The gameplay loop is a decent time (especially once you unlock teleporters). Not fond of the fact that there's only a final boss and no other actual bosses.

Also, very much not a fan of the wall jump, as it always felt finicky to me. Sometimes, I'd jump from point to point no problem, other times I'd just drop back down next to the wall instead of making the jump properly.

That might be a me-issue, but that's not something I usually have a problem with in games.

It's not a terrible game, but there are some unpleasant components to it.

What's good?

-- Once you acquire the power-ups, there are two different gun modifications that feel really smooth.

-- I think that's it.

What's average?

-- Level design is somewhere between okay and bad depending on where you are. Save points are located in precarious places in relation to teleporters, so for most of the game, expect to do some awkward backtracking sometimes (especially the forest, which is annoying to slog through when you're trying to figure out what you're missing next).

-- Basic enemies. They're fine, they have enough behaviors and variety for a short game that they don't wear out their welcome in parts.

-- Exploration. It's a Metroidvania, so it's what you're here for (along with bosses), and this game has a decent number of power-ups waiting around corners or past bosses for you to enjoy and use to overcome gating.

What's bad?

-- Boss design isn't great. One boss you'll end up fighting three times and with only marginal differences between each iteration, and then four other bosses that vary between pushovers and annoying because of certain power-ups you won't have yet. Regardless, none of them are challenging.

-- The climbing power-up. This is a two-fold issue, because being able to basically go almost anywhere is nice, but the real problem is that the areas designed specifically around using it are designed poorly to be an exercise in frustration. Moreover, if you touch a wall, you cling immediately and if you jump off, even if you have double-jump, your jump off isn't long or high, so you essentially lose about half-a-jump of distance. The sticking to walls when you don't want to is especially annoying.

-- Cryptic information regarding keys. This is an optional part of the game, but there are some keys you can try and find to get access to a walled off area. The clues for these are bad. One suggests that the area you're in changes, but it turns out the clue is to tell you that you just need to walk in and out of the room several times for the key to appear. Another says it's near a save point, but the phrasing of the clue made me think it was in one of a couple save points that were in a completely different location.

-- Indestructible enemies. Hazards like the electro ball, I get. Bonefish and the tank? Why? They behave just like other stuff, why can't you kill them?

-- The interface in general. It's hard to really tell how you're doing with picking up power-ups and the pause menu has a decent map, but there's no markers on it, so you better remember everywhere you've been (and you WILL wander).

-- The gusting wind bits where you have to ride wind up in order to reach certain areas. These things were very finicky and resulted in me crashing back into hazards a lot.

Bottom line:

The game is already available on the cheap and it's an okay Metroidvania, so if you don't want to pull the trigger on it at full price, wait for a sale. You might get about 3-4 hours out of it if you take your time and wander around as much as I did.

This game is a tough sell for me. It's fun enough, at times. I enjoyed the bosses I've fought so far -- not so much the enemies, as they feel mostly identical save for one different move in each of their repertoires.

First, you fight a sword guy. Then you fight a sword guy with a shield that doesn't use the shield to block. Then you fight a spear guy with a shield that doesn't use the shield to block.

Then you fight long range snipers, but it's easy to dodge their shots and when you get close, they become sword guys. They also like to swing at you if you jump up near them from below, which makes them walk right off the ledges they're guarding. Then you fight rocket snipers, but they do all the same things. Then you fight guys who look like sword guys but have the ability to use the beam from their swords and home in on you / go through you. You just roll like you normally do. Then you fight guys who are like the sword guys but can fire a purple wave at you that travels horizontally only. This is hilarious when different levels of terrain come into play.

The boundaries for where the game wants you to go are a little unclear at times, but not that big of a deal. The platforming is the real fault of this game, though. There's a lot of bugginess and a lot of ledges you can land on that are too far down to jump back up, so you have to kill yourself or use your bonfire-warp ability and go back and run through again. The side-scrolling platforming sections are extra weird and feel unnecessary, like they just wanted to try out some ideas and rolled with them.

The absolute offender of all offenders though is trick platforms that collapse under you over instadeath pits. No warning, no color differentiation or details to spot -- you land on/walk onto the platform, it drops, and you either reflex fast enough to not die or you die. My instinct to sudden changes in the game is usually to roll forward. This just makes you dash into what is usually the next safe platform at chest height and look up at it longingly as you plunge to your untimely death AGAIN.

