Neither Cross Nor Crown

yeah this is definitely going to be in a Iron Pineapple video

Get this game!! Fun enemies/bosses, story, and combat! Lots of cool exploration avenues too - W game - W dev

Immaculate vibes. I love the way all the faces look. Runs great on Deck, just don't change screen settings! It borks the menu.

NCNC offers an experience that starts very promising, and ramps you off a difficulty cliff into frustrating. Enemies became cracked out superhuman damage sponges requiring perfect blocks or parries to succeed against. My equipment glitched and I was stuck with a sub par 2-handed weapon. If there was a 'secret' the game wanted to impart, it didn't signpost it and I beat the game running from most encounters after the half way point. The art style and sparing writing felt compelling and did drive me to see more. Level design starts out expansive and promising, even if the areas you're given felt underutilized. This is a plucky indie project I absolutely enjoyed on the whole, but cannot suggest people spend time on without some polish at the time of this review unless you're an enthusiast for the souls genre.

The game starts off very fun but then it becomes very unfun. Now, is it worth $4? Probably, it has a unique aesthetic and setting, and some people will probably be able to enjoy the latter stages of the game. But I don't. Like all indie "souls-likes," the power creep of the enemies becomes way too ridiculous and the player is nerfed for no reason. Every third enemy gets a musket and the rest are experts in the use of shields, blocking every attack, in a MEDEIVAL, HIGH FANTASY setting. Two handed weapons are useless because the player is way too slow to use them (although they are useful for cheesing the game which I will mention later), and since this is not actually an RPG, there is no way to make your character more powerful. You can only pick up better weapons and armor but the player is always slower and clunkier than the enemy. Human enemies and high fantasy beings work together to kill you for no reason. Exploration of the large levels and taking on extra enemies becomes absolutely pointless in the late game because of these reasons because by this time, you will have worked out how to cheese the game and won't need to engage with the "souls-like" looting and difficulty mechanics. Cheesing this game is actually very easy and is just straight up a more viable strategy than playing the game in good faith. You can pretty much just run past all your problems in any level. If you do have to engage an enemy, you don't actually have to use the game's convoluted souls-like dodge, directional attacking, blocking, etc. You simply equip a two-handed weapon, strike the enemy, run away as he performs an unbreakable attack sequence, strike again from maximum hit detection range, rinse and repeat, bonus points if you hide behind a world object so he can't get to you. Once the enemies get the muskets, you can goad a bunch of melee units into following you like in COD zombies and lead them into the musketeers line of fire, slowly killing them off one by one, tedious, not-fun, but effective. This game really should not have been a "souls-like." It should've been a hack n slash or at least included a way to make the player character less clunky to motivate the player to play in good faith. Instead, while the game is fun and balanced in the first few levels, it devolves into a cheese-fest simply because that is literally the best strategy, which is a common pitfall for souls-likes and why I am not usually a fan of the genre. But again, it might be worth $4 for a lot of players tbh.

This game is so simple yet effective at the same time I dunno what to tell ya. Gameplay is really simple but fun at the same time. Visuals are really good. I adore the colorful art style. The music is really really good. The pacing of the game is pretty decent. The boss fights were neat. Solid 4/5. Wish some stuff was polished a little more but I got my money's worth.

I'm feeling it

Utterly wonderful. Weird in that specifically medieval way. Fantastic texture work on characters and environments, and the soundtrack is great. Combat is fun back-and-forth sword-and-board (or 2h whacking). Quite jank which unfortunately catches up to it in the very final section of the game but it's oozing with charm. Huge fan of the squeaky imps.

Very souls like, I wish i could equip my shield. Dodged all the bees, but I ultimately failed my king.

This game is so clearly made by someone who adores everything about the Middle Ages. Constantly charming with weird references and a genuine appreciation of the spirit of the time. The combat is weird and janky and really difficult but whatever. What matters is that no one has ever made a game as true to the nature of Medieval fairy tales and myth as this. P.S. Please disable the UI during cutscenes. It messes with the experience.