Marks of Ki

As a first attempt at a game it's not too bad. The combat needs so much work to feel comfortable. Without a lock on it is actually painful to play as a ranged character. £10.99 is a very steep price point for an indie game especially one as rough around the edges of this. Though I can appreciate the love that went into this game.

While I have heaps of respect for solo devs and whoever made this game obviously spent a lot of time making their very own Dark Souls. Unfortunately, the combat is awful. There is no enemy lock and the enemies just walk up and whack you. So pointing yourself at the enemy to fire the bow is nigh impossible. Not worth the money. https://youtu.be/UDWCVJKqq34

The game was a bit hard to play for me but with the help of items I could make a build that's making it easy. It's fun and definitely worth the money!

Game of the year 2024

I was interested in trying the game after finding it randomly in a store. I thought to myself, "An indie Souls-like? I’d love to try that." I honestly shouldn’t have. I fully realize this is a one-man project, but it feels less like a game and more like a school project that was uploaded to the store. Here in Slovakia it costs 6 euros which is at least 5 too many. In the short time I played, the hardest boss was navigating the world. The top half of the screen has a badly set-up canvas and is therefore unusable, while the bottom part sometimes just gets covered by a gray rectangle. ESC stops working after a few seconds of starting the game, so if you want to change something in the settings, you have to restart the entire game. There’s no lock-on, poor optimization, and huge empty areas with random assets scattered around (half of them stuck in the ground). Overall, don’t buy it at this price. I understand this may be the developer’s first project, but many of the issues exist because they didn’t seem to care. And if they don’t care, neither should you. The store page claims AI was used to generate some of the game’s images, but honestly, it feels like the code itself is AI galore. There’s potential here if it gets polished, but considering nothing has been done since the release, skip the game entirely.