That was the last current straw for me in my current run of the game, as I had beaten a boss and was looking for the next bonfire-type-thing and saw an item to collect, walked over carefully and right before I got there, platform drops and I die. Respawn a fair ways before the boss fight. No thanks. Maybe another time, I've got plenty of backlog to play without that garbage.

Also had a bug where the forge menu spazzed on me and just kept shifting between multiple weapons I had when I was trying to pick one to upgrade. Only notable bug I can think of outside of HUGE enemy AI goofs that is worth noting.

Some neat graphical flourishes mixed with some fun pixel art mixed with ugly monsters...yeah, everything about this game is a mixed bag, for sure.

Music is catchy at first, but then loops very quickly and you start to get over it after hearing the loop for the fifth or sixth time in a row in a span of several minutes.

Combat and movement in general are where I really have an issue with it. This is a Metroidvania, but it wants me to punch/kickbox with enemies, but the actual actions look like specific animations cut from some fighting games that don't belong with any single character, let alone this one. There are times when she moves like Iori Yagami with certain strikes, then other times where she's doing light attacks that have a range of almost nothing...but none of the moves feel correct. Since you have MP in the form of Demonic Power, special moves require Demonic Power and often don't pop correctly when you initiate the commands for them (I can summon Devilboy with Up>Down>LP all day, but damn if it's not impossible to do Forward>Forward>LK or HK for some reason).

I mentioned the movement above, but I really need to touch on why it's uncomfortable as can be. You mostly just walk and jump places, but the jumping is a nightmare. When you jump, you move forward until you either 1) stop, 2) move backwards (and only minorly, at that), or 3) touch a wall. The first two are self-evident in their behaviors, but if you touch a wall, you cling to it and can jump off said wall in the opposite direction with increased height. This means triangle jumping is a thing, but this only sounds good in practice. In execution, level design has lots of ledges that you can't reach with your normal jump, so you end up hugging an edge instead of getting onto a platform, then flinging yourself in the opposite direction regardless of if that was your intent. Coupled with the fact that there's a lot of floating indestructible enemies that cause HUGE knockback and you find yourself spending a lot of time flying away from potential ledges and falling back onto the ground, only to wait several seconds to get back up, recover, and try again. This can culminate into spending minutes on the same "simple" jumps again just to cross a single room in some instances. Some room designs include multiple floors of distance so that if you are working across several ledges (sometimes using the Jump+HK to get a little extra air-time) and contact an enemy, you fall all the way back down one floor and have to climb back up to try again. It's frustrating, to say the least.

Fought one boss so far and it was basically throwing strikes at it while it sat in one spot for a bit, then moved to another spot, summoned some projectiles that followed a pattern that had no interest in your location, then rushed back and forth across the screen once before repeating the process. It had three phases, and the only thing that changed in each phase was how difficult it was to hit the boss without dealing with knockback. Since you only had ~10 seconds to get your hits in before the whole projectile phase came, one knockback basically cut out about half your time and meant you'd have to do some jumping to get back into place. Good luck with that.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that there are doors that gate you from exploration (not sure if any affect progression) and require you to deal a certain amount of damage to said doors in one shot in order to get through. The game uses a leveling system with stats and an equipment system that affects certain stats, so you're almost incentivized to exclusively dump all your points into ATK so you can potentially open those doors sooner. Kinda takes away some of the variety of the game when you're supposed to decide between a different build or useful items.

Not a bad game, but very uncomfortable to play with all its awkward control issues, for sure.

Less than half the people who have played it have beaten the first acolyte, according to global achievements on Steam. Believe me when I tell you that it isn't because of difficulty.

If anything, Morbid feels too easy. It also feels strangely empty, despite all the enemies that are around. There's NPCs with quests, but at least in the first several areas, they're extremely sparse.

There's no map access while wandering past shrines and trying to find your next shrines. And that's really all it feels like you're doing early on. There's a number of shrines and you can fast travel between them once you find them, but you can't even "level up" until you beat the first acolyte, but leveling up is also just raising the power of blessings you get (which initially, you get three and can only equip two at a time -- I don't know if this increases or not).

I beat a miniboss at one point and got a big-boy sword and equipped it immediately, since I noticed it only swung 15% slower for speed than the one I was using. I took ONE hit from that miniboss, only because I needed to see what an attack from it looked like. After that, I just used the Heavy Attack to one-shot most enemies and poured all my runes into that big-boy sword. Fought the first acolyte and he did some damage by running into me a bunch of times, but he never hit me with a single swing. Just heavy slash from above or below, roll further up or down away from him and rinse and repeat until we call it a day.

