Ascendant

Gorgeous art and beautiful sound design. Lots of power ups and potential builds. Very creative rougelite. Fast gameplay

really fun, a lot of stuff to figure out, tough boss battles

I've only played for an hour so far but have been having fun with it and will definitely come back to play more. The art design is full of personality and has its own specific style which is lovely to look at, with detailed and interesting character and enemy designs. The wands and hats you collect have distinct styles and abilities that make upgrading feel very rewarding. The progression is also quite good, I enjoyed unlocking a new wand or hat that would make enemies suddenly a lot easier to deal with. I've had one or two performance hiccups - a dash ability which i unlocked with a pendant left me stuck in a wall and i had to reload. The parry ability can also be a little hard to judge with some of the melee attacks. Overall I would recommend this game. I'm having fun with it so far and plan to come back to it. I think with some fine tuning it could be really great. It's impressive work given it was made by a solo developer, and for under €10 I would say it's absolutely worth picking up.

I don't really know how to explain this but, the game seems pretty interesting with a ton of playable spells and really interesting fights that overall works pretty neat but at the same time... I'll be honest, can be boring from time to time. The fights when you understand the enemies are pretty boring (at least at the start of the game, I got annoyed of fighting the same 3 enemies over and over again, killing over 200 of them before the first boss) but also the main mechanics are way too forgiving and make the overall experience slow. The problem is that : - blocking doesn't have any effect when missed so you can just spam it 24/7 and lose nothing (you can still cast during it and it doesn't slow you down) - healing spells are way too easy to get and spam so you can just afk heal and spam shield and just never die. - the mana and spell mechanic feel great at the start but once you play more than 30 mins it gets hard to like it anymore. - diversity exists but you litteraly don't have any reasons to choose diversity over braindead, because if you try to not spam these broken blocks and heal you just die because some enemies are MADE to hit you whatever you do (so u NEED to block here) Overall I think it's pretty sad that such an interesting game with rich build diversity has such issues gameplay-wise because the story from the tutorial seemed great (even though it seems to extend only rarely) and it's clearely not enough for me to recommend it. I feel weird about not recommanding the game when I didn't even play it that much but it just didn't seem worth the wait. PS: graphics are nice and the grandpas are cool as fk. 5/10

Tedious and shallow :(

Idk, the game is fun, but the lack of details on how to do things, the bugs, maybe pick this up when its less than $4?

+Snappy controls +Looks nice +Feels polished +Some player choice -...but too far between / not meaningful -...playing the game feels like a chore. = DIsappointed. I could not find the fun and would not recommend the game for myself.

This game is not fun at all.

So the thing is the game isn't necessarily bad, but it's just missing so many little things. If this game had like 50 more unique wands, decent music and better enemy design(instead of just hyper scaling hp), I would put this as a recommend. The game kinda presents itself as a Noita x Gungeon but falls flat on both ends. Main complaints: - Music is basically non-existent. I got really bored like 20 minutes in because of this. - Menu jank. Like it thinks the triggers are the bumpers and vice versa (controller). And menus will randomly not show - Bosses are straight-forward, but have tons of hp for basically no reason - Lack of customization/combos/synergy - Floors are a slog to go through because of the repetitiveness of enemies with no hazards with the above complaints I'll revise the comment if this game ever gets a huge update, because it has potential to be great.

I cannot recommend this game as it currently is. Enjoyment turned to frustration turned to angrily playing through it and cataloging frustrations because it could be so much better so easily. I love games like this. I want games like this to exist. This one is half baked and you will be paying to playtest things that should have been caught by the dev's best friend after the game jam. It's early days yet, so hopefully they keep polishing it, but for now if you want a polished guy with a gun in a dungeon game you're better off with Wizard of Legend, Noita, Enter the Gungeon, or The Binding of Isaac, to name a few. As of Feb 1 2025: 1) enemies and rooms are hyper repetitive and predictable (each floor always has a merchant, an Enchantress, a Mizer and a boss. All other rooms are enemy chest rooms), 2) there are no interesting environmental factors (exploitable traps, holes in the ground, slippery floor, moving platforms etc), 3) quests are either trivial or unrewarding (1 I've found appears to be impossible due to a bug - don't take "release 100 souls", it counts chests rather than souls), 4) all of the gear is basically linear upgrades with very few inter-slot synergies to make builds interesting, 5) bosses are boring bullet sponges (the first couple have literally 1 attack and 1 movement pattern, and the Mizer - literally the penultimate boss - spams his grab attack so much that he forgets how to move, so you can just stand out of range and hold down the trigger for 5 minutes after you've done about 30% damage to him), 6) healing is very OP and unlimited. Just kite, heal and repeat 99% of the time. 7) spells are all very samey (and the spread on the few scattershot weapons is so large that they're generally useless), 8) the visuals don't communicate things like enemy debuffs very well, 9) the merchant/upgrade interface suuuuucks on controller (it's clearly meant for mouse dragging and it didn't translate well. Steal ideas from Death Must Die if you have to, anything but this) and I found this neat trick where if your inventory is full and you go to upgrade an equipped wand but cancel without putting your wand back on your quick bar, it disappears forever and now you're unarmed. 10) I don't think there's any meta progression, but I can't say for sure as I was so bored and frustrated by the time I got to the Mizer's second phase that I turned it off. Maybe once you've beaten him there's some meets. I shouldn't be coming out of my first time at the final boss' first phase feeling tedium. That sucks, because the second phase has potential to be quite fun. It reminds me of the final boss of the NES ghost Busters game, and I'm sorry to the dev that I had to make that comparison - that final boss was the only part of ghost Busters that didn't feel like a hateful chore. 11) Parrying works well for defence, but does trivial damage. Which I guess makes the "parry 50 times" quest easy? --- Overall, Ascendant would benefit from more variety in all aspects, more build synergies, a quest system that doesn't penalize you for not finding the floor's Enchantress before doing anything (and communicates quest completion better, and doesn't clutter your inventory...), clear limits on possibilities (ie maybe enchantment scrolls should only come from quests, or different kinds of chests containing only limited kinds of items), and some serious rethinking of the controller setup. Also maybe fast travel or random encounters in revisited cleared rooms; getting back to the Enchantress when my inventory is full of upgrade scrolls is just a chore. Oh yeah, 12) When combining wands at the Mizer, I shouldn't have to hold the up button for over a minute just to put 1/3rd of my coins into the bribe box for a 90% chance not to have a bugged fight. Let me set the probability and tell me what it's going to cost, or let me move my cursor from the ones column to the thousands column, or take some inspiration from any of the SNES games that solved this kind of interface mess in weirdly functional ways decades ago. For the bosses, even spawning adds from other places than right in front of the boss would add a lot of interest. Look, I've got feelings about this. I knew from the first boss that I wasn't going to like the current state of the game, but I kept going because of neat things like the charger ghost variant that possesses enemies to become a shield that runs away to the next nearest enemy whenever you drive it out. That's really cool behavior. More weird stuff like that, please.