard to goddamn use when I have the max notches used up already and have no idea if I can find more because I haven't found any.
! I cannot express how infuriating it would feel for me to be exploring for hours and discover a cool area at last to be rewarded with bullshit and thus having to go back to already-explored areas AGAIN to look for the other blockade I had found before.
! Then there's the other thing that just infuriates me: dying.
Now, I am by no means a slouch when it comes to gaming. I think it's because of this that I find the combat and bosses to be the best part of the game by far. Anytime I found a boss it was actually exciting, and usually it took about two tries or so to take them down (or one for some simpler ones like that asshole who was sitting on the bench). But dying made me want to throw the controller at something because instantly my thought flies to which god forsaken faraway bench was the one where I sat last.
! Like, I get there's supposed to be a challenge to the bosses and a consequence to dying. But if I'm excited exploring a new area and in that exciting I find cool new fighting challenges and badass bosses I want to fight over and over again, making me backtrack to a fucking distant bench is SUCH A PAIN. This is made worse in some areas by having relatively long-ish minion fights in between that despite not being difficult just delay the process of getting back, sometimes also taking away some chip damage or making you use up soul and leaving you less prepared for the boss you're trying to get back to.
I mean, why the shit isn't it possible to put a fucking bench before a boss area? There's enough benches all over the map to not have you expect a boss anytime you find one. Or shit, have a separate mechanic so that if a boss kills you it puts you outside the area of the boss instead all the way to bumfuck wherever-you-last-sat.
! This also takes me to the ghost dark souls/shovel knight mechanic where you have to go back to get your money. I hate it in this game.
In Shovel Knight it makes sense because it's a linear path, and even if you die in a side area you are still always in the same path. Also, it doesn't take away all of your money. I don't do dark souls so idk how it works there.
But this is a game about exploration. If I go particularly deep into an area where I don't have the map and where I have no shitting clue where I'm going, I realize that there's always the possibility that I may die. This should be ok, it should always be ok to die in games like these where exploration and risk-taking and FREEDOM are encouraged. But instead, what kept happening is that I would die to some bullshit, die to a cool new boss, or a combination of the two, and get sent back to a familiar area.
In coming back of course I'm going to find stuff. New paths, different directions... except I never could bring myself to follow them because if I did, then goodbye all of my fucking money. The worst instance of this was when I actually didn't know how to get back to my corpse, and it was in that next bout of exploration that I found in quick succession: map-maker, some dude asking for money to sell me shit, the bank lady, and a post where I had to pay to summon the fast travel. All things that I couldn't pay because I had lost all of my money on a ghost that was god fucking knows where. From there on I had to constantly go back to get my ghost regardless of how stupidly inconvenient the location was, and it just completely killed any desire to be risky or stray too far from what felt like the common path. And I hate that.
! Also, the common bullshit that keeps picking off at your health constantly exasperated me. I hate accidentally landing on enemies or spikes because you fell too far a distance. I hate trying to skip part enemy fights and then they follow you and then you have a hellish cluster of minions on your ass all tossing shit and comboing like 3-4 HP from you, and then you can't heal because if you stand still you're fucked. I hate entering a secret/hidden cave, only to suddenly hear a chip and BOOM, kamikaze bird out of nowhere and I'm dead. I hate areas where you walk forward and you hear something, and thinking it's a worm to collect you keep going forward and suddenly bullshit comes out of the ground and hurts you. Then you walk back past this area because blockage, and that shit appears AGAIN. I hate that I would be at one hp and see a spikes/wall jump challenge area and then spend 3 minutes or so grinding bullshit enemies just to have enough soul to heal myself entirely because I know that dying in the middle of the spiky hell would be fucking painful to reach from wherever-the-fuck-I-sat-last.
! But I kept going. I bitched for hours about this game while playing it, but I kept going, because the boss fights gave me hope for where it was going. The blockages I kept seeing gave me hope for cool upgrades. And at one point I got to what felt like ACTUAL STORY and figured "fuck, at last I know what I'm supposed to do and why I'm even fucking here, thank god", but then I wake up from that dream and some seer bitch tells me to bring her some tree fruit so she can buff up my light sword. I spend hours re-exploring the world to get those trees, get all the map upgrades to make traveling better, and come back ready for w.e. the next badass adventure is and she goes "so fast! well, here's a hallownest seal, bring me 200 next time."
FUCK. OFF. WITH. THAT.
How can it take such a fucking massive time to collect yet another goddamn collectible only to get jack shit for it. After that and the hours of moments where it honestly and truly felt like the game didn't respect my time, I finally decided to just stop. I gave up on games that angered me less for... well, for less. It also doesn't help it that there was no discernible story or character development or charm to most things, so for all I know there was no real point to anything. Like, how am I supposed to be excited about finding a gravestone or w.e. when it just has some random-ass words that mean jack shit to me. And no, I didn't particularly like the world either. It has that indie thing like Ori where for some reason everything has to be dark and bleak and tim burton and DC and while it's pretty at first it got tiring pretty quickly. I mean shit man, we're talking about bugs and there's no psychodelic colors or colorful leaves or flowers or ... idk man, why is it that games hate color so much?
! So yea, I'm happy to have tried it out and there's things in here to make it a good game, but fuck if it isn't for me.
In conclusion, if you are not into metroidvanias, this game is a fucking terrible risk to try out. You COULD stumble into a solid, awesome-as-fuck-path, or you could have my experience of heading into the wrong place every time and having a terrible time.
But to end on some positivity, what I did like:
- Combat, though I would refine some of the effects (explosions on hit obscuring enemy actions hurt me too many times)
- The little collectible wormies
- Hornet, she's a badass
- Character design
- The soul mechanic is interesting and is an excellent reason to actually care about fighting things
- The option to not have the game track where you are on the map. Makes it feel like a real-life map and keeps you attentive to land-marks. (which would be awesome if I could have the map earlier when entering an area)
ok, I'm out. Super tired lol. I don't think I've ever been more convinced in my life of how tired I am from exploratory game experiences and really happy with just linear level design.