I don't think I like this... It's well-produced, looks good and especially sounds surprisingly good with some pretty music, but it's in the La-Mulana school of metroidvanias and that's just not my vibe. This one is a friendlier La-Mulana that isn't as hostile to you, but it's still exhausting for me. Every room is excessively hostile and your combat abilities are limited.

I spoiled myself and the internet claims there will be no movement abilities and so it seems like I don't have much on the horizon to look forward to and that would make the game more enjoyable to me. I'm supposed to be able to reach those really high chests some other way?

I really hate that lighting is a skill (called "awareness") that you level up while feeling like it does nothing and how it makes nearly every room pitch dark. I'm also not a fan of how they combine momentum-based movement (as in you have to run a couple of steps to maximize your jump) with tiny platforms, which I don't think quite works. I don't really love the focus on sending your bat to do a bunch of things and the whole mechanic of having limited fruits, especially when some of them are requirements for killing certain enemies.

Guess I'm rambling now but I didn't vibe with this game more or less from the moment it started. The non-stop jokes aren't super funny to me, I don't like the momentum-based movement and your tiny sword, nor the focus on tossing things for your bat to perform tasks. This is a very well-made game that's suited for someone who definitely isn't me.

Full disclosure: the developer plays in my D&D games.

Breath of fresh air! Batbarian focuses on atmosphere; it captures the feeling of being trapped within a dungeon. Enemies are strong, rests are few and far between, and the darkness is nearly all-encompassing. All this allows the game's relationships to shine--and there's no bond deeper than the one between a barbarian and their bat. It also allows the quirky sense of humor to land, which is probably the game's most stunning accomplishment.

I'd recommend playing with the assists, especially for some of the boss combat. Also, please place diligent markers on your map. Don't be like me and leave it mostly blank until you need to go through every room in a mad scramble for those last few gems.

A characterful metroidvania with unique pixel art, that feels like it was designed by someone who is obsessed with level design and spent many hours of their youth filling notebooks with miniature dungeons. This isn't to say it has The Best Level Design of All Time, just that its map is designed with a sense of care and attention to detail that is absent from much of the genre. Batbarian feels more like an old school dungeon crawler than most metroidvanias. It's not really like La-Mulana, because nothing really is, but in the intricacy and challenge of its dungeon, it’s more akin to La-Mulana than to other genre entries. The use of light and darkness is also unique among metroidvanias that I’ve played, and adds to that feeling of a dungeon crawl. If you want to explore a vast network of caves riddled with secrets, clever puzzles, and challenging enemies, this may be the game for you.

Of note are the assist options which let you tweak difficulty to your liking, and can be turned on and off at any time with no penalty. When I got sick of a certain boss, I just turned on increased defense and increased attack, beat the boss, and turned them back off. Excellent for people with, like, jobs, who can't spend an infinite amount of time on every video game challenge.

Should be said that I didn't actually finish the game. By the time I was about 90% through, finishing the game started to sound exhausting, so take that as you will.

This is a tough one to write about.

Short answer: It's probably a really good game at its core and if you like puzzle-centric Metroidvanias that encourage exploring, this is probably your cup of tea.

Longer answer: For me at least, it's too puzzle-centric. There's an amazing amount of exploration to be done with secrets hidden in practically every room you enter (and if they're not hidden, it's because you stumbled into a secret room and the chests are there, waiting for you if you can solve a puzzle to reach them).

Fast travel is a little unintuitive at times because some campfires you travel from don't reach areas you think they would when heading back from them. That being said, the caves you explore are labyrinthine in nature and it kinda fits the mold of the game, so it's hard to gripe about that.

The soundtrack is solid. Not much else to say about that because it's an enjoyable listen, but nothing I'm adding to my music collection.

Enemy diversity is a mixed bag, in that there are some interesting enemy choices that have distinct behaviors, but some enemies really are just basic palette swaps with nothing else going for them beyond dealing more damage/taking more damage before dying.

Bosses are a great time, though for all the traveling I did in the game, they feel few and far between. That may just be a perception issue on my part because of getting lost a few times and having to backtrack a bit to figure out where to go next, but I figure it's worth noting.

