Cathedral is a huge step-up from developer Elden Pixels' debut title, Alwa’s Awakening. Alwa was… fine? It’s certainly not the most exciting or memorable Metroidvania game out there, but it had enough going for it that I was interested in trying their next game. I was curious to see if they’d be able to take the strengths of Alwa’s formula and inject them into a stronger overall package. Surprisingly, Elden Pixels has done exactly that and more with Cathedral. In fact, I’m kinda blown away with how clearly the game communicates its own awareness of Alwa’s shortcomings and addresses them within the very first minutes of gameplay. Cathedral is a massive refinement of the previously established Metroidvania formula while being longer, tougher, and more complex than its predecessor. Most notably though, it sets itself apart in the way it nails the moment-to-moment gameplay; not just in comparison to Alwa, but even to most other games in the Metroidvania genre.
Alwa’s Awakening is a mixed bag, but it’s ultimately a pretty respectable effort for the studio’s debut release. It has strong map design and challenging exploration given your limited toolset for traversal, but is ultimately held back pretty seriously by slow movement and frankly boring combat. Cathedral thoroughly fixes both of these issues with ease, as movement and combat are far snappier from the moment you start playing. The quicker movement is especially noticeable, as it's emphasized further by the more zoomed in screen size. In Alwa, you control this tiny ass sprite on a giant zoomed out screen. It makes the slow movement and sluggish (not to mention very short-range) attacks stick out even more than they already do. Not only are both movement and combat faster in Cathedral, but you have a much more reasonable attack range and toolset overall.
The “Duck Tales bounce” is always a welcome feature for 2D action combat, and Cathedral utilizes it well. I also like that there’s a timing aspect to it compared to how it works in like, Duck Tales or Shovel Knight for example- where you can just continually bounce while airborne. The timing makes it trickier to get down, but it provides a bit more precision and engagement during combat. You can also get varying heights on your bounces depending on how long you hold the button, which brings more depth to not just combat, but platforming too. Higher bounces are useful for platforming, since you can time the button press and conserve your double jump to get even higher than a normal double jump. Meanwhile, shorter bounces are useful for combat, since you can get a faster rhythm of attacking in order to deal damage even faster than your normal attack speed (especially if there’s a low ceiling to limit your height further). Alwa’s combat, on the other hand, was limited to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-esque staff swing and a shitty magic projectile that takes forever to recharge…so yeah, calling the combat improved would be an understatement.
The refinements to combat also allow Cathedral to crank its difficulty way the fuck up without ever feeling unfair. You do have a higher movement speed, but so do most of the enemies as well. They’re faster and more aggressive pretty much right from the start of the game. The extra layer of challenge and complexity makes killing enemies way more fun and satisfying. It’s not just more satisfying in terms of speed either. Killing even the weaker enemies sees them exploding with gold, health, and ammo pickups. So not only does combat always feel good and satisfying, but more often than not, it’s actually WORTH the risk you’re taking by engaging with them. In Alwa, combat kinda just feels like a nuisance- even putting aside how slow and repetitive it is. This is because, if you weren’t low on health (which isn’t often since the game is a cakewalk), there is literally no incentive for fighting. Well, other than getting the enemies to stop annoying you during platforming I guess.
Combat in Cathedral isn’t anywhere as much of a nuisance. In fact, it’s one of the game’s biggest strengths, since its engaging simplicity makes it consistently fun from beginning to end. It makes many subtle improvements to combat, like its reduction of invincibility frames. Alwa’s Awakening had the problem of enemies taking multiple hits to kill despite having significant invincibility frames and not enough hitsun. This made the already simplistic combat somehow both insanely mashy yet imprecise at the same time. Cathedral corrects this by allowing you to repeatedly strike enemies without having to smash through some arbitrary invincibility frames to actually hit the enemy more than once.
Another more notable improvement to combat is the charge projectile system being replaced with a resource-driven item system. In Alwa, you don’t get a projectile for like… 10 hours- during the final dungeon. Cathedral throws a bow and arrow at you within ten minutes and it’s immediately just as good, and arguably better, than Alwa’s magic projectile. Not to mention, the bow’s resource system is a lot more versatile and, well, fun. You can’t save up charges for your projectile in Alwa whatsoever- so you have to sit and wait like, what, 5-10 seconds? Just to be able to use it again one more time. I much prefer having the option to use my tools when they’re needed. Even if I screw myself over by being too liberal and running out of ammo, that’s a consequence I’m more than willing to work around in place of some annoying limitation.
