Hero's Spirit

The lack of automapping or collection logging is an unforgivable sin in a exploration/collection game.

In like the early days of the 90s, a lot of games usually came with manuals. more specifically they give you like a brief overview of the characters, some screenshots of the gameplay, and occasionally even a few secrets, and perhaps some concept art as well. This is because in that era due to hardware limitations, they couldn't effectively hide secrets in games all too well, as that would take up a lot of space either during development or in physical cartridge size. This would occasionally lead to rumors about how to get secret stuffs in the game (i.e Mew under the truck, the 151st Pokémon, Jumping over the flag in Mario) and by extension some of them actually being true, but coming at the cost of the fact that there would usually be a lot of dead ends or "nothingburgers" of stories, and so a lot of it feels absurd but not to the point where it feels like it's completely out of focus, and you're left constantly guessing whether or not X or Y actually changed or not. Hero's Spirit is an NES RPG but you forgot the manual and so the only thing you have to rely with is playground rumors and praying, and everything good [i]and[/i] bad that comes with that. This is a game that really made me wish that Steam had some sort of a "Mixed" rating or equivalent, since the good of it is really good, but it is also alongside some painful and sometimes, frustrating design decisions that would be equivalent to the era. I still lean towards recommending this, but I would advise that you also go in knowing at least [i]some[/i] of what the game has to offer, and less go in completely blind.

The premise and presentation seems like a throwaway nostalgia 'look, it's like when games had hard fog of war and grids and simple combat!' but it actually goes so, so insanely deep and really explores everything you can possibly do from a set of rules like this. There are layers of secrets upon secrets and many of which you'll have to see for yourself.

Had it for a few years now and coming back to it after getting me a Steam Deck, I remembered why I couldn't put it down. Hero's Spirit is entirely about exploring, so much so that its combat is as simple as it gets. You bump into hostile creatures and if you've collected enough swords to be of equal or higher level than them, then they're defeated. Otherwise, you can negate damage with a one-time-use shield, kill anything in your path with a one-time-use golden sword (which are rather rare), or even freeze time for a moment to avoid combat altogether. Combat aside, the game revolves entirely around finding keys, unlocking doors, and unearthing secrets to increase that combat level (so you can progress through the 'story') and gather items that'll further help you traverse the labyrinthine maps. And while Hero's Spirit is a fantastic retro exploration game, it's also extremely frustrating. It doesn't help that it didn't manage to find an audience, meaning you're left to your own devices. No guides, little to no help on the forums (no joke, when I asked where to find a specific door, someone game me a jester award), no videos... But then, that's part of why it's so good.

This is a really addictive retro exploration RPG. It has secrets within secrets that hide another secret that unlocks another secret behind the first one. There are some tough spots to get past, but there are always other ways to approach a problem, so you are never really stuck.

youre gonna want to make a map

Sensación de progresión, exploración y descubrimiento como ningún otro. Y lo que me queda por descubrir... vaya joya.

It's an acquired taste hidden gem, kind of game.

Finally, a game on the level of Voidstranger. I´m glad they didn´t include any community puzzles there.

This is a thumbs-up with a caveat that I think you have to really like what you see to get the most out of the game. I've just finished 100%ing my first save file of the game (at about 10 hours in), and it's clear that this is going to be one of those kind of iceberg-style games that has a lot more to it than it seems. However I think the game is sort of sharply divided between the gameplay-elements (essentially a sokoban-lite, with little to no puzzles compared to your average sokoban games) and the meta-puzzle/investigation elements where they rarely if ever mix. If you played Tunic into the later game, I think you get the idea. The game also has a tendency to overuse illusionary walls to hide items or paths as a way to compensate, but the end result makes some of the attempts to fully explore the game tedious as you smash your face up against an entire section of a mountain to find the one invisible path to the item you're missing. That said, despite those two elements not quite mixing together everything else is very well done. The game looks and sounds great, though there can be the occasional sprite readability issue with red enemies on red tiles. Overall I think if you're looking a solid game that rewards you to investigating every single corner and expects you to do so, you can't really go wrong here.