Sadly another "Hardcore" 2d Darksouls inspired platformer, which treats the terms "hardcore" and "fun" as mutually exclusive.

TLDR: A good game that gets brought down by some VERY frustrating design choice.

The artstyle creates a suitibly grim tone, a lot of work went in and it shows. Music is also fairly good and never gets annoying, I didn't feel like turning it down at any point.

There is a fairly large world to explore and it looks good, but the overall map design is painful, lots of very small ledges and enemies with attacks that can easily knock you off, my most common cause of death was falling. There is also no map, luckily there is a great map that has been provided by someone in the community.

Combat is very good in general, there is a nice variety of weapons and they usually feel good. Heavy weapons feel like they hit with a impact and light weapons are fast and flahy. Weapons have a variety of combos that feel good to pull off and can provide different angles of attack if used correctly. The bad part comes in the form of an exhaustion mechanic, which reduces you maximum stamina the more you fight - That's right, you are actively punished for fighting in a game that is focused on combat......

Bosses are for the most part, well designed and fun to fight, with a few exceptions, like the Tree of Man which, like the Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls is just painful, not particularly hard, but some of it's attacks are poorly telegraphed and it can eject you from the arena in a single hit, which is instant death.

Speaking of Death, like Dark Souls, you will lose all of your Salt (AKA Souls) when you die and you need to get it back, you also lose a portion of the gold you have collected, as a "fee" for someone dragging your carcass back to a sanctuary and reviving you, all of this also involves an unskippable cutscene which is a bit too long and gets boring quickly.

Another painful inspiration from Dark Souls is the checkpoints being placed some distance from bosses, which is bad enough as even Fromsoft did away with this, but there are also no fog gates, meaning trash mobs can follow you into the boss arena, so you can't skip past them.

The story is pretty much non-existant, you are here for some reason, you want to kill things for no reason other than they are in your way, there aren't really any characters to write home about, I don't think they even have names anyway.

Developer seems to really hate blocking or tanky builds and rolling around naked is absolutely not my taste.

Charlie murder but darks souls