Castle In The Darkness

The game is just way too hard. And punishing at that. Any game that doesn't put a save point before a boss fight is not for me.

I was THIS close to give it a bad review because WHAT DO YOUMEAN A SKIPABLE CUTSCENE AFFECTS THE COMPLETION PERCENTAGE!!!!

I Want to be The Guy. is a more rewarding game. this game "WANTS" to evoke old school games of the NES, but either doesn't remember those games well enough for how NOT trolly they were, and how few "instant death" mechanics were in them, or saw I Want to be The Guy, and thought it was "too fair"

Классический случай, когда игру делает не геймдизайнер, а графический дизайнер. Игра сделана криво. И судя по дате релиза 2015, на нее забили х.. Картинка 320*240, можно растянуть, выглядит так себе. В общем примерно на 200 смерти я устал играть в этот кал. Как метроидвания - игра ноль, как платформер - полнейший ноль. Автор как будто не умеет делать игры. Он просто не понимает как все устроено. - Тут нет стандартного лишнего пикселя для прыжка, как делают все уважающие себя разработчики. Очень часто у края прыжок не срабатывает. - Если в тебя попадают, ты мигаешь. В нормальных играх это значит, что на секунду ты бессмертный, тут этого нет. - любит трясти экран там где это не нужно - прыжок в игре "тяжелый", герой будто тонну весит. Когда появляется второй прыжек в воздухе, ситуация становится еще хуже. Он часто не срабатывает, да и не сильно увеличивает расстояние. - хитбоксы квадратные. Если у тебя обьект круглый, то хитбокс, должен быть меньше спрайта. - ну главное доказательство, что разрабам пофиг на аудиторию, карты в МЕТРОИДВАНИИ нет!! Даже в самой первой метроид она есть! - вы сделали некоторые вещи стоимостью в 15-20 тысяч! На такое хер заработаешь. Будь я разработчиком, я бы скрасил смерти игрока, мешочком денег на месте смерти. Это бы в РАЗЫ уменьшило жопную боль от сотен смертей в ОДНИХ И ТЕХ ЖЕ МЕСТАХ. - ну и куча подобных мелочей, которые портят впечатление. А главное, что все можно бы было исправить, но разработчикам явно пофиг на проект. Так как тут экраны, то очень часто дохнешь при переходе, тупо падая на шипы или с обрыва. Инпутлаг в игре тоже не слабый. Кривой сложности тут нет, в любой момент игры может быть супер сложно. Особенно меня вывел из себя уровень, где у тебя на пути херова туча препятствий, которые убивают с одного удара, а в конце ♥♥♥♥ БОСС!!! Ебанутый? Баги. Если игра на весь экран, инвентарь у меня не отображается. Хитбоксы хер пойми как. Иногда касаешься и ничего, иногда убивает за километр. В игре есть сеты. Например зеленая броня и стартовый меч. Тогда мечь начинает стрелять. НО. Это тоже сломано, он стреляет пару экранов и ломается. Сохранения сломанные. Я 3 раза находил топор, но ни разу он не сохранился в инвентаре. Я прям сразу бежал сохранятся. Ну и самое тупое это полоса жизней. Ты никогда не знаешь сколько у тебя жизней осталось. Полоса просто от балды рисует. Если убить босса, увеличивает жизни, (меняется стата в настройках инвентаря), полоса же никак не меняется. Тогда логичнее было бы сделать ее в цифровом исчислении. Тут в принципе жизни совершенно не нужны, нужно было сделать сердечки, тогда хоть ясно бы было. А так 99% смертей это шипы или падения, которые убивают моментально. Находишь более мощное оружие, броню, а противники становятся еще сильнее. Накой хер спрашивается тогда мне эта броня и оружие, если по факту ничего не меняется. Это не РПГ где есть левелкап, это метроид, а значит тут ограничение зон. Не нужны тут десятки одинаковых мечей с уроном различающимся на 1. В целом игра прикольная, но ощущение, что тестировать никому не давали ее, да и на правки забили болт.

I used to speed run this game for some idiotic reason. Even though I can't even rebind the keys properly. I know, I'm a freak, and I use ESDF for movement rather than WASD (typically), but trying to rebind that on this game causes the "F" key to overlap with the full screen effect, making it impossible to rebind to my personal control setup. So many aspects of this game has zero quality assurance that went into it, and even with the developer knowing about certain issues, he took zero action to fix anything while working on his next, boring as ♥♥♥♥ game by comparison to this one, when this one honestly is not even that great to begin with. I was going through some serious mental health issues while I was speed running this game, so perhaps that's why I kept playing this honest ♥♥♥♥♥. With most certainty, I can assure you that this game is NOT worth 10$.

