Pharaonic

I enjoyed this game, but objectively speaking, it's not an extraordinary one. Pharaonic faithfully follows the Souls-like recipe, but in 2D. The gameplay is therefore slow, the player must analyze enemy animations and attack accordingly. There's a "quick" attack, a powerful attack, a shield to parry or counter, and a dodge. Healing is done either with a flask or, towards the end, with an equipped item "spell". Progression takes place in levels with many branching paths, making it quite maze-like, contrary to what the 2D aesthetic might suggest. The environments are quite varied, as are the enemies. And even though the graphics are rather simple, I find them quite beautiful. The theme is original but the story is quite basic. There are also some NPC with few lines of flavor text, and sometimes some requests. So what's wrong with Pharaonic? Not much, but at the same time, the game doesn't do enough. Our character's stats are rudimentary, as are the few character progression options. Overall, the game doesn't evolve from beginning to end. But the adventure isn't very long, so boredom doesn't have much time to set in. Although each level are quite maze-like, the adventure ultimately unfolds in a fairly linear fashion, with each level being completed almost one after the other. Including truly hidden areas to discover, with a boss and an exclusive reward, would have been appreciated. And the boss fights could have been more unique, because, most of the time, the bosses behaved the same way as the regular enemies. It would also have been nice to have more precise descriptions, especially for the rings, even for those I understood, it wasn't possible to know if the ring effect was great or negligible. Also, be warned about the ending, the developers made the foolish decision to allow only one ending (out of three) per save file, and saving is automatic. Since the ending choice can be made just before the final boss, I recommend making copies of your save files on a hard drive to experience all the endings without having to restart the game from the beginning.

uff. One of those games where I sincerely doubt the developers played it themselves. The relatively untouched setting and 2,5-D-perspective is already the most positiv-ish one can say about Pharaonic. Visually/creatively bland, basically only two types of enemies copypasted endlessly (light and heavy - even most bosses are just an iteration of one), painfully slow combat (hit-hit-wait for enemy attack-dodge and repeat for the overly long healthbar), every movement feels like being underwater, nonsensical and inconsistent hitboxes and -detection (for the player as well as the enemies), grindy leveling and so forth. Was even to boring for killing the time while waiting in the hospital bed. Runs well enough on the Deck at least.

Fun little sidescroller game set in Egypt theme with dark souls type gameplay. The only downsides i experienced were no respec for character and the prerequisite enemy fight before the actual end game boss fight was a giant pain in the holy anubis butt.

Dark Souls: Easy Mode

Good Game 11/10

Gg.

I had already played it back on PS4 but had to get it again for PC. I still think this game is a lot of fun and underrated. A very well done, challenging 2.5D Souls-like game with a fresh setting. I also like the art style a lot. Not the most demanding graphics, but it just feels nostalgic in a good way, a bit like fun PS2 games in prettier. I would wish the devs would return to this game some day and make a second one in the series. Great fun!