The pixel aesthetic of Alwa was another of its strengths, and Cathedral’s are even more impressive. Perhaps it’s because the camera is drawn in so much closer, but it’s easier to appreciate the designs and level of detail within the game’s art for both the enemies and environments. Cathedral also features a lot more environmental variety, which helps each area feel distinct even beyond their unique puzzle mechanics and different upgrade focuses. For example, the dungeon areas feel very much in that same sort of Alwa vein aesthetically, but then there’s areas like Brightwind which feel completely different. While the dungeons are fairly standard medieval fare, its bright and overly saturated beaches look straight out of something like Alex Kidd or Wonder Boy.
The upgrade system really benefits the game’s balance, allowing the different areas to not only have aesthetic variety, but mechanical variety. This is because of the upgrade restrictions preventing you from using every upgrade at once- at least for most of the game. At first, this seemed like a rather unnecessary restriction, since it was frustrating to have the double jump taken away after getting used to having it. However, you quickly realize that the limitation is specifically placed in order to allow the different areas to maintain a degree of mechanical variety via level design.
Again, the “double jump vs dash” upgrade is the most notable example of this restriction.The areas you explore after getting the double jump upgrade are more spacious and spread-out to accommodate for your wider range of movement. Then, when you get to Brightwind and are forced to exchange it for the dash, the area suddenly becomes a lot more compact and focused around horizontal movement (dash and/or bone platform). Later areas are even crafted so that you’ll be rewarded with different paths depending on WHICH upgrade you’re using. It encourages experimentation, urging you to view the same rooms from different perspectives. These restrictions then make it all the more satisfying when you can finally use both of these major upgrades at the same time during the endgame. It might sound like a relatively minor change, but the game does a great job at providing distinct platforming challenges for each and every combination of movement options at your disposal throughout the game.
Cathedral also made significant strides through its accessibility and quality of life improvements. The map is clean and clear, allowing you to toggle between two unique layers. It even gives you the option to place a marker on rooms of interest. Easily the most useful accessibility feature though is that your map highlights ALL exits after having visited the room. This greatly reduces the potential for getting outright stuck- while simultaneously prodding you to seek out its multitude of secrets.
Input mapping is also fairly extensive, though I do wish it provided the option to map one action to multiple buttons, since I kinda wanted to map shield to both “L” and “A” for faster reflexes since it does take a moment to raise. Otherwise, I slapped the secondary item on “R” and removed the item toggles entirely for the majority of the game. Kind of a personal preference there, but I usually find toggling to be far too clumsy to be useful during fast paced combat. I’d much rather just pause and choose my new item manually, as you would in something like Zelda II or classic Mega Man. I did end up mapping toggle to “A” and using it to switch between two items at a few points in the endgame, as there were a few puzzles and encounters where it was basically required (looking at you, Conduit boss).
Considering the relative mainstream popularity of Shovel Knight, which at this point is among the most famous indie/kickstarter games ever, I’m surprised at just how under the radar Cathedral has flown given their surface level similarities. Especially because of its aformentioned accessibility and quality of life features, as they'd make Cathedral easy to pick up for even someone who’s never played a Metroidvania game in their life. I guess the difficulty might be a bit of a barrier, but it’s entirely doable with adequate exploration. Otherwise, it’s extremely beginner friendly: the maps show all possible exits on every screen, the more obtuse secrets and puzzles will have instructions/hints sitting right next to them, there’s a detailed quest log, there’s even an NPC in every town that straight up tells you what to do the second you get lost… you get the idea. Accessibility aside, Cathedral’s faster pace and more demanding combat made it a lot more of an exciting and engaging experience than Shovel Knight, at least for me personally. I admit it’s not a totally fair comparison, since one is a stage-centric 2D platformer and the other is a Metroidvania. But that stark contrast in their popularity makes it a comparison still worth mentioning.
Cathedral’s relative obscurity is a real shame though, since I consider it to be among the best Metroidvania games I’ve played- even among my favorite 2D platformers altogether. It’s a surprisingly meaty experience, boasting a huge map with nearly 700 rooms, of which can easily take you over 30 hours to explore fully. But it’s not just a far longer and more substantive experience than its predecessor. It’s also more demanding, more memorable, and much more mechanically satisfying thanks to dramatically improved moment-to-moment gameplay. In fact, it’s such an overall stark improvement to Alwa’s Awakening that I’m honestly a bit surprised, disappointed even, that Elden Pixel’s next game is yet another Alwa rather than something new- or hell, even just another Cathedral would’ve been cool. But I’ll reserve judgment in the hope that the improvements Cathedral made to its formula persist in subsequent titles.
