Hero's Spirit

I'm so glad furyforged mentioned this game offhand in a video because it's completely unsuspecting and I never would have found it otherwise. it's somehow the perfect game for me, but i can see how some people wouldn't vibe with it. huge open world, full of secrets, mostly discovered through brute force trial and error, and memorization. I'm the type of gamer that explores literally every pixel of a world (it's a problem) and this game is one of the few that heartily rewards me for it. the systems are all fairly straightforward (granted i haven't seen everything in the game), but they all serve their purpose. just getting a single attack increase feels like good progress. the metroidvanianess doesn't feel tiresome at all and getting an unlock or breaking a strength threshold is actually gamechanging. the game is cryptic, but never ambiguous. it always gives you as much information as you need. if you love mysterious games with lots of places to explore and discover you need to try it. also the soundtrack slaps

This game has a fun concept, but it's a bit much at times. Seeing nothing but what's currently visible is sometimes painful. The line of sight is cool, but it's easy to wonder about aimlessly because you haven't memorized the entire map (they are big, purposefully confusing, maze-like, and have fake walls; there are many maps to memorize as well). It would be nice if there was a fog of war mode. This way you can still see what you've seen (minus monsters, etc.). Sometimes I wanted to tactically get around a creature, but couldn't remember the map well enough so I trapped myself and died. There was this area that you have to get through and I (one tile at a time) traced the whole thing (full of fake walls and zero line of sight). Just to get through took ~1 hour. Fun for the first few min, painful and regretful playing for the rest. After that point, I put the game down. Part of me wanted to create a map as I went, but that's too much trouble tbh. Looking online for a map doesn't work either partly because they don't exist yet, but even if they did that would ruin the fun of exploring. I don't want to be handed the answer, but I'd like to not "forget" after taking one step forward. I'd semi-recommend this game, but without that feature it's a bit too tedious to play as is. I haven't and probably won't play anymore because of this. It's too bad because I enjoyed this game a lot at first. After exploring a bit, it's too much to remember every tile on every map, every fake wall, every portal.

Exploration! The world feels enormous and there are secrets and treasures everywhere. The combat mechanics are fairly simple, but still sufficiently engaging that you feel good when you juke a high-level enemy or get past it with the help of a special item. Scattered NPCs offer bits of lore and suggest vague steering to find secrets and mobility upgrades and such. But for the most part, it's a game of exploration, where you're constantly feeling like you might find the next big piece of the puzzle right around the next corner... or maybe you'll discover you've just traveled a big circle and you're back where you started, oops! Be vigilant, there is always more to see than meets the eye. I'm like six hours in, and I have no idea but imagine I might be 40% the way thru the game? Impossible to tell, but I am having a ton of fun. (EDITED: I'm now 18 hours in, perhaps 75% done, and man this game is fun. Reminds me somewhat of playing Legend of Zelda on NES as a kid and drawing maps and looking for secrets everywhere.)

Hero's Spirit looks like "haha cute pixel game, I'll get 5 hours max out of this investment" but don't be deceived by the simple appearance. This is a(n almost) never ending "rabbit hole" type masterpiece in the vein of Void Stranger, Blue Prince, Tunic, etc. The deeper you go, the clearer it becomes that there's MORE to discover. It starts out as a simple game of "collect stuff, get stronger, beat tougher monsters" with fun exploration and item collection. Then it becomes a deep dive into digging up secrets across multiple save files, collecting every scrap of info from NPCs who change what they tell you in response to overall game progress, and smashing your face into every wall on the planet in search of hidden paths. And then it's a mad dance to escape the underworld [strike]without losing your mind[/strike] and find out how it all began... Be the [i]hero[/i]. Seek the truth of the world. Find and fix what went wrong. Break the cycle. Easier said than done [i]points to play time[/i] but if you get stuck, everyone on the mod.kitchen discord is super cool and happy to help! Also the soundtrack is 100% bangers. Buy that too.

Absolutely monumentally cool and weird game. Just to set the tone, this is a bump combat (think Hydlide or, more modern, Fairune) puzzle game where combat is completely determined by who has the bigger number (ties go to the player). No HP, only live or die. This setup is used as the foundation for an intimidatingly large and weird puzzle box that doesn't bother to explain itself beyond the very basics. It's more arcane than 99% of modern games, but also more friendly than 99% of the retro games it's cribbing from. Absolutely jam-packed with secrets - the only game that consistently rewards my wall humping with *extremely important progression items*. This is Iceberg: The Game. I say that and it sounds intimidating, but I really don't think it is. It's confident and kind enough that any edge you push on is going to reward you. Not *once* did I hit a hard barrier where I had no idea what to do. I could always go somewhere different and find 10-20 keys, swords, diamonds, etc. that would help me progress the game. It also has the most brilliant mechanic I've ever seen in a game that's ostensibly turn-based: if you hold a direction, you move twice as fast as if you took everything step by step. This turns a game that might normally force you to stop and think about every move into a Thinky Action Game, which is. Wow. This one thing makes Hydlide-adjacent fully determinative bump combat into *an actual skill check*. It's minimal enough to be non-intrusive - if you're not an action game person, don't be scared away. But it really encourages the player to *move* without actually forcing you to think on your feet all the time. I cannot recommend this game highly enough. It is doing things I've never seen any other game do, and it's doing them with *such confidence* that it gets away with being extremely bizarre. If any of the above piqued your interest even 1%, just buy this game now. I finished this game thinking I'd possibly dug up many of its secrets: my final completion score was 53%. Upon reflection I'm certain I'm missing at least *five* progression items, amongst countless other important items. And I never did meet the friendly dragon people keep talking about!!

