Aeterna Noctis

I play a ton of Metroidvanias, and I really do not like this one. I find it overly frustrating for essentially mediocre game play, and overall just not worth the time. I have too many other games I really enjoy to waste time with this kind of jank. If the game were really special and had good controls or unique combat it might be worth it but it doesn't... it's just mid in all respects, but tuned to be difficult and very punishing on death for no good reason. Don't get me wrong... there's nothing wrong with difficulty in general, but it needs to be balanced by quality of game play. That's the issue here... lots of difficulty, harsh punishments for any missteps... but only mediocre, run of the mill game play with very little interesting design to make it worth the time investment. I also play on Steam Deck, so game time above is not correct. And by the way.. this game has NO right to be steam deck verified. The text in this game is microscopic, and the controls remap function is unusable on the small steam deck screen due to the text scaling. Beware of the false "Verified" rating this game has. Everything else works ok, but it should be "Playable" at best. The combat is ok... the movement is good. Range can be a bit of an issue, but in general the flow of movement is fine. The graphics and sound design are very good. I don't like how the bounce works.. you have to jump and press down and attack, which is fine... but it is very tightly timed, so if you are off at all you just take damage and fail the bounce. And that is generally true in this game, everything you do is very tightly timed. But this game has every single one of the "bad" tropes that plague the genre. It's designed to be very punishing. You can only respawn at lanterns once, otherwise you respawn back at the start of the zone. That's even if you manage to collect all of your lost souls from a death, which is another issue. You lose all of your darkness every time you die until you reclaim it. None of these are super unique... they are bad designs, but they are also common to some of the games in this genre for some reason. The issue with this game is they combine in a very harsh and frustrating manner with no actual payoff from quality or skill of combat. It's just punishment with no reward. All of this just makes the game more punishing than it deserves to be, and the game is just very frustrating to play instead of fun. The other issue the game has is that controls are really awkward on game pad by default. They do offer a menu to change those but it doesn't actually work, because there are functions in the world that will still all show the original keys. Additionally, if you remap the B button for example, then you can't use any of the in world thrones or chests... even if you remapped a different key to B's default function. It just won't work. So you are forced to restore the default, which puts dash on RT, which is very awkward. Again this just adds frustration to an already frustrating game. This isn't a souls-like... you don't get a great sense of skill and reward for defeating bosses or enemies. The combat flow is simple... it's just tuned to be brutal. And that doesn't really work because without some sense of skill, everything just feels unnecessary and the game isn't fun enough to offset the bad respawn and death chest mechanics. There are tons of really great, really rewarding Metroidvania's with great graphics and gameplay on the market. I see no reason to waste time on this one, given the combination of how uncomfortable and punishing it is for really no returned value.

What an insane game! Insanely hard. Insanely good. And insanely polished. I am not a masochist enough to get no-hit achievements, and I already died 676 times, but I very, very, very much enjoyed the challenges this game issued to me. Maybe not the bosses, because some of them were harder than souls-likes and made me mad, but platforming was brilliant! Even the most ridiculous ones like in [spoiler]Cosmos (HOLY FUCK what a map!).[/spoiler] Precision and timing needed for some platforming was... insane. But I totally enjoyed overcoming everything game placed before me, with some puzzles stopping me for as long as 40 minutes. Definitely the most difficult Metroidvania I have played. One of the most beautiful – definitely top 5. And, for me, one of the best – I would go as far as top 4 right behind Ori Will of the Wisps, Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown and Hollow Knight. Fake languages of all NPCs really bothered me at first, but after a few hours not only I didn't mind them, but even started to like them. If you need to get gray hair from stress fast, I totally recommend this game!