That's the biggest problem I've run into so far -- enemies do a decent job of covering their bases on the horizontal axis, but if you attack them from above or below and just remember to save enough stamina to roll at least once, you're never getting hit. It doesn't even feel skillful when I evade them -- I just feel like I'm being rude and not actually engaging them in battles they clearly want.

I'll definitely continue it at some point, but it's rather underwhelming as far as games in my backlog go.

I just want to add a couple points now that the game is finally out of Early Access.

-- Having all the assigned button presses in your UI demonstrating what your weapons or skills are is great...it's kind of a Souls Standard. But listing healing as a button press and then not letting the player know that it's a button HOLD is kind of a big deal...especially when it's 1. also tied to ammo reload as a button press and 2. has to be HELD THE ENTIRE TIME YOU'RE HEALING OR IT AUTOMATICALLY STOPS.

-- 3D one-hit-kill traps in a 2D environment are stupid if you don't make it easily definable for the player to know WHEN the trap is lethal. In the case of swinging pendulums that are supposed to be cutting from the back of the screen and past it to the front, the answer is WHILE THEY'RE IN THE BACKGROUND. Which is a really weird answer, considering where they are, but I may also be salty from losing a boatload of currency to jumping at a time that seemed reasonable, only to die. Add in the fact that you're jumping between ledges over one-hit-kill pits and it doesn't make the platforming concept better, especially when it's not a platforming game as much as a combat game. Go figure.

I might come back to this again at some point but it's definitely going in the backlog. It's one of those soulslike games that tries to be intentionally vague and mysterious, but just comes off as unintuitive and frustrating. When it's fun, it's fun, and when it's not, it's the other 50% of the time and it's not hard to see why adding up the global achievements for all eight endings equates to runs being finished only 2.3% of the time.

Original review follows.
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Things I like:

-- You have a double jump and in conjunction with your sword swing upward or forward, you can basically get a triple jump or an air dash, so mobility is awesome in some respects.

-- That's really it. Everything else is serviceable.

I think the worst thing going for this game (it's still in Early Access, I believe, but coming out of it soon?) is that there's a random health and ammo drop system in play. You can spend your currency on ammo, but you can also just shoot a bunch and hope some ammo drops. You can attack carefully and play a very slow game, but you can also just be aggressive and hope some health drops.

There's a lot of inconsistency in getting these drops to happen, so you're sometimes taking risks you shouldn't be taking under the notion that you might get the drops you need and then finding yourself sorely disappointed. There are health checkpoints along the way through areas, as well as bonfire-like travel locations that you can rest at, so making these mini-health drops just seems to encourage unnecessary recklessness (at least with me, as I didn't start taking hits until I started seeing plentiful health drops, only to suddenly find myself getting NONE when I actually needed them).

Maybe that's a me problem, but it strikes me as odd when the game seems to encourage being careful the rest of the time.

Also, lots of ways to accidentally kill yourself (pits included) in a 2D game that encourages exploration, so fun times there.

Leveling up is basically spending currency you get in the actual exploration areas and leveling up your health or your energy. Your energy just gives you more uses of your powers and your health is...your health. Actual damage is only upgraded via weapon drops you find, as far as I can tell. In all my exploring early on, I got a boatload of the same guns as drops and one actually better gun from about a hundred or more enemies.

It's not a bad game. It's just not overly exciting and I feel like it could tweak a few things to make it more enjoyable. Also, the music makes me want to take a nap, so maybe not the best thing for a game where I need to stay alert so I don't die.

I'll have to mess with this more, because it's definitely not a bad game, but it's a mixed bag that I really struggle to play.

First, it's way too easy. Enemies meander aimlessly or sit in one place and fire stuff, bosses are cakewalks. I got hit once on the first boss because I didn't know that some of its projectiles actually targeted you (a separate one just sprays in three directions). Once that happened, I just prepared to roll as needed.

Second, the level design is kind of...eh? It's not bad per se, but there's a lot of open area with not a lot going on and it feels like someone just took goal points for a map area, then threw together some random terrain to try and make up a path to those points along the way and in the process, made very long paths that don't really diverge at all with secrets pretty much out in the open at all times.