I've "beaten" the game but I don't think I've BEATEN the game. I see people who have 100+ hours in this game and I'm afraid, very afraid. It seems to be the game in which you'll have to keep lots of notes and pay attention to every detail. I can't get sucked into something like this at the moment but maybe this might be someone else's jam right now. I might come back to this one in the future.

Completed the game (50% completion). Game is good, theres definitely no other game that has a concept like this one does. It does NOT hold your hand, it does NOT tell you where to go, you need to figure that out yourself. Much like Legend of Zelda 1/2. I've been told that theres lots of the game and also secrets that ive missed and not seen. I think i wont give the game another Playthrough for a higher %. It's a little too unforgiving for me to scan every corner of the map for items. That said, the Final Boss was peak. Do not try to change my mind

here's a section from my article "Why do people love cryptic video games now?" (which is on my substack - steam got mad at me for linking it but i believe in you to find it if you want the full thing), which is mostly about Simon's Quest, but I talk about how wonderful this game is and I think it deserves more love: At the end of last year, with some Christmas money I purchased Hero’s Spirit on a whim. Created by tiny indie dev team mod.kitchen, it’s an obscure game that up to that point I had never heard of until I scrolled through Steam tags. It promised me exploration, hundreds of items to collect, and lots of secrets. While I did get all of those, I still felt like there was so much more that was inside this $5 package that I felt misled a little bit. For nearly the entirety of January, I was enthralled by this unassuming little game like it was a benevolent ghost taking over me. The map layouts burnt into my brain as I wrote down half of a notebook’s worth of notes to even keep track of it all. Occasionally, I would dream of the map of Hero’s Spirit. It took over my life. The obscurity of Hero’s Spirit worked heavily in its favor. Later on in this article I will discuss other games with a very Simon’s Quest-ian design philosophy like Animal Well, Void Stranger, or La-Mulana. While I do adore those games, they’re popular and influential enough to have walkthroughs. Hero’s Spirit… doesn’t, its only guides are short and cryptic. The best you can get is having a general idea of where some of the early game items are. So I was forced to play it like the old days. I took a pen and paper out, I drew a map and interesting things townsfolk said. I took note of anything that could be a puzzle, that could lead to some major revelation. Some of them led to nothing. Some of them blew the game wide open and gave me 10 more hours of content. It’s a rabbit hole that keeps going deeper and deeper, and being forced to be Lost in it, to figure it out with nothing but vague hints to push me in the right direction, gave the game world a looming sense of scope. There could be secrets and items anywhere, and I could be missing all of them. At any moment the rug could be pulled from under my legs and I will be put in a place I do not recognize that twists the game’s design in a new, baffling way. It gave the puzzle solving an obsessive factor to me that no other game like this, ones popular enough where they have basically been “solved” made me feel. I felt like a kid in the 80s, playing Simon’s Quest, who could not believe games could be constructed like this with this level of interconnectivity and secrets hidden everywhere, in the strangest places. When you are in that position, the game feels like a wormhole that never ends. You can’t tell when something is a hint or if it’s just some silly nonsense. And even when you finish your time with Hero’s Spirit, you know there is probably much more waiting for you that you could have never conceived of.

I wanted to wait until I finished this game to really give it a review, but I've known that this was going to be an extremely positive review since around the ~5 hour mark. This is an exceptional game. Every single time I thought it was about to end, there was another layer to the rabbit hole. Hell, even now, I'm not even [i]done[/i] done with it, I've only finished all the achievements. There's still a whole game mode I haven't gotten very far in, and another I've "finished" without 100% completing. There are so many brilliant things about this game, but I feel like I can't tell you them without spoiling some aspect of the experience. I'll just say that it features both an extremely original final boss and an extremely original NG+ system. This game took over my brain in a way that's pretty rare, and I've never quite seen a game exploit my obsession with poking around every single corner of a game world quite this well. If you enjoy speedrunning as well, this game is a total dream. You [i]will[/i] feel like Neo in The Matrix on your third playthrough and beyond as you bob and weave through illusory walls that let you reach distant places in a fraction of the time it took on your first play through. Part of what made this game such a fantastic experience for me is the fact that its relative (and unfortunate) obscurity forces you to take notes and go old school, though if you want help the developer's discord is extremely friendly and has plenty of people who have genuinely mastered the art of giving hints that reveal [i]just[/i] enough to still allow you to feel the buzz of that final eureka moment. This is one of the absolute best ways you can spend six dollars.

젤다라이크 라뮬라나 힌트 주는 npc의 대사는 진행도에 따라 바뀜 가짜벽 작작좀