This game is designed to annoy you, and doesn't want you to play it. So just don't! That simple. Plenty of other much better metroidvanias out there. My one million complaints if you're interested: 1. No Map, so it's hard to tell when you "took the path that wasn't the dead end with a treasure" and no, this game is not designed in a way that having no map is fine. There is backtracking and remembering where you didn't go very necessary to find secrets. So it would have been extremely useful to have a map. 2. Game has pretty cheap difficulty with instakill spikes, only save checkpoints so backtracking is absolute suffering until you get the warp ability far into the game. If you missed some item, going back for it is a massive pain prior to getting the ability to warp, so if you make a simple mistake of exploring in the wrong direction have fun being locked out of an item for most of the rest of the game. 3. Game does not recognize an Xbox one controller. 4. Game glitches on resizing the window when you boot it up for the first time. 5. Game doesn't let you change equipment whenever you want, only at save points. Why give multiple weapons if you cannot easily switch between them? 6. Game lives in the shadow of better games. Constant blatant references to games it was inspired by. Lots of enemies based on things in nintendo games, fairies that damage you by saying "Hey! Listen!", power up shroom enemies. It's pretty cringe. Only one of them made me laugh and it could have done so even without the reference - this was when you open a chest as a gift from the NPC, get 1 coin from it, then most players instinctively go back and hit the NPC with their sword out of annoyance, expecting nothing to happen, but the NPC instead dies instantly with a small blip. Of course, they have to make this character look like link and say "It's dangerous to go alone, take this" as well because they can't come up with their own ideas. Candles in a castle placed conveniently in hitting height that explode and drop fire that hurts you when hit instead of hearts like in castlevania just to trick you yet again. Angry faces on rock block enemies that drop down to try to crush you in a castle just like in mario world! Ugh. Get your own designs please. 7. Often background elements are interactable, but look like they aren't. Such as pots in rooms of inns or pots in dungeons. The game has bad visual design in this way. I kept dying because i hit my head on something i thought was a background detail and plummeted into a pit. 8. Game's audio does not mute on alt tabbing out of it 9. No pause button, only alt tab to pause 10. Due to how fast enemies annihilate you if you get even touched, it's superior to simply fight nothing ever if possible since the risk is too high to your health. This is not how this sort of game should be designed, the player should not be discouraged from fighting enemies. 11. This is kind of rudimentary game design, but usually you design levels so that skilled players can flow through the level by feel. However this game is designed in that if you do that, you will be hit with 17 traps that do insane amounts of damage to you as if it was one of those "look how hard it is" games from back in the day like I Wanna Be the Guy. Which isn't hard, it's just intentionally designed to trick the player in ways that instantly kill them. This is crappy game design in my opinion. It's obviously not one of those "jokingly bad how dishonestly the game is designed", but you are constantly hit by things placed exactly where you need to stand to accomplish something unexpectedly. It's so annoying to play through blind as a result. 12. Often spikes way too easily blend in with the background. For example in the cave area frequently there are only one or two of them so they look like harmless stalagmites. The visual design is just not good for such a instantly punishing hazard. Oh look, a couple NPCs around a comfy campfire. Oh walking into the campfire just about instantly kills you in this safe zone just to be annoying. Too much crap like that. Everything is designed to aggravate the player on purpose. 13. The hitboxes are not well done for bosses, frequently you will get hit by them when it seems like you were not within "touching" distance. 14. Enemies that look exactly the same as enemies in earlier areas so you cannot tell them apart now drop deadly projectiles when they die, resulting in you getting tricked yet again into getting hurt. You're supposed to design games so that people aren't cheated into learning to be good at the game, they learn by instinct and get better as they go 15. Some cracked blocks break when you step on them, others don't. How can you know? You can't. You just have to know already, like everything else in this badly designed game. 16. Does not obey the "two rooms away rule". Which I think is a grave sin of game design. For those that don't know, the "two rooms away rule" is a rule that states you should respawn enemies only when you are two rooms away from a room you already cleared. Otherwise, if it's only one room away, checking a room and deciding to go back respawns the entire room, which discourages exploration in this sort of game. It's an elementary rule that everyone should know by now. 17. "Hold jump button to skip" does not work on some cutscenes for absolutely no reason. Did you even test this function? The only reason seeing these cutscenes multiple times happens anyway is because of bad saving mechanisms. Just screw off devs of this game. This game feels dishonestly designed, half broken, and has nothing really of note style-wise. You're just a knight saving a princess. It's the most bland crap. The only thing I can say about the game that is good is that the bosses are actually pretty fun to fight as they are the one part of the game NOT filled with bullcrap tricks to instakill you. What you see is what you get basically. It feels like this dev loved making bosses because of how many there are in the game, but needed to wrap it in some crappy precision platforming trash for some reason.

not as hard as i was expecting outside of 1 area but regardless the game's really neat and charming, definitely worth a play if you like games like Cave Story. good art and music too. true ending final boss is a snoozefest though but that's kinda the only bad thing besides the presence of a few loose ends that you always expect to go somewhere the entire game and then just don't lol

Fun and very challenging retro styled platformer

Ok, this game is...interesting. It's mostly kinda boring. Honetsly it nails that weird, dreamlike retro feel that many other "retro inspired" games lack. It's the "hard alcohol" of retro platformers: instead of the pitch being "it's the games you played as a kid, but the unnecessary friction removed!" Matt Kap instead leans into the friction for better or worse. The result is a game that is simple and drab enough to maybe actually be a lost NES cartridge. All that said, it has actually pretty fun bosses and the secrets can be fun to find. I say "can" because there are a mix of just-off-screen secrets and legitimately cryptic stuff, but I'd say at least the majority of them are doable without a guide. Overall, this one is fine.

No invincibility + bad jump + false life bar = Bad game Just buy another game your money is more valuable