Edit/Disclaimer: I only learned after finishing the game that the listing is incorrect and that Elden Pixels was only the publisher. Easy to make that mistake though since the games have a ton of commonality. But well, considering how much better this is than the Alwa games... it certainly explains a lot. Anyways, go support Decemberborn Interactive.
Alwa’s Awakening is a mixed bag, but it’s ultimately a pretty respectable effort for the studio’s debut release. It has strong map design and challenging exploration given your limited toolset for traversal, but is ultimately held back pretty seriously by slow movement and frankly boring combat. Cathedral thoroughly fixes both of these issues with ease, as movement and combat are far snappier from the moment you start playing. The quicker movement is especially noticeable, as it's emphasized further by the more zoomed in screen size. In Alwa, you control this tiny ass sprite on a giant zoomed out screen. It makes the slow movement and sluggish (not to mention very short-range) attacks stick out even more than they already do. Not only are both movement and combat faster in Cathedral, but you have a much more reasonable attack range and toolset overall.
The “Duck Tales bounce” is always a welcome feature for 2D action combat, and Cathedral utilizes it well. I also like that there’s a timing aspect to it compared to how it works in like, Duck Tales or Shovel Knight for example- where you can just continually bounce while airborne. The timing makes it trickier to get down, but it provides a bit more precision and engagement during combat. You can also get varying heights on your bounces depending on how long you hold the button, which brings more depth to not just combat, but platforming too. Higher bounces are useful for platforming, since you can time the button press and conserve your double jump to get even higher than a normal double jump. Meanwhile, shorter bounces are useful for combat, since you can get a faster rhythm of attacking in order to deal damage even faster than your normal attack speed (especially if there’s a low ceiling to limit your height further). Alwa’s combat, on the other hand, was limited to the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-esque staff swing and a shitty magic projectile that takes forever to recharge…so yeah, calling the combat improved would be an understatement.
The refinements to combat also allow Cathedral to crank its difficulty way the fuck up without ever feeling unfair. You do have a higher movement speed, but so do most of the enemies as well. They’re faster and more aggressive pretty much right from the start of the game. The extra layer of challenge and complexity makes killing enemies way more fun and satisfying. It’s not just more satisfying in terms of speed either. Killing even the weaker enemies sees them exploding with gold, health, and ammo pickups. So not only does combat always feel good and satisfying, but more often than not, it’s actually WORTH the risk you’re taking by engaging with them. In Alwa, combat kinda just feels like a nuisance- even putting aside how slow and repetitive it is. This is because, if you weren’t low on health (which isn’t often since the game is a cakewalk), there is literally no incentive for fighting. Well, other than getting the enemies to stop annoying you during platforming I guess.
Combat in Cathedral isn’t anywhere as much of a nuisance. In fact, it’s one of the game’s biggest strengths, since its engaging simplicity makes it consistently fun from beginning to end. It makes many subtle improvements to combat, like its reduction of invincibility frames. Alwa’s Awakening had the problem of enemies taking multiple hits to kill despite having significant invincibility frames and not enough hitsun. This made the already simplistic combat somehow both insanely mashy yet imprecise at the same time. Cathedral corrects this by allowing you to repeatedly strike enemies without having to smash through some arbitrary invincibility frames to actually hit the enemy more than once.
Another more notable improvement to combat is the charge projectile system being replaced with a resource-driven item system. In Alwa, you don’t get a projectile for like… 10 hours- during the final dungeon. Cathedral throws a bow and arrow at you within ten minutes and it’s immediately just as good, and arguably better, than Alwa’s magic projectile. Not to mention, the bow’s resource system is a lot more versatile and, well, fun. You can’t save up charges for your projectile in Alwa whatsoever- so you have to sit and wait like, what, 5-10 seconds? Just to be able to use it again one more time. I much prefer having the option to use my tools when they’re needed. Even if I screw myself over by being too liberal and running out of ammo, that’s a consequence I’m more than willing to work around in place of some annoying limitation.
The pixel aesthetic of Alwa was another of its strengths, and Cathedral’s are even more impressive. Perhaps it’s because the camera is drawn in so much closer, but it’s easier to appreciate the designs and level of detail within the game’s art for both the enemies and environments. Cathedral also features a lot more environmental variety, which helps each area feel distinct even beyond their unique puzzle mechanics and different upgrade focuses. For example, the dungeon areas feel very much in that same sort of Alwa vein aesthetically, but then there’s areas like Brightwind which feel completely different. While the dungeons are fairly standard medieval fare, its bright and overly saturated beaches look straight out of something like Alex Kidd or Wonder Boy.
