Voidwrought

It's a nice metroidvania with eldritch horror flavoring. WIth that in mind, the intro feels a bit lacking, it takes a while till you get a proper feel for the game. Part of that, to me at least, was that most of the mobility skills were available only later on, which, as others have said, leads into a lot of backtracking which can be annoying. I like the music in some areas, the monsters. The narrative... well... you look into the void and the void looks back. It has this weird disjointed feel that, I think, matches the theme of eldritch horrors greatly. If you expect a sane coherent narrative.... it does not match what the game is going for. I feel like once you pass maybe the first 5 to 6 hrs (at least for a slow player), you get to start enjoying it more. You get more skills, more items, more methods of attack, you get a lot more upgrades.... the first few hours... eh, they could be better but maybe it's just that an insane world would not allow you to understand it from the get go. Overall, I have liked. Is it perfect... nope. Does it scratch that itch for anyone waiting for Silksong? Yes, within reason.

Bad game, map and story design. Enemies are bullet sponges, sometimes unfairly placed. Fighting them does not feel fun or rewarding. You do not get properly directed through the map via accessibility by discovered items, and when you discover another area, it does not feel like progress since all enemies share the same flawed movement/attack patterns and hit points. There is no progress to the players character either since all additional abilities just do not feel rewarding, and they also come randomly. The story wants to be super mysterious, religious-spiritual-ominous, but falls flat because what the story writers wanted to achieve, was beyond their skill. So you will get dozens of lines of pseudo cryptic text, but they do not justify the flatness of the story as far as I have played. It fails to click/catch the player from the beginning. I do not care if there is a big story reveal and improved movement after 6+ hours if the way to get there is not fun. And it is not.

A solid metroidvania with a few weaknesses: -I didn't like how the game would often lock you into a combat arena, especially when said combat arenas led to acquiring new abilities. I think it would have been better if all abilities were connected to some boss -the biggest surprise of the game was when it was over. I didn't know that triggering a door would lead to a boss, and even then, I was surprised that it had just one phase. Maybe I didn't explore thoroughly enough (I netted some 60% completion and was able to lay waste to the final boss without much trouble). Theming and story fell flat for me. I didn't care/remember any of the NPCs beyond their utility. Mechanics are solid. The one thing that did annoy me was that you need to wait a few frames after attacking if you want to dodge in the opposite direction. It didn't feel snappy, just something I had to get used to. Final score: SOLID

Heavily "inspired" by Hollow Knight, but clearly worse. For a metroidvania its a good game with great artwork and nice challenges. However the progression system and abilities you unlock is broken imo. You can easily miss the unlocking of the fast travel. Once you get the slither ability you don't need the double jump or get the grapple hook. This opens the world a lot and you can manage to go mostly anywhere, until you can't and have to backtrack. Also the first part of the game is much harder than the rest and without upgrading your weapon the enemies are too tanky. I attempted the fetid boss without upgrades and after 200 hits the thing was still alive. Recommended for fans of the genre or if it is on sale

can't use mouse and keyboard, only keyboard.I tried using a controller instead and the character feels off, i dont feel like i can consistantly make downward attacks when jumping and he falls too quickly. resolution seems bugged, at first i couldn't see the whole screen even if i used windowed mode in a smaller resolution than my screen and if i used the only ultrawide resolution avalible the UI in the inventory was twice the size of my screen so i could not see it. i love the artstyle and had been thinking about playing this game for a long time but after falling down a hole where i was met by ghosts i couldn't damage yet and then facing a boss with this wonky movement and seemingly no way to progress my character yet i dont feel like this game is for me

it's one of those games that start really annoying but gets better once you get the upgrades, cooldowns and animations are a bit long tho, 7/10 overall

[h1]Flawed Hollow Knight clone with boring progression[/h1] And the level design doesn't make sense. Like everywhere you go, the room is full of "revisit here after you unlocked new ability". Exploration is not fun, might as well make this a linear stage-by-stage game. ALSO, the game heavily rely on downward attack (the pogo mechanic) but refuse to make a proper tutorial for this. The game just place a random NPC to hint about it with a random spike path for a secret reward. I played the previous demo and it was nice, I don't understand how the full release is so bad.

Enjoyed it