Cathedral

Tl:dr review - Fun Metroidvania with a touch of Zelda mixed in. Highly recommend it, but be warned it doesn't pull any punches. For starters, let me start out by saying this is quite well done for how few people worked on it. The art is great for what it is, it has good game feel when you get the hang of it and especially when you get some of the different "charms" in the game, and the OST is really solid. I will say it's not perfect and I do have a fair few nitpicks and gripes, but I feel the game is still a decent time, even with the negatives I've got with it. To get things rolling, I guess I'll start with the nitpick of the game's difficulty, or rather the damage ratio as the game goes on. I don't mind a decent challenge, but I guess I've been conditioned by other games like this to think that when I get my gear upgraded, I'll be on even footing with enemies in the current area I'm tackling. Definitely not the case here. Even by endgame, with all upgrades, common enemies would easily do 2 to 4 hearts out of my max of 10, and the bosses could easily kill me in about 2 hits at this point. I also understand that's probably why they give you 10 potions you could use if you hunted them all down at this point, but the balancing here just feels a bit off. Say I wanted to do a casual run and NOT collect everything? I can practically guarantee that would be a painful slog of a playthrough. In all honesty, I feel adding another difficulty would somewhat alleviate this issue, that way you can have something less painful for a more casual run and what's setup now could be like a type of hard mode. Just my 2 cents on that matter though. On a brighter note, I will say that I did enjoy the game's level design quite a lot, as well as the tools you get to help you traverse said levels and complete puzzles. Having various menus to show your items, armor augmentations, quests, and all of that was a nice touch too; made it easier to keep up with everything I had found. The story, although very bare-bones, worked well enough to keep the game rolling and the dialogue wasn't half bad either. On the other side of the coin though, as nice as the levels were, it got quite tedious trying to traverse back and forth at the end when I was looking to find everything that I had missed. The portal system is well and good, but with how big the map feels, I think it would have been a good idea to also implement some means of checkpoint warping by the end of the game, just to make end-game cleanup less of a chore. On the same note of checkpoints, I found it kind of a letdown and sometimes a hassle that they didn't restore any health at all, beyond reviving you when you die, of course. Sure, you have healing statues for that, but it would have been nice to make the checkpoints heal up to your revive heart amount, or accompany each checkpoint with a healing statue. Also, speaking of post-game cleanup, one thing that the game could really use is some means of seeing what you're missing in an area. Sure, the map will show a dot when you have an upgrade to find, but it certainly does not do that for the "collectables" of the game. I'm not even asking for them to be pinpointed, just show me a percentage like with the map completion so I know if I've found everything in that area or if I should keep combing over it to find something. With that all said, I've got one more nitpick as a completionist, so you can take it with a grain of salt, but I feel the achievement for getting 50,000 gold in the bank is just ludicrously excessive. I think I saw someone online do the math, and it would take around 170,000 and some change to get said achievement, since you need to pay more and more to increase your bank cap by 500 each time, and that is just WAY too much. Even getting 50,000 casually after buying all the upgrades is a bit of a pipedream, so even if you took out the "paying to raise your bank cap" bit out of the equation, it would still be a bit silly. Now, for a couple of tiny things I noticed that the game devs may want to look into if they're still updating the game: -I noticed that the character would flat out refuse to move after any means of cutscene (flipping a switch, talking to an NPC, etc.) while I was holding a direction beforehand. So, it kinda' acted like it just cut the feed of my directional input sometimes? -Sometimes the character's gravity would act strange when I tried to jump off of certain platforms that moved up and down (didn't happen a lot, but enough for me to notice it in my playthrough). Anyway, I may have griped a fair bit here, but that's just because I enjoyed the game and I really want to see it be the best it can possibly be. This game was a good one and this team shows a lot of promise, so I definitely look forward to what they come up with next. If you've got the money and patience for a tough adventure, I do recommend picking this one up when you can.