The upgrade system really benefits the game’s balance, allowing the different areas to not only have aesthetic variety, but mechanical variety. This is because of the upgrade restrictions preventing you from using every upgrade at once- at least for most of the game. At first, this seemed like a rather unnecessary restriction, since it was frustrating to have the double jump taken away after getting used to having it. However, you quickly realize that the limitation is specifically placed in order to allow the different areas to maintain a degree of mechanical variety via level design.
Again, the “double jump vs dash” upgrade is the most notable example of this restriction.The areas you explore after getting the double jump upgrade are more spacious and spread-out to accommodate for your wider range of movement. Then, when you get to Brightwind and are forced to exchange it for the dash, the area suddenly becomes a lot more compact and focused around horizontal movement (dash and/or bone platform). Later areas are even crafted so that you’ll be rewarded with different paths depending on WHICH upgrade you’re using. It encourages experimentation, urging you to view the same rooms from different perspectives. These restrictions then make it all the more satisfying when you can finally use both of these major upgrades at the same time during the endgame. It might sound like a relatively minor change, but the game does a great job at providing distinct platforming challenges for each and every combination of movement options at your disposal throughout the game.
Cathedral also made significant strides through its accessibility and quality of life improvements. The map is clean and clear, allowing you to toggle between two unique layers. It even gives you the option to place a marker on rooms of interest. Easily the most useful accessibility feature though is that your map highlights ALL exits after having visited the room. This greatly reduces the potential for getting outright stuck- while simultaneously prodding you to seek out its multitude of secrets.
Input mapping is also fairly extensive, though I do wish it provided the option to map one action to multiple buttons, since I kinda wanted to map shield to both “L” and “A” for faster reflexes since it does take a moment to raise. Otherwise, I slapped the secondary item on “R” and removed the item toggles entirely for the majority of the game. Kind of a personal preference there, but I usually find toggling to be far too clumsy to be useful during fast paced combat. I’d much rather just pause and choose my new item manually, as you would in something like Zelda II or classic Mega Man. I did end up mapping toggle to “A” and using it to switch between two items at a few points in the endgame, as there were a few puzzles and encounters where it was basically required (looking at you, Conduit boss).
Considering the relative mainstream popularity of Shovel Knight, which at this point is among the most famous indie/kickstarter games ever, I’m surprised at just how under the radar Cathedral has flown given their surface level similarities. Especially because of its aformentioned accessibility and quality of life features, as they'd make Cathedral easy to pick up for even someone who’s never played a Metroidvania game in their life. I guess the difficulty might be a bit of a barrier, but it’s entirely doable with adequate exploration. Otherwise, it’s extremely beginner friendly: the maps show all possible exits on every screen, the more obtuse secrets and puzzles will have instructions/hints sitting right next to them, there’s a detailed quest log, there’s even an NPC in every town that straight up tells you what to do the second you get lost… you get the idea. Accessibility aside, Cathedral’s faster pace and more demanding combat made it a lot more of an exciting and engaging experience than Shovel Knight, at least for me personally. I admit it’s not a totally fair comparison, since one is a stage-centric 2D platformer and the other is a Metroidvania. But that stark contrast in their popularity makes it a comparison still worth mentioning.
Cathedral’s relative obscurity is a real shame though, since I consider it to be among the best Metroidvania games I’ve played- even among my favorite 2D platformers altogether. It’s a surprisingly meaty experience, boasting a huge map with nearly 700 rooms, of which can easily take you over 30 hours to explore fully. But it’s not just a far longer and more substantive experience than its predecessor. It’s also more demanding, more memorable, and much more mechanically satisfying thanks to dramatically improved moment-to-moment gameplay. In fact, it’s such an overall stark improvement to Alwa’s Awakening that I’m honestly a bit surprised, disappointed even, that Elden Pixel’s next game is yet another Alwa rather than something new- or hell, even just another Cathedral would’ve been cool. But I’ll reserve judgment in the hope that the improvements Cathedral made to its formula persist in subsequent titles.
Edit/Disclaimer: I only learned after finishing the game that the listing is incorrect and that Elden Pixels was only the publisher. Easy to make that mistake though since the games have a ton of commonality. But well, considering how much better this is than the Alwa games... it certainly explains a lot. Anyways, go support Decemberborn Interactive.