€ PRICE / QUALITY

☐"IT'S A TRAP!"(Admiral Ackbar)
☑ "That'll do, pig. That'll do."(James Cromwell)
☐"SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!"(Philip J. Fry)

PC REQUIREMENTS

☑Minimum
☐Medium
☐High
☐ Extreme

GRAPHICS

☐Cheap
☑Acceptable
☐Masterpiece

GAME TIME (hours)

☐0>2
☐2>5
☑5>15
☐15>30
☐30>50
☐50>75
☐75>100
☐100>?

STORY

☐ None
☐Bad
☑Good
☐Amazing

DIFFICULTY

☐Simple
☑Easy to learn, hard to master
☑Hard
☐Blackhole (FiolaSoft Studio)
☐Impossible

BUGS

☐Game itself is one big BUG
☐Bugs destroying the game
☐Bugs
☐Few little bugs
☑Perfect

Honestly, the game has some interesting ideas but fails to deliver in so many ways. I'm 18 hours in and I'm not going to finish it.

Combat: Sword swings are weirdly timed and slow. I get that you want the player to be methodical with their swings so that mashing isn't rewarded but in a fast paced souls-like it adds a layer of annoyance. The dodge mechanic further worsens this experience with it also being on what feels like a half second delay. In a game where the enemies can (later on) spam constant unblockable attacks, you should have timed swings OR timed dodges but not both.

Healing: Healing is done in 2 ways... You find a limited plant in the world that is pretty scarce, doesn't grow back, doesn't get refunded on death, and you can only hold 3 (until you pointlessly upgrade the capacity later), or you do this awful song and dance with enemies. You hit an enemy to fill up a red rage bar, when the bar is full you can use a powerful attack that also staggers enemies and breaks unbreakable attacks (yellow indicator over their head when doing the attack). If you fill up your rage bar, they're not dead yet from all the previous attacks, and use the rage attack to break their unbreakable attack then you'll get ONE little dot on a track of 4 dots below your health bar. If you do all that 4 TIMES then the 5th time doing it the enemy will poop out a little health orb that gives you an astonishing 1 HEALTH out of your 6 health. If you take any damage during this process then your return is net neutral. If you take 2 damage it's a sunk cost. There's ways to get a little more health per orb or forgiveness out of this healing system but at the end of the day both methods of healing are pointless. Your better off just dying and getting sent back to some (often times) awfully placed checkpoint station.

Abilities/upgrades: You start with a sword and a related skill tree path you earn points to unlock by killing enemies. There are 4 separate paths in total all related to their individual weapons. That's all fine and good but the biggest complaint i see and have also experienced is people looking up how to unlock more paths because the game doesn't really explain how to get other stuff. The other 3 weapons you can unlock don't come until you hit major story beats in the game. At this point I've beaten a dozen bosses and only unlocked the fist weapon which is TERRIBLE. I won't get into it but for the love of god devs don't tie your rage bars to all weapons when one of them goes on cooldown when your rage bar is full. There's also a soul harvest perk mechanic that let's you unlock 4 slots you can put a bosses unlocked soul into for an additional benefit. That soul benefit can be enhanced with additional perk points.... but the game doesn't explain how to upgrade it. Or maybe it did in the beginning of the game in the endless wave of tutorial splash screen text but there's no way to look up system/glossary info if you forget.

Progression: You can upgrade your sword with 1 of 4 perks you unlock throughout the game. How do you get these? Side quests... You have to go out of your way to do a bunch of side quests that are all over the world, some are time-gated until later, and some are earlier but you can be screwed out of them if you progress the main story too much. Again, the game doesn't tell you about any of this.

Side Quests: You talk to an NPC you find along the journey with a blue speech bubble, they ask you to find something for them, you bring it back, and get a reward. This comes in the form of an upgrade to your sword, health, bestiary book, or a memory shard (I don't know what this is for).

World/map design: It's atrocious.... and that's putting it nicely. Areas are designed in a weirdly confusing loop with no real points of interest to make spots memorable. It's all just the same design and texture so you get lost looking for everything. On top of that there's no map that details the area at all further pushing the confusion. There's a fast travel system to different parts of the map but that's about it. I spent way too much time per area looking for where I'm supposed to go then actually progressing and I still have plenty of areas I apparently haven't finished.

Tracking progression: There's no real system in place to remember who gave you what sidequest or where they are located. Often times you find the thing someone is looking for along your journey before you even get a sidequest (which is pretty cool tbh). This leads to looking up everything online since there's no in-game way of tracking sidequest progression. If the NPC isn't in a major settlement but instead in an obscure part of the game....well whip out the wiki I guess.

I could go on but you get the idea.

Overall, If you have to spend more time looking up sidequest wiki's than finding cool stuff on your own and knowing where to go than actually playing the game.... you failed at making a game. The world design being terrible as it is could have at least been compensated for with a good map system that you can access in your menu while exploring but there isn't one. Combine that with the lackluster combat where later on your just dodging for your life against a lightning fast dog demon that can explode like a nuke and it's just a bad time. The game wants to be like dark souls but fails to keep the fairness of combat where if you died it's your fault. The odds based in the games core combat mechanics are stacked against you and you can't out-level or buildcraft your way around it. I have 18 hours in this game and I spent that ENTIRE time trying to find the fun behind the frustration and there just wasn't any.

I won't even recommend this game on sale since the core of the game is poorly design. Could the devs adjust a lot of mechanics and implement a map to help ease the pain points? Yes, but seeing as the last update was Jan 2023 I doubt it. There are better souls-likes out there. This isn't the worst but it's also not worth playing.

Sadly I can't recommend this game. The exploration feels mostly good, the story develops quite slowly but becomes interesting with time. But the biggest problem is the combat system. The combat system is too fast and too chaotic. It's like take Bloodborne or Nioh 2 and multiply the speed two or three times. If you have combat with this speed then you should make the player fight 1 or 2 enemies at once max. But that is not the case here. You will regularly fight 3, 4 or even 5 enemies at once that that attack blazingly fast. What happens in such a scenario is that you do blind dodging because you just can't see all of the incoming attacks, they come too fast. It doesn't help at all that healing items are very scarce and enemies can 3 shot you mostly. So it happens quite often that when particular fight starts, you make two or three mistakes you simply die, in such a encounter from combat start to your death ... 3 seconds will pass. After playing for couple of hours I just got tired of this combat system. There are just better games out there with way more polished combat systems.