THE DARK DWELLERS

A nice 2D Dark Devotion like experience, combat and story are interesting and the game has a decent selection of weapons, unfortunately the selection of spells feels very limited and the game is quite short (I beat it in under two hours, but game was enjoyable enough to warrant not being a scummy refunder).

Very boring game. Bosses were not fun to combat. This is the worst game I've played this year. Lost interest in trying to complete it.

You can ONLY dodge into the direction you are facing. If you attack and want to dodge BACKWARDS and use Back + Dodge, you will STILL DODGE FORWARD, since you need to face left for a few frames before you can dodge into that direction. That makes the game unplayable sadly. I will gladly try again if they ever change that, but currently it feels just way too clunky due to that.

Honestly, this game is fantastic in every aspect. Absolutely love the challenge, weapons and voice acting.

Ehhhhhh, a very light recommendation, if you know what you're getting into. In a nutshell, this has rather weak gameplay with some good ideas, but the presentation is good enough to keep one interested. This is not a Metroidvania. There's a couple "abilities" needed for progress, but one is gotten before you need to use it, and the other one is guaranteed to be with you before the only area where it's needed. I guess getting the latter early might have made a couple sections slightly easier, but not to a degree it'd have made a difference. Instead, it's an almost entirely linear dungeon crawler, with one area that gets revisited a few times and one choice of order later down the line. Oh, and I guess some of the early areas do offer minor forking paths, these barely show up in the bulk of the game. Similarly, any expectation of it being a Soulslike should be abandoned beyond the combat focusing on stamina and iframe-dodging. It's not an RPG, with your stats staying basically the same. You lose 25% of your currency upon death with no way to regain it, but honestly that's not a big deal as there's only two vendors in the entire game: one which grants you the consumable cure for a small total HP penalty upon the first death (which you likely won't use as this also gives you a melee damage buff) while "normal" and another which sells extra spells, which aren't of much use as they're cast from your HP and have minuscule benefits. There's essentially no rewards for exploration: sometimes the checkpoints (literal bonfires for the most of the game) are slightly out of the way and you can find extra healing vials (okay, I guess that's another Soulsl inspired element), but there's no extra items or even lore as a reward. The checkpoints are often spaced out to a degree where you'll have to repeat sections quite a bit until you git gud enough to advance, but it does become a drag. There are some "ideal strategies" for certain rooms and you feel good when you nail them, but they are never so clever you feel like you solved a puzzle, as it happened in the excellent Metroidvania [b]REDO![/b]. You do get a tiny amount of weapons from beating bosses and they do seem to play differently, but honestly I stuck to the "big cleaver" you get after the first boss for most of the game and am doing the final dungeon with the weapon which gets basically forced on you due to its extra attack being needed. Bosses are an interesting bunch. Due to the combat's low complexity none of them fully shine, but you do get the idea that they were well designed even if they could still use a tweak or two to get the balance perfect. There's a kinda-annoying puzzle boss, but right after beating him I realised one thing I could have done differently that would likely have renders him significantly easier. So why, despite all of these complaints, do I think it doesn't go in the trash pile? Well, because the developer put care into making the story feel engrossing. While the general lore is at its core a fairly standard modern dark fantasy Metroidvania/Soulslike affair, the actual events feel meaningful enough in your little universe, centered on one camp. Now, hubs aren't a new thing in these exploration genres, but the small cast feels great: both your allies and the foes. It's slightly unfortunate the "fully voiced cast" [i]maybe[/i] made this cast not as large and/or interactive as they could have been (it doesn't seem that there's any "flavour only" conversations), but there's definitely personality to each. This is why I didn't put the game down even after several sections felt annoying.

Pretty short, pretty fun, gets pretty ridiculous near the end but the voices and dialogue were fantastic, a little hidden gem

Short game that reminded me of Dark Devotion.

Hidden gem. Short but sweet souls-like 2d dungeon exploration game. Good story, interesting characters, solid progression. If you like games like Moonscars, Death's Gambit, Salt & Sanctuary, etc. you'll like this. I picked this up and spent a Saturday playing it, do not regret. 7.5/10 due to short length

Скучноватая игра для детей вроде Никиты

A short but very atmospheric platformer in the spirit of the dark Dark Souls. There are only 4 weapons, 6 bosses, and 5 skills to learn. But it's fun to play. This is not a dynamic rush; to win, you need to be very careful and check every move. Pleasant pixel graphics. There are criminally few levels; I want more :)