Hero's Spirit

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?

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.

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.

Excellent feeling of exploration! I love it.

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.

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

secrets are cool and all but only when you have gameplay to back it up (it does not)

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