this game is so weird. everyone else has summarized it better than me in terms of "wow this is so chronically online, but it redeems itself sort of" but it's more than that. entering this girls dungeon that just reminds me so hard of your typical league-of-legends-playing-anime-loving-gun-obsessed-4-chan-user is almost immediately uncomfortable to me as someone who has met people like this and had the worst experiences. the true ending (?) is sort of sweet, with her realizing that being a degenerate NEET isn't really great after all, but she's just so unlikable before this point i can't believe i played it all the way through. idk. she's potentially trans and bisexual which would be cool except it's so minisculely hinted at it gives the same audience they're pandering too enough plausible deniability to ignore it. so its like. i mean i guess. only reason i wont give it a 1 is because i can understand her underlying autism coding and there was like a few minutes where i thought the character was pretty okay.

I really wanted to like this game. I love roguelikes and I've had this one on my steam wishlist for a loooong while. I finally picked it up and I feel disappointed.

The gunplay in this game feels very reminiscent of revita and enter the gungeon, two really great games, but unfortunately the actual feel of the shooting is so awkward. the starting weapons don't just feel weak, they are boring and unfun. the few weapons i've unlocked and tried in my short experince with this game were equally unfun and uncomfortable to control. games like the binding of isaac provide a healthy balance right from the start, with cool unlocks being available from the very beginning with an equal amount of shitty items to balance it out. you can get lucky and have broken runs with brimstone or you can get stuck with tammy's head from the very beginning, but almost every upgrade will still feel like an upgrade. this is something neon abyss did not do well for me.

i have a few more issues with this game, too. the enemies are, frankly, not difficult ones just unfair and that largely is because of another issue i have with this game (we will circle back to enemies): the environments. every room just feels wayyy too big. most of the time, when you enter a chamber/room you cannot see everything, including enemies that have spawned into the level. this means random bullets spawning at you and enemies that peek, shoot, and then hide and teleport somewhere else in the room. it is so tedious and feels so slow to clear because of it. the level design is just unfun. everything in this game just boils back down to unfun. the combos in all the promotional material looks interesting and they have good concepts i like but havent made use for (you can disable individual items from appearing in runs if you hate them this much) but it is just too much of an unfun slog to get there.

quick side tangent: the buddy/egg hatching system is... it exists? i didnt hate it, but the infrequency of the hatches feels so lame. you just have to carry this trail of famiiars that do nothing. the hatches never felt significantly impactful. if done right, i think that protecting these akin to something like the lost soul item from the binding of isaac (familiar that you must protect each floor that will give an item upon progression) would work much better but otherwise is just so unsatisfying.

i WANT to like this game. the art is great and the mood of the environments feels cool, even if i think their tech aura is a bit corny. maybe one day i will revisit this and try to enjoy it, but as of now it is just not worth it when there are so many other amazing indie roguelikes that can provide you with so much more bang for your buck.