Bosses (outside of maybe the first) require patience and paying attention to the layout of the room and whatever resources might be there to maximize your chances for survival. Although a barbarian's instinct might be to Hulk-Smash! your way through them, the player better bring a heaping of awareness to the match because you don't get any kinds of items to heal or boost stats or anything of the sort when going into these fights -- it's adapting to the situation or getting wrecked.

I think I enjoyed every boss fight I encountered outside of maybe the boss of the Eternal Palace area, which just felt like a chore to deal with, despite probably being the easiest boss to figure out.

I should give a brief mention to combat in general -- it's extremely basic and consists of you slashy-slashing and occasionally using your bat to manipulate resources around you to deal with enemies. Sometimes you might throw a stone to hit an enemy and elicit a particular behavior from them (be it knocking them off a ceiling or a ledge), but it's mostly just about slashing (or charge-slashing) while not being in the way of whatever the enemy might have in store for you.

I want to mention the map system because I said earlier that the place is very labyrinthine and it is, but it's also worth noting that the map system comes with a variety of markers to allow you to make notes-of-sorts for each room in case you need/want to come back there to deal with something specific. Wish you could have an easier way to pick the icon you want instead of just scrolling through all of them, but I appreciate the sheer number of options available.

Some puzzles are mandatory and I think at least for me, I'm just not that fond of the puzzle mechanics for this game. You (barbarian) send your bat (Pip) out to light up certain stones that can cause effects (temporarily or permanently based on each room) that allow you to traverse said rooms. You use the right-analog stick to aim a fruit that sends the bat in that direction. You can also throw stones this way (of which you have limited supplies) or special fruits (of which you also have limited supplies) to either hit switches from a distance or use your bat to do some specific tactics to help make puzzle progression a thing.

The puzzles are oftentimes clever, but sometimes just frustrating because they rely on the player's ability to hit angles properly with a limited supply of items. As an example, there's a very simple puzzle in a secret room that involves a ball and chain swinging back and forth over a pit of spikes. The chest is on the other side of the room behind a locked portcullis. The switch is on a ledge up and to the right of where the ball swings back and forth in a pendulum fashion.

What do you do? Simple, you try and angle and time your stone throw so that it bounces off the ball/chain on the way back to the right, causing it to ricochet onto the ledge with the switch to hit it. I understood exactly what it wanted after the first throw, but with 25 stones in my inventory, I couldn't manage it and had to just abandon the chest to come back later if I wanted to (I didn't). There were no nearby resources to recover my stones, so I couldn't go back and try again quickly. Not all puzzles are like this, but enough are that it can get frustrating (at least for me).

It got to the point where I wasn't really having fun slogging through some puzzles and it kinda took me out of the game. At one point, I found this puzzle that was simply moving around the perimeter of a room quickly while getting a monster inside a maze in the middle of the room to follow you through said maze. There are hazards in the maze that will kill the creature and you need to get it to a certain place in the maze in order to solve the puzzle, but between teleporters in the maze that would fling the creature back the way it came because it sat in a spot for too long and the hazards, I gave up despite knowing what to do after having it die on me about a dozen times or so.

I mention this because it was in the last area I got to before I quit and when I went back to explore the rest of the area, I found my way to a room that had notes that said that the puzzle I gave up on was one of three trials I had to overcome to make progress. Yeah, that was it for me. I wasn't dying to ruthlessly hard platforming (there is some hard platforming in the game), I wasn't missing vital resources when I needed them for an area -- I just couldn't get a stupid creature to follow me through a maze where it was crystal clear where it should go, but I simply couldn't get it to behave the way I needed it to in order to get it there. When progress is beyond my control and in the hands of enemy AI behaving properly, I'm kinda over it.

I'd encourage anyone who wants to play a Metroidvania with deep exploration to it and doesn't mind sometimes-frustrating puzzles to give it a shot. The game has a lot of good things going for it and if you can get past bashing your head against the brick wall that is handling those puzzles, you might have a grand time with this game.