Crimson Capes

i'd give this a 7/10 - if you're a videogame addict constantly looking for a fix, it might tide you over until something comes on your radar. the gameplay is kinda indebted to sekiro, i.e., deflect heavy, and that's cool. it also has a cool flow mechanic, where you can attack more fluidly like a combo (it doesn't always work in practice because the pixelated animations can be kind of confusing, but when you land it it feels very, very cool and i'd love to see it other soulslikes) a couple problems: it's a little forgiving for a deflection game. you don't lose experience if you die, and there are a save spots everywhere. dying is not a problem at all, because there are no runbacks to speak of and again, you don't lose experience. some of the bosses are not very difficult, even if you flub your deflections. also, there's not much to do with your experience points. you can unlock other characters and you can get other weapon skills or 'stances', but they are all pretty extraneous; so far, i haven't seen much value in using anything other than the starting character and the basic skill set. you don't upgrade weapons or armor, as far as i can tell. still it has some really great ideas and i'm enjoying it overall. being able to cancel most of your attacks into deflects, and then go into an offensive flow-combo feels really good and unique in this game.

Pretty good!

Cool/unique artstyle, good atmosphere, solid lore in a dark fantasy world! Pair this with skillful combat, a large array of items, and a decent amount of customization and you have a decent platformer soulslike entry! I only wish I could train with the other Capes to get their Flow timing down. Also, the bosses could have been a bit more difficult :) I'd give this a solid 8+

It pains me to write such a review, because I can tell a lot of effort and passion has gone into this game, especially the animations and art. Indeed, none of these aspects of the game are an issue for me at all. If I were to critique this game only in terms of its art direction and animations, this game would be one of the best games of all time. Sadly, games cannot be assessed only on this basis, especially not Blasphemous-style soulslikes. Blasphemous is also a very gorgeous game, and had solid, rhythmic combat where every enemy seemed to be bound by the same rules as you. Alas, this is not at all the case in Crimson Capes. It felt to me that, throughout the experience, Crimson Capes wanted to have Blasphemous/Sekiro-style combat without understanding what made either of them work. As mentioned before, Blasphemous is a game that required a lot of Castlevania and Dark Souls-esque calculation, since both you and the enemies that you'd encounter would be about as fast as you. What's more, since the game was oriented around solo combat, Blasphemous was very, very careful about enemy placement and tried to make sure enemy attacks did not overlap in obnoxious ways, lest combat be an unreadable, poorly-paced mess. The bosses in Blasphemous were not horribly difficult, but also did not shy away from a mild puzzle feel, or utilized the arena in interesting ways. I have played Sekiro less, but from what I understand, Sekiro made sure that aggressive combat was highly rewarded, while also recognizing that bullying enemies with combos would be obscenely boring. Thus, Sekiro's stamina bar was a means of ensuring that you and the enemy would have to rhythmically bob in and out of combat, and so, part of mastering Sekiro's combat was the dance you'd do with both deflects and aggressive gameplay once you understood boss patterns. It is an ingenious system that few games besides the outstanding game Nine Sols has ever replicated since. I get the sense that Crimson Capes is an ambitious game, given that it tried to blend both of these influences together into a game that worked. However, two particularly pernicious problems reared their heads in this game. For one, enemies, and especially bosses, have their animation speeds and attack downtime clocked absurdly high. This seems like this was a last-minute balance change to ensure that gameplay wasn't too easy in order to keep up with the recent influx of action soulslikes that have come out in recent years. Since the game is not too long (it's about 8 hours on average, but I suspect a few hours more if you try to 100% everything), perhaps the developers were worried that their game would be seen as a disappointment to said action soulslike fans if their bosses were not difficult. However, enemy speeds being as high as they are leads to the second main issue of gameplay: combat is not impactful enough, and the game has a problem that many in the genre have experienced: enemies seem like they're having way more fun than you are. Combat is a lot of waiting, deflecting, and dodging, where you wait for your ability to hit the boss with 1, maybe 2 light attacks before they continue with their multi-hit frenzy, since deflecting is the only option you're given, and it doesn't affect poise or stamina in this game. For whatever reason, hitting the enemy is the only way to decrease enemy stamina, and enemies regenerate their stamina over time if you don't hit them. This means that if you ever want to get a critical hit on many later bosses, you'll have to rely on circumventing combat with your powers (rather than enhancing combat with said powers) or relying on RNG where a boss uses attacks with more openings than not. Interestingly, I did not feel this way about the two "hardest" bosses in the game (the lightning-themed king and light king bosses, respectively), as they had a very distinctive rhythm and aggressive pace, along with very clear openings. They are largely an exception to a pretty noxious rule. I'll close by offering the cliche "you can trust my game review because I'm not bad at these games" by noting that difficulty does not bother me, in light of the fact that I have beaten the final boss of Lies of P's DLC's Difficulty 5 iteration in 4 minutes and 27 seconds. It's a shame we live in a climate where such credentials are required to be taken seriously, but I sort of understand I suppose. The reason I make this point clear about difficulty is that I think that a gameplay loop in action soulslikes should have a satisfying loop that rewards aggressive gameplay rather than giving the player about 2 seconds of uptime before they go back to a passive snooze-fest. Sadly, I think Crimson Capes falls into this camp. It's tragic, because I think that lowering animation speeds and adding variation to how one should approach bosses could have saved it.