I wanna kiss every single person that worked on this game, just give them a big ol smooch on the lips. This rivals great metroidvanias like hollow knight and ori and on some aspects completely blows them out of the park.

The devs clearly listened to every single complaint from the first game and fixed issues or improved mechanics significantly. More abilities, more areas, more enemies, more bosses. Bosses are actually challenging (the final boss is again a joke, but eh), enemies and areas are slightly less challenging, more responsive platforming sections - EVERYTHING IS BETTER.

I love this shit, man.

Beautiful looking metroidvania, that really falls apart in the combat and movement sections.

Movement is often quite limited and clunky, but it does have the usual metroidvania abilities - dash, wall jump, etc. Your character is painfully slow, until you get one of those abilities, which helps you move about 15% faster. The decision to not re-enable double jump after wall jumping also limits whatever platforming options you have.

Combat has A LOT of variety, regarding secondary weapons, but you probably won't get to utilize them, due to the limited amount of times you can use them. And it's not like ammo shards regen after resting at a dragon statue, no no no, you need to either buy them for dirt cheap from the shop or find them in chests/enemies.

Speaking of chests, it's like a 50/50 split if you're gonna get something useful from a wooden chest (coins, area items) or something completely useless (potions that you don't use or aforementioned ammo shards). The big boy red chests are less of a gamble, but you can still get ass warts from them (secondary weapons you're never going to use).

The world is beautifully constructed and animated, there's virtually never a place where it feels empty (by metroidvania standards). However, the dungeons are a bit too large. They all have their separate unique gimmicks and that's fine, but boy is it tiring trying to re-visit those areas to get all of the chests, bugs and crystals.

On the topic of those green flying shits, I wish the map marked them (as it does with every other collectible on the map), because doing 100% exploration without a third party map is impossible. You can absolutely find them, but it's going to take hours upon hours of wall hugging, jumping down random cliffs, straining your eyes to see the littlest crumb of differing texture on a wall (which would indicate it's bombable, very nice). This is like a joint point on map clearing, but it does blow at times. I have no clue how people even found some of those secrets, they're sometimes hidden at absolute random locations, with no indicators that something is there to be blown up or passed through.

If you're going to 100% this game, the game requires you to complete it 4 separate times (for the 3 classes available and 1 NG+ mode). Complete insult of anyone's time. Speaking of that, everytime you collect a health crystal (forgot what they're called in-game, it doesn't matter), the game plays the collection animation (ala Legend of Zelda) and then plays a separate animation of the crystal going into the collection slot. Waste of time, every time. Also all of the cutscenes are unskippable. At least you could skip the credits.

The game gets the general idea of metroidvanias, but really falls apart trying to execute everything. I'd still recommend playing it, but do beware ofthe scare of being lost in the humongous dungeons.

Title of the game checks out, because oh boy is it fucking dark.

A very aggressive playstyle requiring game that scales it's difficulty beautifully. I never felt overpowered, even if I got stronger and better at the game, the enemy variety, different, progressively harder to dodge attacks meant I needed to be on my A game.

Fantastic artstyle, great soundtrack. All of the areas are unique, all of the bosses are extremely well designed (one's are focused on more of a defensive-aggresive playstyle and for other's you just need to utilise every single weapon in your arsenal to even think about taking them down before their health regens).

However, the map is lacking a map and some of the areas are extremely hard to navigate without it (with the aforementioned "no light" everywhere).

All in all, very good game, mucho spice

Mid chinese hollow knight. I know there's a need for a narrative, but FUCK ME was there a lot of boring exposition "Luca this, Razing that" SHUT UP. At times the dialogue was completely incomprehensible and either the script was written by an AI or there was some deep meaning lost in translation. None of the characters are fun or noteworthy, I'll forget them all in about 3 hours.

The gameplay is just hollow knight, but bigger. Bold choice for the game to start you with the dash and then completely drown out natural progression since the fucking map is ginormous. Like I'm talking MASSIVE, BIG, FUCKING HUMONGOUS. And while it was fun exploring it for the first time, revisiting these areas, traversing them and backtracking through them for some ass cryptic shit side quest is infuriating.

The leveling system is asinine, I don't know why it's RPG-ized. The weapon variety is definitely the best part (low bar, I know), but the titular afterimages (little boosts you can get while resting at confluences, imagine like charms from hollow knight).

Children yearned for silksong and got a chinese knockoff, just like ye olden times.

A delightful deductive narrative experience. All of the characters are more or less well written, the VA work (as little as there is) attributes a different accent to a character based on where they were born, which was a nice addition and helped breathe life into the 2D cardboard cutouts floating around.

The main attraction is obviously the clue and collectible search. You get to travel around a vast world, solve very simple puzzles and basically create your own narrative with what you find. The game invites you to explore every nook and cranny, because you never know if there's gonna be a key item there or a useless collectible (until you memorize the sprites).

From the mystery side of things, there's some stones left unturned even if you got all the clues. Not getting into any spoilers, since everyone needs to experience this game blindly, but I wasn't left entirely satisfied, since there were some contradictions with the suspect stories and the evidence collected, that I didn't get an explanation to (must have chosen them during the trials I guess, but it's not a good way to do that).

Overall, spankin good game, enjoyed basically everything and it's brimming with it's own style and world.