It looks nice, and that's the best compliment I can pay it. Despite beating the first two bosses on my first try for each, I found a number of the game mechanics to be frustrating enough that I don't want to keep pushing forward in it.

Some notes:

-- As far as I can tell, despite having a currency system built in the fashion of a soulslike with you needing to recover stuff at your spot of death and level at at bonfire-equivalent (fountains), the game just takes the notion of that and says, "But what if we only allow leveling at SOME bonfire-type places and just allow recovery at others?" Not so bad, but what is bad is when you're trying to level and you have no idea (as far as I can tell) of how much you need to level. It tells you the cost for the next level if you have enough for it, but that's mostly irrelevant information unless you're saving your "souls" for some other purchase (which at least in the first couple hours of the game for me, seemed to be the Pointer Key that requires so many "souls" that you're never going to care about proximity to level up totals while you're farming for it).

-- A nothing-thing, but it's really weird to watch your currency total creep down from another value sometimes when you rest at a location, making it feel like it's costing you to rest when it's just some weird oversight bug.

-- Regular enemies are both boring AND obnoxious. I use the term "boring" because combat is very much a roll/slash/roll/slash approach against most enemies I encountered for the most part. You might get an archer you can roll behind and get one or two extra strikes on, but a lot of enemies are as fast or faster than you and trading hits isn't exactly a staple of survival in soulslikes or metroidvanias. A lot of enemies like to lunge forward REALLY far and their overreach basically incentivizes rolling through them. You could argue this is great practice for the first boss, but all the enemies you meet after the first boss that aren't archers do the exact same thing.

As for "obnoxious", this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the jump mechanic. I'll elaborate on movement more in a moment, but what's important about jumping is that if you leave the ground for any reason, anything that hits you will both stun you and fling you, causing you to land a short distance away (or long if you go off the side of a ledge) and force you to spend some time waiting to get back up. You do have a mid-air roll, but since it angles you downward, it's cumbersome to mix it into your repertoire when just doing a normal roll is far easier and less punishing. You get a relic eventually that gives you a backstep, then you get the joy of trying to figure out how to do it because they don't tell you the command for the backstep. :) Spoiler: It's DOWN+ROLL/EVADE.

Because combat is so lethargic with the back-and-forth of hunting for a good moment for strikes (there's a stamina boost system that rewards you for successive strikes, but singular enemies move around quickly enough that it's difficult to build this bar up), you're honestly more incentivized to ignore as many enemies as you can and find the next fountain to heal at (especially one you can level at) and farm enemies next to that fountain. Yeah, enemies drop equipment but it's generally not better than what you find while exploring.

-- I looked it up and as far as I can tell, there's no way to respec. You're given a boatload of different weapons just in the first two hours (by the time I stopped at 118 minutes, I had to scroll off the page to see what I had and I think I was at 20 weapons?) and some go off STR, some off DEX, and I even found one that went off your INT or whatever the equivalent is. Some go off two or possibly more stats. From what I've read, the game is pretty short and I guess this encourages users to just do a playthrough with a particular build that's focused on one thing, but there's nothing stopping someone from hamstringing themselves by going the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none route. Moreover, experimentation is absolutely discouraged because the resource for upgrading weapons is VERY limited from what I've read. I can't verify this, but people suggest that there's really only enough of the upgrade currency to max out one weapon and partially work on another. Armed with that knowledge, you're either just settling for one of the earliest weapons you find or you're intentionally playing a weaker/softer game against enemies until you're near the end because you might want to hold out for a weapon that feels better to you and aligns with your build direction. In fact, I'd say this is encouraged because I went with knuckles because of how fast they are and I found a second knuckle right before the second boss, then got to the upgrade area and realized that if I had found that knuckle later (it's missable), I might have upgraded an outright inferior weapon. But also, knowing that there's at least two knuckles, odds are that there's more than two and even though I did end up doing one upgrade with that weapon, I'd be hard-pressed not to just hold out and wait to see if there's one or two (or more) knuckles later that I might want to focus on instead.

-- Traps are a pain because they often fling you just like getting hit while jumping does, and they're often set up near pit spikes that take a sizable chunk of your life before respawning you on the last safe ledge you made it to before hitting spikes. This isn't a game killer (although there are some rooms that make this into misery porn because they're just trap spam), but it also makes encounters where enemies are nearby into extreme acts of frustration because it's easy to just get juggled and have to recover from an enemy or trap, only to stand up into another enemy or trap with little control over these things. Again, minor issue, but I imagine that over the course of the full game, this could be rather grating.

-- Movement is a pain because it's sometimes rather loose and sometimes rather tight and there seems to be a lack of consistency in this. If I jump up and to the right and immediately try to turn around to my left, it takes a significant amount of time for the game to reflect this turn properly. If I jump up and to the right and immediately hold left and roll, I IMMEDIATELY roll. No delay, nothing. This makes upward movement slightly more difficult to control while encouraging downward movement with the mid-air roll. This also muddles any potential for precision movement because the game has a very snap-to tendency of wanting to help you grab ledges, regardless of whether that's your intention. As far as I can tell, there's no fall damage but it's so easy to accidentally grab a ledge while trying to drop quickly, and yet jumping up and trying to get a ledge that's JUST at the edge of your reach in the opposite direction you jump from is an exercise in futility. This gets complicated even more by how quickly you walk while not striking, because rooms with short ledges (which usually have spikes around them) seem to be when your character's movement issues show themselves the most, especially if you already fell on a spike and got respawned, as the game LOVES to hurtle you toward your doom if you're holding in a direction after you hit a spike trap, usually resulting in you hitting a spike trap again as you careen right off an edge post-recovery. Movement in conjunction with striking fares as a mixed bag because it's very easy to accidentally go through enemies while in the middle of trying to pull off successive strikes, but this is sometimes a boon because it means that overcompensating enemies will just whiff right past you, even if you only get one strike out of the mix. So, movement while swinging is bog-slow but accidentally beneficial, movement while not swinging can be buttery-slippery, jumping can result in so many different possibilities ranging from normalcy to utter taxation, and rolling seems to be the one thing the game wants to treat you to in the best of ways (I honestly didn't spend enough time with the backstep to really comment on it).

