Worldless

Some aspects of the game are good, some are awful. The horned dude spews out pretentious nonsense, the world is sure beautiful but the biomes don't intertwine (they exist separately from each other) and also are stylistically strange (man-made structures in cosmogonic setting), the amount and slowness of backtracking is absurd (too few portals), the map is nonexistent for sake of style (the levels layout is not that unique, a standart metroidvania map would do just fine), which makes collecting stuff tiring, the requirements to win a fight by absorbing are too high (you need to parry the same attacks over and over and over again and take care not to kill the enemy). Also I couldn't shake off that the protagonist is basically the dude from Grime but it could be my problem, not the game's. The visuals are great but that's about it.

Music: 10/10 Art style: 10/10 Story: 2/10 Parkour: 6/10 Parkour Challenge: 4/10 Combat: 8/10 Combat Challenge: 0/10 Overall: 3/10 - I do not recommend. This is a metroidvania-style game that is incredibly short. I finished about 95% of content within 10 hours, including the final "boss", which isn't a boss fight at all. I was confused what was even happening and ended up just standing still doing nothing; it was more like an interactive cutscene with no explanation of what's happening. Nothing you do matters one iota in the final boss "fight". It isn't explained in game; the only reason anyone in the community really has any idea of what's going on is because the devs gave more lore outside the game. Apparently it's supposed to be an analogy for the big bang, one in which you have zero agency over the outcome. It actually made me feel kinda sick because you start with [spoiler]Edda[/spoiler] trying to fight [spoiler]Aven[/spoiler], then you realize that you are [spoiler]two parts of a whole and unite to fight together[/spoiler]. Then during the final boss "fight", one of them [spoiler]gets impaled by a spear[/spoiler] and the other [spoiler]can't do anything to help[/spoiler]. At that point, I honestly can't tell if both just [spoiler]lose and the boss resets the universe[/spoiler] or if they both [spoiler]sacrifice themselves, thus causing the big bang, getting rid of the boss and resetting the universe[/spoiler]. For such a short game, I felt like If the game had ended here, I would've given the game a thumbs up just for the music, environment, and entertaining-enough combat/parkour, even with the nonsensical "story". The problem is that the combat/parkour was very mid. Entertaining, for me, but not overtly challenging. But there was option content (with several achievements locked behind it) that dialed the difficulty into Hollow Knight territory. I managed to finish the parkour part, which clearly was trying to take a page from Path of Pain. But the boss at the end of it? F that piece of trash. There are 66 combat actions/combos between [spoiler]both Edda and Aven combined[/spoiler]. Many of them are longer/bigger/more powerful improvements on smaller combos or are similar abilities [spoiler]on each separate character or separate situations[/spoiler] that use the same combo keys. I got through the entire game (well, 95%) without using the majority of them without any problem. What I despise is when games don't properly train you. They give you weak sauce for 95% of the game, and then expect you to be a master at every single ability without any weakness for the last 5%. It's absurdly unbalanced. And I'm sorry, but 66 is TOO MANY COMBOS. Even when you ignore shorter/weaker versions of them, there's still roughly 40 combos. Cut that in half [spoiler]to account for duplicate combos of usually but not always similar attacks on the two characters[/spoiler] and it's still about 20 combos with no on-screen help. For a game that otherwise lasts 10 hours, that's WAY too many combos to memorize how to use and when to use them, let alone being perfect at it. I vehemently despise games that bait you along with a particular expectation of gameplay and then switch it on you at the last moment. This is clearly a game that at the very last moment decided it wanted to ride on the coat tails of Hollow Knight/Silksong. Locking achievements behind it is dirty. HK/Silksong were challenging from the very beginning and were much longer so you had heaps of time to perfect your skills and get challenged in how to use them,, plus a lot of flexibility in choosing your own build to suit your playstyle. It's fair to have hard achievements in games that are already hard. It's stupid to have them in games this extremely short that fail so spectacularly at teaching you anything. I am uninstalling and putting this game on the shelf. I have zero intention to ever play it again, unless mods come out to make the end fight more fair, but the game is ultra indie so I don't really see it gaining enough traction for that to really be a thing. I hate when 9/10 experiences get dumped on at the very end because the devs suddenly tried to make their game into something it clearly wasn't meant to be until that point. Or they just suck at implementing a stable progression system that is designed to train players for what's to come.