Mortal Manor

This game is somewhat of a love letter to the Metroidvania genre while trying to greatly expand on what makes those games great. First things first, this game was done entirely by one person - coding, graphics, music, everything. It's a game that's impressive in scale but I find my favorite way to play this is to make a playlist of my favorite classic Castlevania music and put those on repeat while as I retry the same section 20 times but FINALLY get past it. Or don't get past it and wonder if I need a new relic or other powerup to progress. If you're a fan of mastering mobility techniques and enjoy games like Dark Souls that require a lot of repition to get past a section, this is definitely your game. This game is all about classic difficulty but the kind of difficult that's also fair. The start will be slow and frustrating - the enemies feel overwhelmingly powerful and more mobile than you are but after you get your first two mobility items, the game opens up dramatically. It's almost too much as there's tons and tons of rooms (over 1,000 unique rooms!). You can tell a lot of care went into enemy placement and difficulty so that when you die - it's really your fault and not something you couldn't have predicted. But the game does throw curveballs at you - enemies don't die when they jump into pits, but you sure do! Also read the help that's in the menu! There's a lot of things that aren't obvious like being able to warp between save points or that you need to press up to be able save at crosses. You can equip three weapons at a time each assigned to their own button and they've been thoughtfully balanced as best they can and the enemy types make sure you'll need to put some thought into what weapons you're using for the situation There's plenty of tongue-in-cheek moments and little pieces of humor sprinkled thoughout too. Overall this game is huge and there's a lot of attention to detail - it will absolutely punish even skilled gamers but you'll feel great when you finally backflip-hookshot-slide though the situation. This game is an absolute steal at this price!

A metroidvania full of content and challenge. I am a few hours in and am enjoying it quite a bit. The developer is actively pushing out patches and is responsive to user feedback.

Worth the dough esp. if you like metroidvanias. Underrated.

Had to get a refund on this one, because of some serious game design flaws, bland artwork, bland music, sloppy controls, etc.. You die immediately but enemies take 20 hits to kill. Main character moves like a sloth. If the game had tighter controls, more enemies/enemy types that you could run through (quick/quicker kills), a better soundtrack, etc, then you might actually have fun playing an action platformer/metroidvania. Basically every type of game like this should be taking lessons from Iga/Igavania, if you know what I mean. Unless we're looking for a cure for insomnia, we don't want to stand in one spot for 5 minutes at a time, killing a enemy at the beginning of the game already. Yeah your weak at the beginning, I get that, but ffs the enemies take forever to kill when you start playing. Also there are spots that are impossible to get by without losing 3/4 of your life. I have said enough. Long story short, this is castlevania if castlevania went from being a handsome, popular, armani suit wearing billionaire wearing the finest macys colognes, to a guy living in a sewer with rats and roaches that smells so bad, he'll start to make paint melt off your walls.

This game is SO close to being a recommend from me. Some people may like it. It's basically a "demake" of Symphony of the Night. Explore the world, collect new weapons, get upgrades, unlock new areas. Each new weapon behaves slightly different, just like SotN. You can find stat upgrades and level up after killing enough enemies. The problem with this game is that it's too hard for all the wrong reasons. Getting hit by an enemy will knock you back 10 feet into spikes that instakill you. Combat is insanely one dimensional and most enemies have too much health. Early game, taking a whopping 2-3 hits will kill you. By mid game I was running past every enemy I saw because I didn't want to stand there wacking enemies 6-7 times each waiting for them to die. Often damage is totally unavoidable. There's an enemy that shoots out a wave of green bullets. Unless you're standing right next to it and jump over it right before they shoot, you literally can't get past the wave of shots without taking hits. Late game the game throws tons of enemies at you that can barely get knocked back and you have pretty much no chance of avoiding damage. It really feels like you were intended to either grind or skip 90% of the enemies in the game. I ended up finishing and getting the best ending but I was really pushing myself in the last ~4 hours or so.