That's a lot to say for barely two hours of gameplay time and given that people have mentioned beating the game in under ten hours on their first run, I probably shouldn't have spent so much time on this review. It's not a terrible game, but it doesn't seem to understand the core components of a soulslike and how to draw the most fun out of one -- it's just a few mixed bag systems cobbled together with middling results. I can't even say a lot about the two bosses I fought because they were very roll/slash/roll/slash for the most part (although the end of the second boss fight had me just standing on the edge of a ledge and punching furiously because I realized that the boss could not hit me with 90% of its attacks from that spot). Only 50% of people that played this even beat the second boss and I don't think it was necessarily because of difficulty (although the build issues might suggest that was exactly why). I don't think the game is an actual metroidvania because the only gating seems to be "boss is in your way" and the leveling and soul-retrieval components seem to suggest it's supposed to be fashioned in a more traditional soulslike format. I guess that's fine, but if you're going to model yourself this way, at least try and do something substantial because there's nothing worse than an affair of mediocrity. Visually lovely game sometimes, very nothingburger the rest of the time. I got it on sale for 4.79 USD and still refunded it because I just know I'm never going to go back to it. Unless you're desperate for trying everything under the soulslike sun, maybe give this a hard pass.

You know what? I don't think it's as bad as everyone makes it out to be, but maybe I was just also very lucky (until I wasn't).

I chose the Detective because my Lovecraft-brain was like, "This will be the one that lets me gather lots of information and learn creepy lore so that I can make progress while dealing with occult stuffs!"

The actual result? I got a guy with a big shooty-gun that does lots of big shooty at lots of things in a game where you have infinite ammo and just need to reload every now and then. There's a roll command, but unless you're facing the gank squad of reanimated corpses or...slimes?... you're basically free to just spam the big shooty until a given room is cleared.

Healing items are ample enough, though some bosses can deplete them rather quickly -- I'm looking at you, Chapter 2 boss with huge random puddles of acid everywhere and the ability to inflict a status effect that also causes health loss. More than anything, the biggest threat to my character was my own curiosity that kept lowering my sanity until I died, but I had an item equipped that thankfully was the equivalent of a free pass that restored me back to life and restored my sanity back to full when it happened (I had no idea it did this, but that's kinda how this game goes).

I do understand the appeal of making things mysterious and how some roguelikes go for things like that so the player can work out what's worthwhile and what isn't, but holy hell, maybe don't make usable items with vague descriptions that cost a metric ton to purchase, then let the player discover their use by wasting it immediately in a pointless place -- why yes, I did figure out what item allows you to display the entire map for a chapter...IN THE HUB WORLD WHERE THE MAP IS ONE ROOM.

There are a lot of little issues like this that do seem to add up a bit, which is a shame because it honestly doesn't feel like a bad game to play. Save points are linked to storage chests, but once you use one, it's gone until the next time you go back to the hub world and there's nothing worse than finding a merchant to sell all your stuff to after you've already offloaded everything to storage because you were out of room. Or the weird quirkiness of using a controller and having the controls work fine EXCEPT for when you go to start a chapter and then you have to reach over to the keyboard to hit "any key to continue" because somehow, the "any key" wasn't mapped to the gamepad. Just little things like that.

What did seal the deal for me was getting into Chapter 3, pulling up my map, and then discovering that I couldn't leave my map anymore -- the Back button simply didn't work anymore. And it wasn't just the gamepad that was the issue, but rather, the keyboard was unresponsive for this as well, but all buttons for all other commands in the map menu worked absolutely fine. So, I had to just tab out of the game and close it manually and that was a good enough excuse for a rather unpolished game with some decent potential to be removed from the backlog.

I can see why they advertise it as 80% off every now and then on Steam, and it might be worth your time to check it out as a curiosity when it is that cheap. I didn't even realize they made a sequel until I went to update this Backloggd entry, so maybe they fixed things in said sequel.

Recently came back to this while fighting The Backlog Monster and after grabbing the last achievements I was missing, I've decided to bump it up to 4.5 stars because it really is just ridiculously addictive fun in such a simple form.

The only thing keeping it from a perfect score for me is the fact that the game (at least in the PC version, I don't know about others) doesn't remember which type of Pac-Man you previously picked or the type of visual effect for a given level. I'm not sure about music type because I just left that on Auto, but it tends to pick a random visual type each time I come back to a level and ALWAYS defaults to AUTO for the type of Pac-Man/Ghosts you encounter, which means I keep having to readjust both and fix the color if there's a particular visual type with a particular color palette I want (Type C with the cool colors largely based in purple is my go-to along with Pac-Man Type 3). It shouldn't be a big deal, but it adds up over time.

Other than that, the game is a diamond and I think absolutely anyone looking for the stellar feeling of plowing through like 100 ghosts in a matter of seconds and racking up score like crazy should absolutely check it out.