Third, the game sometimes has some weird chop for me. Might be resolvable in fullscreen, but I don't really feel like going to windowed mode to play a game.

Finally...it's just not entertaining? Visually, it's a lovely game. Aurally, it might be good but music seems sparse at times (I thought it wasn't working at one point when I was wandering through a particular part of one map, but it was just intended silence, I guess).

From a gameplay perspective, combat and platforming is just swinging without any deeper effort and hopping over pits that just return you to the other side if you fall in, minus a bit of health. There's a sprint and roll option that both consume stamina, but stamina doesn't start refilling immediately -- this seems like an intention to increase difficulty and make the user ration their stamina carefully, but rolling is almost never necessary and once you start getting tired of the winding paths, you'll be sprinting, only to find that you'll eventually have to stop after short bursts to get stamina back so you can keep sprinting.

There's a few bugs I encountered, but they were very minor in nature and I don't feel like they really detracted much from the game, so I won't go into them with the exception of letting you know that if you play with a DS4 controller, it may not register your triggers correctly, so make sure not to set the Sprint or Heal commands to those buttons.

As of right now (June 16th, 2022), the game is on sale for 35% off and I'd say that if you're a Metroidvania fan, that might be a good price for jumping in to try it (20 normally, 13 on sale). I'll come back to it at some point to run through the rest of it, but it's just hard to get motivated when a game is so bland feeling and easy, even if it looks lovely.

Not much to say. I think most AC games have the same overall vibe with me -- they're just kind of okay-to-mildly-enjoyable. And usually after a number of hours, I'm over it and ready to move on to something else because the open world feel for these games doesn't draw me in like some others do.

I will give this game credit for being probably the most accessible game I've ever played based on the options and difficulty choices that I saw when firing it up. They really tried to account for the needs of a lot of people, and that's pretty cool.

But yeah...just another okay experience that I can't really weigh on beyond that. About the only comment I can specifically make of note is that breaking boxes with Eivor was kind of a pain in the ass because I'd whiff all the time. It felt strange, like Eivor was just spastically swinging at nothing in particular (probably was).

But yeah, that's how babies are made.

Just going to quote what I told a friend about this:

I just played one of the most awful-and-yet-somehow-fun games ever. Magus for the PS3. The engine it runs in is awful, the dialogue trees are awful, the UI design is awful, the controls are awful, the enemy design is awful, the level design is awful -- and yet it's so easy that mowing enemies down is kind of amusing anyway. Especially when they start to charge you, then change their mind and stand in front of a jar and ponder their life existence for a bit.

"I wanted to kill you, but maybe there's something more to all of this than -- wait, you're just going to shoot me? Guess I'll die!"

As a...sort of city-builder/tower defense game, it's kinda fun. It never gets particularly exciting, but getting to design your layout for your city in order to rotate it around and deal with waves of enemies is interesting.

If there's one issue that weighs heavily, it's that the game doesn't let you access useful info (as far as I could tell) like the help topics once you're in the planning and combat stages, which means that if you put the game off for a while and came back to it like I did after already building into your second city, you get to experience the fun of trying to remember how things work if you didn't read all the necessary help topics again from the command console.

If you told me this game was built for mobile originally, I'd believe it. The hook is there, but it's not deep enough to keep me invested when I'm multiple cities deep.

It's...fine. For like eight bucks, you get a decent amount of gameplay that's mediocre platforming in a Zelda 2 styling. The biggest issue is that it's just way too easy to just not know where to find a vital component you're looking for or to miss a trigger of some sort.

At one point, I went through a palace and saw a passage I couldn't reach with platforming, but decided to see if I could use one of my abilities to sneak around up to it. I failed, but I found an invisible platform to stand on. A couple jumps later and I'm up to the passage. I go in, drop down, do one of the standard dream sequence deals the game has when you find books, and then leave.

It's only later when I'm stuck on an area and forced to watch a speedrun to figure out why I can't progress that I discover that I wasn't supposed to go to that location until after I picked up a different item and essentially caused a sequence break, so the individual that was supposed to give me an item hadn't shown up yet.

Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that can happen in here. The game has its moments, but it's mostly just an okay experience that pads its time out based on your inability to know exactly where to go next without visiting a fortune teller. I logged ten hours, but I imagine that someone with a guide could do the game in a couple or so. I'd just wait for a sale if you're going to pick it up unless you're really hard up on Metroidvanias. You can do better.