Poetry of Blood: Eclipse

What happens when a new studio takes a stab at making an anime-fueled hack & slash rogue-like? You get an interesting mix between the style of Dead Cells with regards to weapon variety and equipment, the feel of something similar to old school Risk of Rain pixel art, and the game play of Blazblue Entropy Effect for your moment to moment combat and flow. And copious amounts of cat girls. The part that grabbed me initially was the mix between anime aesthetics and pixel art. It's something that you don't commonly see. It is strangely refined, though - check the idle scene where the grass gently sways in the wind and you'll get what I mean. The characters definitely exhibit some fan service elements, but much like Rabi-Ribi, the pixel art style blunts that into something pretty tame and tasteful by modern anime style conventions. Combine that with the branching paths, weapon upgrades, and slick combat and you get something that is very refined for an early access indie title. Personally, I enjoy the cute cat girls on the loading screens and in the bar. The pixel art plus their dancing animations is pretty dang cute, honestly. I also think the perfect dodge time slow with counter attacks is very satisfying. And I definitely think the idle mode, where you can use the characters in a few set scenes as a desktop background, is something novel and unique that a lot of games don't offer. If you leave the idle mode up, you can also build Blood currency every minute, which is a really nice bonus. I also was delighted by the fact that, much like Crypt of the Necrodancer, you can challenge the merchant, and she's a very fun fight. Currently, the cat girl bar is under a rework, but I'm pretty interested to see what they come up with when it comes back. If I had one issue, it is that this game has issues with the English localization sticking until you explicitly set it in the options menu. A simple bug that would probably be trivial to fix, but noteworthy nonetheless. In the same vein, I think this game would benefit from an Entropy Effect style two player multiplayer add-on, but that's probably wishful thinking, as well. This game is definitely worth the money - even more so because I picked it up in a Fanatical bundle for half off. I can see this game becoming an enjoyable staple to play alongside Dead Cells for my rogue-like rotation. Give it a gander - it is definitely something a bit different.