[b]Short version:[/b] Even if dashing around is fun, the majority of the playtime is spent grinding money and passing the same obstacles over and over again.
[b]Long version:[/b] Shalnor Legends is a 2D top-down action adventure game with a style of pixel graphics reminiscent of the home consoles of the mid 1990's. You play as Rynna Silwerwind, a young elven girl who has entered a pocket dimension to undergo a trial to become the champion of the goddess. You start out in the center of the map, with other areas of other terrain in each cardinal direction. It appears you can go exploring anywhere, but you are ill equipped - in fact entirely unequipped - and roadblocks halt your progress in all directions except the intended one. You receive a sword, and with it the ability to dash for the cost of some of your stamina, which slowly replenishes automatically. Then, after going through the first mini-dungeon, you gain the bow which lets you shoot silver arrows for an amount of mana, which also is replenished over time.
Up until this point, everything in the game is adequate, even satisfactory. The graphics are colorful yet muted. The music mostly consists of low notes in midi instruments played slowly and sparsely, with a lot of echoing. With the darker graphics, the lack of other people, and the presence of ghosts, it appropriately sets a somber mood. The controls are simple, elegant, and responsive. There's an abundance of resolution options, and you have control over the volume for individual categories of sounds in addition to Master; Music, Effects, Ambient, and Footsteps. (I turned footsteps down to 70.)
But then, the game quickly becomes repetitive.
The first mini-dungeon introduces a number of traps. First there are fireballs being shot out of walls, from the top of the screen and towards the bottom, all on a global timer so all flames are shot at the same time every time. Second, there are whirling blades that spin in one direction until they hit a wall, then they go the other direction. Third, there are spikes popping out of the floor and then being retracted. They're also on a global timer. Fourth and final, there are some color-coded blocks you have to push into the appropriate hole. (They could have different shapes in addition to the color to make this more accessible to colorblind people, but I digress.)
These trap mechanics are reused in the four major dungeons of the game, in the caves on the overworld leading to the dungeons, and even in the dungeon of the final boss. There is no escalation to these traps. Even in the final dungeon there are color-coded blocks that must be pushed into their respective holes, without the presence of enemies, a time limit, or any other trap. There are rare instances where mechanics are combine; For instance, one cave in (I believe it was) the Dreadmarsh has you pushing a block towards a hole, all the while the wall is lined with holes that shoot fire, so you have to duck behind the block for cover every so often.
There are also two other challenges that weren't presented in the introductory dungeon. One of them is simply defeating all monsters in the room to open up a door or gain access to a chest. The other is a puzzle where you step on floor tiles, thereby turning on the light on that tile and switching on/off the adjacent tiles, with the objective of switching them all on. The tile puzzles can be quite challenging depending on their layout, but you have all the time in the world to figure them out and you're otherwise not in any danger while solving them - with the notable exception of another rare instance of combining mechanics, where the final dungeon has you solving two rows of tiles while fireballs are being shot at you.
Ultimately, the puzzles and obstacles lack variety and don't feel meaningful or rewarding.
Yet combat is even more disappointing.
Your sword is a short sword (technical term) and it shows. The range on your swing makes it seem unsafe, enemies don't get knocked back, nor do they get stunned. Your bow grants you the range, but it costs mana so you may have to take a potion or just wait until you can reload. You also can't move while charging your arrow, much to the delight of the enemies that shoot projectiles. I also found it hard to shoot enemies on the horizontal plane as opposed to vertical, and I'm not sure why.
But the shallowness of the combat isn't what makes it disappointing. It's the fact that fighting enemies, aside from when it will open a path in a dungeon, is entirely pointless.
All enemies on each map respawn as soon as you re-enter. So when you're entering a new hub area of the overworld and you're going in and out of the caves in order to make your way to the dungeon proper, fighting the same enemies out in the open just puts you in danger.
Slain enemies will not drop anything to replenish you health, mana, or stamina, nothing to mitigate the danger they put you in. They may drop a gold coin, or one of the 15 types of crafting materials. But it's not worth fighting enemies for them when you can just go into caves with a bunch of barrels, break them open in a single dash or fire arrow, collect the loot, re-enter and repeat. Which brings me to the next point.
Progress is gated behind upgrades you have to pay dearly for.
At the start of the game, you can carry at most 250 gold, 10 of each crafting item, and 2 potions. The crafting item limit can't be increased, but you can buy bigger wallets and a bigger potion case. The wallet upgrades are essential to being able to afford the other things for sale, which include upgrades for your armor, your sword, your archery, your health, your mana, and also recipes for other potions, as well as other collectibles. I decided to grind money for upgrades when I got stuck on the third boss. The previous dungeon bosses had felt like slogs, but were managable when I got the pattern down, so I felt like I was overdue.
As previously stated, the ideal way to grind money is to repeatedly reload caves with lots of barrels in them. All crafting materials can be found in them, just as in overworld bushes, as well as the gold. But even with the upgrade shops and my grind spot in the Haunted Cragg being close to warp points on the maps, this is no easy affair. There are 12 upgrades each for your sword, your armor, and your bracers (which pertain to archery). At least the last one of each costs a thousand gold, and there are multiple upgrades for each type that cost 500. But even with a full wallet you might not get two upgrades at 500g from one shop in one trip, because upgrades also require crafting items and you can only carry ten of each. When the upgrades require more than 5 of a kind, all you can do is suck it up and get back to the grind.
By the end of the game, the player stats that I unlocked from a very finnicky archery game tell me that I've gathered (read: spent) 20,000 gold. I'm still short two sword upgrades and some potion recipes. I can safely say that more than half of my playtime was spent grinding money.
The really sad part is a lot of these upgrades are not or don't feel meaningful. There are sword upgrades for regaining health or mana when you kill a foe with a sword, but fighting generally is to be avoided if possible, and the 2 HP you'd get is not worth the risk involved in close-range combat. Also, there's a lot of enemies that attack you by means of self-destructing, so that upgrade is wasted on them. There is a total of 6 sword upgrades that increase the damage of your swing by +10%. What it amounts to is that the first enemy in the game, a green slime, goes down in two swings rather than three when you had no upgrades. And at one point, a ghost shows up and informs you that traps do double damage now. While that may be intended to increase the value of armor upgrades, to me it felt like I lost the purchases I'd already made.
(Continued in comments below.)
