Haunted Lands

The style of this game is great and I really enjoyed playing as the Beast class characters, plus the setting really speaks to me. Rest of it is kind of a mess. Yes, this is supposed to be difficult, but that is no excuse for the omission of modern QoL design. It needs more checkpoints, I don't care if you sacrifice score for them, needs more opportunities to exit a level, again for a score sacrifice, I don't care. I tried the gun guy and the slow reloads (yes I know that can be fixed with later upgrades) just killed all the fun for me and the mage woman was frustrating to play even in the tutorial. This is not a case of "mad cuz bad" as I have beaten many games in a similar vein to this and beaten many NES/SNES era games, but this is 2026, not 1986, this game needs some QoL additions badly, otherwise the game really has potential and that's what kinda frustrates me the most about this.

In principal this game has potential; it looks good and has creative characters. However it's problem lies in the difficulty. This is the primary reason i would NOT recommend this game to people. A truly decent game needs an easy difficulty to help you get the hang of the game and just enjoy it...and as far as i can tell this game doesn't have one. Difficulty spikes up very quickly in some areas and certain characters have flaws that make it very difficult to progress (slow reloading for example). On top of this when you do reach save checkpoints you have to have gold to actually USE them...which is so outragoues. i have never seen that before in all my years of gaming. i don't know who designed this game but IMO they need to make some alterations...if they did they could have something pretty good. but right now it's just an unbeatable mess.

This game does what it's trying to do well. I understand the complaints about difficulty, but that's clearly what the game wants to be. "Punishing" is a good word for it; if you die, you are re-doing a significant portion of the level (which *does* make the shortcuts you open seem rather pointless; they don't stay open if you die). The levels are a bit long, imo, but that's more than forgivable, The bosses are definitely the highpoint, and I'd take more of those over also a-bit-too-long arenas. One kinda big complaint: "Next Area" doors need to be clearly marked as soon as they come on screen. The number of times I've pressed up on a "Next Area" door because the text came up way too late is uncountable. That's super frustrating in a game with collectibles like this.

Haunted Lands is a love letter to a bunch of early platforming games, from its colour pallet that is used extremely well, to the sound effects, and the harsh but fair difficulty of the game play. I found myself thinking of the Veterans jumping animation and how it reminded me of Commander Keens, animations, for those of you old enough to remember those games. There have been complaints about there not being enough health or enough checkpoints, or that it costs you a portion of your score sometimes to use those things and this prevents you from being able to complete the challenges, however that is the point of them being challenges. The game is hard by design, but not unfair. The game has a variety of environments to explore with a range of different characters that all play and move about the levels very differently, this lends itself to a decent replay-ability as only certain characters can access certain areas on a given level generally secret areas in order to obtain items/upgrades. The items themselves provide a great functionality that allows you to optimise your completion times for the speedrunners at heart. If you were a fan of games like Ghouls and Goblins or the old style Castlevania games, then this is a refreshing addition to the genre with improved controls and mechanics compared to yesteryears titles. Definitely worth picking up given how cheap the game is.

Iits a sh*t game ... looks interesting ... plays like a crappy game. Starting the level from begining really makes it boring. For me personally i experience some motion sickness from the jittery layered screens ... not sure if its the game or my machine( im well above minimum requirements). The backgrounds have some weird effect where the camera moves the backrounds move and its not done smoothly,. Otherwise it was fun playing it until i repeated the first leve about 40 times ... iuninstalled it and lost my 10 dollars .

十分Old School的游戏，恶魔城like的关卡地图，画风和音效直接还原雅达利FC时期，只推荐极端复古爱好者

Un metroidvania que te va a desafiar con sus tres personajes y sus distintos stats de habilidades. Visualmente con un pixel exquisito con sus tonos puros y saturados muy vieja escuela.

Dangerous Dave revisited after 35 years, faster, brutally hard, but less jinxed and grim, which is a slight minus

Do you like platformer shooters? Do you love memory-games and demand for positioning? Do you like the unforgiving difficulties of older DOS games? Do you like retro visuals and SFX ? Or are you looking at this because it reminds you of Dangerous Dave, and you remember playing that game? ( and you also remember CGA / EGA graphics ) ... in that case, this rather low-priced game might just be for you! ( In any other case, you might want to familiarize yourself with other platformer games. This game demands patience, and may inflict carpal tunnel. )

Sometimes I think humanity has a deep pit of sickness within it that cannot be cured, and I'm mostly reminded of that when I see games as cool as Haunted Lands have fewer than 500 reviews