Hero's Spirit

Enough surface level fun to give you an easy 10-15 hours of fun, but then you really start to dig and you realize you could spend 50 hours on the game and it's well crafted secrets. Fantastic game for anybody looking to scratch that TUNIC or Animal Well itch.

I love the retro feel, would like to see more games like this.

Holy crap, somebody actualy made Hydlide good

Hero's Spirit is an infinite open field of exploration, wonder and curiosity, and I am not just talking about gems and treasure chests! This is a game made for people who like it from the get-go, and I must admit, I wasn't into it. It took me a few tries to actually get invested, and even now I can't really tell if I [i]enjoy[/i] playing it. But if you can look at my playtime, I sure did. Basically, if you think you can endure what you see in the trailer for a couple hours in return of the most mind-numbing series of hidden items, locations and puzzles, you're gonna love this! The mysteries placed here are made to be absurdly cryptic, but well enough hinted to at least push you to explore [i]just a little bit more[/i]. You might finally see what big secret is lying behind that wall, right? ...right?

In truth, I wouldn't recommend this game to most people, but I think the game has a committed enough vision that I can overlook my personal grievances and give it a thumbs up here. The focus on exploring and the binary combat system makes an interesting dynamic of "find more swords to upgrade your attack so you can explore more". And there is certainly plenty to explore, but I think some of the exploration is bogged down by some design choices. Your character can't see past obstances, which creates blackened areas of your screen where your character can't see. Unfortunately this becomes a huge pain as you become lost or disoriented. I would PERSONALLY prefer it if your character "remembered" what he last saw on each tile, except slightly darkened. That way you can more easily tell where you are in relation to everything else. There's also a LOT of illusory walls, which results in most gameplay being: walk up to wall -> bump into wall -> move to next time -> bump into wall -> repeat until you find an illusory wall. There's no visual indicator that there's a fake wall (from what I can tell), so you could easily miss a crucial location just because you didn't bump into one wall. It reminds me of playing Legend of Grimrock and checking every single wall for secret buttons hidden in the walls, which was an annoying experience. Overall, I like the exploration, but the design decisions keep me from committing much more time into this. Oh yeah, and the final boss was not a good time. It's basically an easter egg hunt dialed up to 11, where your attack is reset to 0 and you have to reclaim your swords around the castle to get enough attack to kill the enemies. Initially it was interesting, but after an hour of frantically searching, trying to find just one more sword, I had had enough.

This game is almost like a... Turn based, tile based metroidvania. It very much evokes the sense of discovery and wonder. I beat it in about 8 hours, but there's a LOT of secrets still. Regardless, I think I can recommend the game! It's a very simple game, only requiring use of arrow keys, and it tries to invoke a certain aesthetic of older, more rough-around-the-edges games. No manual, no map, claustrophobic level design, and strange inexplicable bits. I quite like what it does, for the most part! Just beating the game probably will take you about 10 hours at the latest, but for the 100% completion, it seems I may be at this game for many hours yet. The graphics are okay. Standard fare for Retro Games. The soundtrack, however, is very good, although I wish many of the tracks were longer. Still, overall, this is quite the lovely little package. Play it if you love adventuring!

I absolutely love the exploration and collecting in this game—it scratches a deeply primal completionist itch. While the core loop seems incredibly simple at first (get more swords, defeat monsters, explore further), it quickly opens up to reveal surprising depth in both its mechanics and lore. I'm 67 hours in and still haven't seen everything. That said, it’s definitely a niche title. If the trailers don't grab you, or if the idea of scouring every single nook and cranny to hunt down hundreds of collectibles sounds tedious, this might not be your cup of tea. But if that's your jam? You'll love it.

A fantastic, authentic, and interesting game with a huge world and homage to for whom the frog tolls

10/10

Great game!