No. The game had potential but the designer overused spikes way to much and made enemies like the octopus have insanely annoying movement patterns (homing movement from above with weakness from weapons that attack horizontally)

I love this game. It accomplished what it set out to do very well. My favorite Metroidvania of 2018 by far.

If you're hungry for a hardcore retro Metroidvania from NES era, this game is fantastic with crunchy exploration but be forewarn this game is brutally difficult particularly at the beginning.

A vrai dire je ne sais pas si je dois recommander ce jeu ou non car il est parfaitement mentionné dans la page du magasin qu'il faut effectivement avoir un niveau de matrise parfait pour pouvoir progresser dans le jeu. Mais certes,il s'agit d'un metroidvania comme je les aiment.Mais là où cela ne va pas,c'est qu'un simple ennemi peut nous buter en deux ou trois coups.Meme en utilisant les level up,on ne sent pas de grosses differences. Par contre,un très gros point fort,on est réeellement libre de nous ballader où bon nous semble,mais parfois sans espoirs de retour,à moins de trouver une nouvelle abilité. C'est simple,perso,je n'en suis qu'à 10% de la map et je suis vraiment frustré par autant de difficulté. J'aurai vraiment préféré de ne pas mourir en un coup sur les pointes. Pour faire court,ce jeu est uniquement réservé aux hardcore gamers Les autres seront totalement écoeurés par cette difficulté abominable. Je vais tout de même le recommander car excepté la difficulté,le jeu est très bon.

I played this game during queue using multiple steam accounts, my hours do not reflect my total play time. While I enjoyed playing the game a lot at first, it quickly dwindled when I realized what kind of game this was. Still, I continued and explored the whole map and beat the game with best ending with no guide. I played on the hardest difficulty, so early game combat was pretty difficult. Then it turned grindy as you literally need EXP to level up to do more damage. I pooled all my stats into STR. Combat seemed good at first but then it was just ass. A lot of enemy types repeat themselves. The "dragon" type monster was basically impossible to kill without face tanking it and doing as much damage as possible before it kills you. I managed to kill it once. It probably drops the best weapon in the game (guess) All weapons have EXP levels that get EXP if you get the last hit to a monster and have various upgrades whether it means adding a special ability or stat bonuses. Exploration gets you stat point bonuses, weapons, trinkets mostly. You're not rewarded too much other than finding some better trinkets. In fact, I was almost punished into starting a new game file several hours into the game. I decided I didn't want to go the route the game wanted me to go and went off the deep end in the opposite direction. Monsters were much more difficult and often two shot me and I did no damage to them. Went through a cave, a beach, to a laboratory. Then jumped off to apparently the edge of the map - which is one of the 2nd highest level area in the game (I figured out after going through entire game). As you can imagine, going anywhere basically got me one shot and I couldn't even run through the area sometimes based on monster type and obstacle blockage. I only got out by climbing up and jumping across a gap I can't normally jump across and timed it so that a monster projectile would hit me, launching me to the other side and using ninja jump to get to other side. Then navigate through the laboratory from the bottom to the last save point which is no easy feat as there are these fast moving robot laser shooting things that are DEADLY especially at the under level crap I was at on the hardest difficulty. Yikes. Games should reward you for moving into high level difficulty areas and the only thing I got there was +1 stat to defense which is equivalent to if I stayed in the level 1 area killing level 1 monsters until leveling up and putting 1 stat into DEF. Combat is ass even if you stayed around to grind to level up. Last boss consisted of my spamming my attacks and tanking everything basically. The two best weapons in the game was found in the first 10 seconds of starting in the game and in the first cave. The most difficulty you have in the game is navigating from checkpoint to checkpoint near beginning-mid game. The metroidvania/exploration aspect was fun, but with no reward of exploring, makes it kinda boring and uneventful. It was fun finding the secret for the sake of finding it not the sake of getting the item and being happy with it. Overall, even though I enjoyed some, can't recommend the game.