A beautiful game that will test your patience to the limits.
This is the slowest-feeling game I've ever played. I've played walking simulators and adjusted to the committal jumping and whipping of the original Castlevanias. I've played frustrating Souls-like games. But never in any of those did I get hit so many times while not paying attention because I was moving my character across an empty landscape and then got randomly hit out of nowhere. And never in my time have I felt like a person trying to pick up a dollar off the ground tied to a string where another person was slowly pulling it away every time I was about to grab it. That sums up everything you need to know about this game's playstyle.
The Positives
-I decided to play this game because of its beautiful visuals, and it is quite a beautiful game. The way it zooms out to beautiful landscapes every once in a while is nice, and the different areas and themes are nice. I enjoyed the visuals when I got to see something new like a new boss or statue.
-The story is good. I usually don't like having to read English subtitles to foreign spoken language, but this worked well since it felt authentic to the legends and the story. The voices were nice and I liked the combination of audio, visuals, and story. It worked well together.
-I enjoyed the animations and the various ways to traverse the areas. And getting to use Mjolnir was cool. I had fun with the exploration when I learned how to read the map, which took a while. Overall, the game is trying to engage you with its visuals and art style, and that all worked well.
The Negatives
-This game is SO SLOW. Get out a stopwatch and feel how long 3 seconds, 5 seconds, and 10 seconds are of waiting. That's this game in a nutshell. I would walk, and it would be like 10 seconds to just get across one screen in a whole area. Want to do a heavy attack? Try waiting 3 full seconds for it to strike. Want to hit a boss? You'll walk up to it in 3 seconds, and then it'll slowly pull away, making it impossible to hit, and it'll take another 5 seconds to continue walking until you can hit it. But at that point, you'll experience that boss's next attack. This game will test your patience to the absolute limits–I have spent decades never using the word "bored" or "boring" to describe my experience because I could always either focus on something else or find a way to keep myself amused. But I used those words playing this game more than I have in decades. I would be walking somewhere and trying to do my thing where I listen to a podcast or something while I was waiting to get across the screen, and then an enemy would come out of nowhere and hit me. It's like a constant experience of getting lulled into a relaxed state wandering around and then get randomly hit when you're not paying attention.
-The bosses are okay for the most part except for Kaunan and Odin, which take the monotony and annoyance up to 11. I don't recall ever having both of those emotions at the same time to this extent before. And it's all because of the moves that they have where they move far away from you and make you run toward them, taking anywhere from 5-10 seconds (and occasionally even more) to get back to them to hit them. And any time you die, you get to do it all over again. I swear that those boss battles felt like an eternity. And the problem is that the key to beating bosses in Souls-like games is patience. It's almost like the developers intentionally wanted to see if they could drain your patience by making you run for 10-20 seconds and then see if you'd then still have enough patience left to fight Souls-like battles where you have to dodge-dodge-attack-attack-attack-evade. And that was my problem—if I had more patience, I could've beat them a lot faster, but since this was the slowest game I'd ever played (note: I have never played Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde for NES)...I kept running out of patience and trying to get one more swipe in, which would cost me a hit. Oh, and I would sometimes get hit seemingly randomly—sometimes a small yellow crack wouldn't hit me, and other times it would, for instance. And one time I just lost a whole chunk of health for no discernible reason because the boss was jumping away. Twice, I beat the boss, turned away from the screen to celebrate, and turned back to have been killed somehow after the battle was over. WTF?!?!? Fortunately, one time I left back to the main area and it recorded my win (even though I was literally standing in front of the boss to fight it again a moment before).
-I found the abilities to be quite useless. I only used the healing, which by the end only recovers about 1/3 of your health (with 3 uses, you can roughly fill your health bar all the way back up once), and Mjolnir, which basically shaved off a few hits during boss battles (and since each attack sequence took anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds, it was a big time-saver). But because it only worked with heavy attacks, you had to basically be on top of it where you could trigger it AND get a heavy swing in before the boss moved again, which was very rare. I don't recall wasting so many limited-use abilities as I did in this game. And I tried triggering the other abilities, which mostly didn't really do anything useful. The shield, for example—if you needed it, you were probably dead, anyway.
This game probably would've went from boring and frustrating to fun if they simply had sped it up by about 30%. Taking 20 seconds to walk across the screen seems excessive, as is requiring 3-5 seconds to get a heavy attack in and making the later bosses stand there until you walked up only to hover away to simply make them take an extra 5 seconds per evasion to hit them with no other purpose (i.e., sometimes, there was nothing that could hit you on screen and so it was just taking up your time). I can't think of too many games who openly make you suffer with slowness like this. I could beat all of the bosses once I built up my patience and accepted that taking 15 minutes to kill the boss slowly once would take less time than trying to beat it in 5 minutes and dying 10 times, but it was a huge test of my patience to do so. But the bosses got a lot easier once I did that.
For some reason, I wanted to be able to recommend this game because I'm a softie for pretty indie games with worlds that bring to life cultures and myths. But, man, it was almost like they didn't respect my time with this game. I wouldn't mind walking far distances if it was scenic or I felt like things were far away, but sometimes I'd walk for a minute or two only to be staring at my character moving slowly across a nearly blank screen the whole time. Like what the hell? I beat it because I don't like to abandon games and it was only several hours long, but WOW was it tough to get through. For a 6-hour game, I feel like I spent 3 hours doing things and 3 hours mindlessly pushing on the analog stick (either to find the apples or run back to a boss who jumped to the other side of the arena) trying to keep my sanity. Sad—I liked a lot of the game, but some parts were borderline unbearable. If it were a 20-hour game or any more difficult than it was, I might've quit.