Excellent and lengthy metroidvania. If you're a fairly fresh/casual metroidvania player, Noctis mode is probably too rough for you. However, if you're an avid player of metroidvanias, it's not particularly hard or challenging for the most part. I'm currently 2/3 done with the game and haven't had a single moment where I felt frustrated - longest I spent on a section was maybe 5min. Luckily, respawning and reattempting is quite simply, and no section is SO long that it feels unfair. Regardless of any videos you might watch there is NOTHING as difficult as the Path of Pain in Hollow Knight imo. Yes, the average section is significantly harder, but the highest difficulty is well below the lengthy and difficult sections of the Path of Pain. In fact, most sections have a lot of "give" to them with your skillset (like, you need 2/3 of your teleport arrows, so you still have a 3rd to make up the gap). It's only when you finally get into the DLC that you are required to use ALL available resources, and even then it's not that tight to navigate. Next we have the game itself - standard metroidvania affair done as good as any top tier game (Hollow Knight, for example), but having the "weapons" act as unique interactions is VERY much appreciated (the scythe acts as your secondary weapon and gives more "blood", the spear as your downward thrusting attack, the shuriken as your ranged, etc). Never will you not have your trusty sword, but supplementing the weapons instead of replacing them feels great! Lastly - some performance issues. There are sections where the FPS drops (namely when reflections are involved), and it's a bit disappointing in a game that my 3080 Ti should run just fine, but it's not common enough that it's a major issue.

Absolutely goated game. Yes, it has a lot of flaws but none of them are major enough to really affect the gameplay. The good just heavily outweighs the bad. The teleport arrow is probably my favorite mechanic ive ever used in a game. The platforming is still really enjoyable when the arrow isnt needed though. I have to point out the biggest issue I had with the game, which is one area (dream kingdom). It is a creative idea, but just didnt work out well imo. So if u like difficult platforming, u need to get this game.

takes inspiration from a lot of metroidvania games but the sheer difficulty entices a masochist like myself. arrow is cool af but also screw the arrow

I can't in good conscience recommend this game to anybody. This game seems to favor tedium over any and everything else. Areas are too big with few interesting things to actually see, platforming challenges go on for way too long, there are random spikes and traps everywhere, even where they shouldn't be (like in a calm transition between levels), and other tedium-focused design decisions that I'm not going to list. The bosses, as far as I have played, are all trash tier. There's a sword where 90% of the boss is just going up a tower, a big worm that you have to kill by shooting it's eyes with the most wonky projectile system in a MV to date, a robot that can't decide if it has contact damage or not (and how big the hitbox for the contact damage is), and honestly I have yet to find a boss I would consider GOOD in this game. Well, I probably won't because I uninstalled it lol. Let's also not forget the utter incompetence of the devs at making keyboard and mouse controls, I mean they managed to fk up mouse-look... Quite literally the EASIEST control to implement properly, and they managed to fk it up... And as a result, aiming the bow is absolutely unbearable on kb/m. And no, this isn't a case of "oh it's meant for controller". Dog, you're INTENTIONALLY making it play like ass on kb/m! Out of half a hundred MVs that I played, this is the ONLY one where I would say it's almost impossible to play it on kb/m, y'all managed to fk it up THAT BADLY! But the absolute main problem with this game, is the fact that it's trying to be and do too many things, while using the Hollow Knight formula that was designed specifically for a system where you can do very few things. Hollow Knight's philosophy was "let's do few things, and do them well!", and then Aeterna Noctis comes along and goes like "yeah but what if we do a lot of things, and do them piss poor?"...

Weirdly this game gives me PoP Lost Crown vibes and I loved Lost Crown. Looking forward to digging in further to see how far the similarities go.

I don't like to bash indie game studios as I'd like more indie games but this game feels like a flop. It's like the design team played Hollow Knight and then said, "I know how to make this worse" and then proceeded to make this game. It doesn't stay true to the feel of a Metroidvania but liberally uses the tag. The controls are clunky, the game play is punishingly difficult to control but not in a way that feels like it's fun to learn. Celeste's difficulty doesn't come because it's clunky but because it's tight, well-designed platforming. This is difficult because it's poorly designed by choice. The design team didn't know how to design the maps around the abilities so instead locked them all at the beginning of the map and then makes you search for keys to take back to the beginning for new upgrades. The bosses aren't fun and the combat is clunky with weird spacing on weapon attacks, platforms and enemy movement. I was drawn in by the art but don't really want to stick around because of the game play itself, which I feel a game should do. Play it for free but you aren't in for a fun ride. Should have refunded but wanted to give it a chance. 2/5 Combat 2/5 Platforming 3.5/5 Art design (-.5 on the buggy animations) 2/5 Metroidvania feel 1.5/5 on Dialogue and world building Overall 2.2/5

Recommended for those who hates themselves

dick hard