random games

I beat it last night, actually.

It's good. The art is pretty amazing, and the combat feels nice and weighty. The Penitent One's dodge move is probably the best feeling thing in the game, especially when you find stuff that lets you improve it. And the sword feels nice and slice-y (compared with the thwack-iness of Hollow Knight), especially after parrying.

The sword needs to be good because Prayers (magic attacks) are all pretty bad. They all have so much windup that most enemies or bosses will interrupt you when you're trying to use them, and most of them don't have enough range to use from a safe distance.

The game is a Metroidvania souls-like similar to Hollow Knight, but the death mechanic is less punishing. You drop a fragment of guilt upon death, and until you collect it, your mana bar is shortened, your mana buildup is reduced, and you get less currency from killing enemies. You can also drop multiple fragments, so the mana bar can get shorter and shorter upon subsequent death. Even so, you don't lose any of the money you had, and if your guilt is in an annoying place, you can go pay a Confessor statue to recover it for you.

The difficulty curve feels similar to Dark Souls, too. There are three places you can go to start, and they're all doable, but I would say there is one direction that is easiest and I went there second.

One of my biggest beefs with the game is that there is no equivalent to the Firekeeper Soul/Undead Bone Shard, so while you find additional healing flasks, they always heal the same amount, even when your health is quadruple what you started with. Late game bosses deal huge chunks of damage, and if you want to recover you might have to use 5 flasks, all of which require a 2 second animation where you can't move. I found the best way to win was usually to avoid taking damage at all, and it's doable, but it leads to few of those satisfying scenarios where you eke out a win. Maybe to compensate for this, when you've fully upgraded the sword, it is stupidly strong, so I still wound up doing considerable damage every time I opened up the last boss.

There's a true ending that I don't think I would have discovered without looking it up. Also there's gonna be free DLC, so that's pretty cool. I would recommend the game.

also if I replayed this game it would be very different in some places because I did not learn until the final boss how to air combo. not sure if I missed a tutorial or what, but I didn't find out until I looked up what a certain item did.

Edit: Oh, another thing I'd ding it for is the music. There's a lot of nice Spanish-sounding guitar, but it feels pretty same-y after the third area.