Warning this Review is subject to change but this is based on current experience from a guy who plays too many metroidvania games

so the reason i'm giving this game a negative review is because it feels like a metroidvania that doesn't have a primary focus in anything, so an idea is hollow knight's gameplay is simplistic your walking speed isn't fast but it also isn't slow as that game's focus is exploration and platforming, most platformer focused metroidvanias are very fast paced movement and precise timings as for combat metroidvania's your typically slower in movement options but a bunch of animations for attacks and damage modifiers. the problem with this game is at first i thought this was a combat metroidvania within the first hour of playing because of the movement (also the tutorial is very vauge with some things it feels like is should be able to dash through enemies at a specific time but i just eat damage because of the damage box being on the sprite) this game's movement felt sluggish at the start and when doing some platform sections i just get annoyed because i either can't reach a platform that i should be able to or the slow movement doesn't allow me to

one of my personal favorite things in games is the OST and artsyle with the animations which this game succeeds in both.

the other problem is how much of a snails pace the bosses feel, in most cases i don't mind long bosses because i can read their attacks and patterns but i don't like taking 5-7 min just to get to the phase to learn the attacks to die within 5 seconds after... take Nightmare King Grimm from Hollow Knight for example most of the fight you're focused on dodging and hitting the boss on the possible opening and the boss takes 3-5 min to kill usually but they also have more than 3 attacks, in this game (i don't know how far i am pretty sure i'm not even a eighth in yet) i killed the sword boss in the spire to the right of the map and encountered the boss in the grave area and the worm one somewhere around the goblin mines and these two bosses i die at because the first phase just takes an eternity or the adds kill me because i'm focused on dodging the boss and waiting for a moment that i can deal damage

in short so far this game is a Platformer metroidvania with a combat focused metroidvania character and the two feel like they clash too much (doesn't help that the controls for both controller and kbm feel abysmal) i can only play kbm because the movement feels slightly better with it over controller (why can't i use Dpad for movement)

This game is only for super elite pro gamers lol. It plays really well and it looks pretty good but honestly I wish I'd never heard of it

So, this is a weird one. Because actually, I thought this game was actually really great, in most ways.

tl;DR: I will say, despite the rant below, I don't hate this game at all, I hate certain aspects of it that drag it down, and make the rest of the game worse for it. There's some great boss fights (brought down for me by the no-hit achievements for every one of them), great platforming sections (brought down by them being almost pointlessly long, and the game almost always making you manually backtrack the way you came in said overly long platforming sections), some great ideas with moving around and traversing quickly (brought down by terrible, convoluted controls that did not need to be twinstick aiming for 99% of the game). Pretty solid music and art and world building, lovely little cutscenes, and the story was fine. So yeah. It's impossible for me to recommend this game because it's a 20h game turned into a 50h slog because of the design decisions. You might still enjoy it though; I did.... half of the time.

RANT FOLLOWS:

Rarely have I played a game with so much potential, crippled by terrible design choices by the devs. The controls in this game are absolutely -terrible-. It's baffling how bad they are. You press a face button on your controller to fire arrows, holding it down, and then aim with the left stick. This is terrible. It'd still be terrible if it was right stick, though, you know why? Because there's literally not one shot you have to make with the arrows (to hit switches, and later, to teleport) IN THE ENTIRE GAME that requires twinstick aiming. The only exception is versus two of the bosses of the game, one is a secret optional fight, the other is the final boss. Now you might say, well, just rebind them. Oh, I assure you I did. But, it's worse. There are multiple arrow types, which you have to switch between, and one of those two arrow types itself has another sub-type (dark arrows), which is switched with yet another different button. And the teleport arrows, once you switch to them, require a FOURTH button to then teleport to the arrow while it is in mid-flight. This feels terrible from the moment you gain the ability. Here's an idea: have the teleport arrows simply be an upgrade to your regular arrows, removing the need to switch to them. Then, when you fire the arrow, merely pressing the arrow button again will teleport you. There. I just replaced FOUR separate buttons with one button, the same button. What about the alternate dark arrows? Who cares. I literally never used them, because they're terrible. And if you really must have multiple arrows, then just have one button to fire, and one to switch arrows. Not four different buttons AND your left stick to mess around with arrows. Just stops the games momentum dead in its tracks, every time you use arrows. And, as for holding down the button to aim, that can go away too, and be replaced with 8-way aiming, like Contra or a million other games that work totally fine without twinstick aiming. I understand these were probably design decisions for variety and yada yada yada I don't care. It sucks. It sucks so bad, it made me just constantly cringe at how it tanked enjoyment of the game for me, and I'm not the only one, looking at other reviews and forum posts.

And then there's the achievement design. This is a game with tough boss fights, with screen filling attacks, bullet hell waves of projectiles, super fast counters, etc. That's fine, I like challenge. What I do *not* like is BEATING EVERY BOSS NO HIT. Especially, when the boss design is pretty much designed to beat you absolutely bloody no matter how good you are dodging. I understand they're all possible to be beaten no-hit. I'm not saying it's not possible. But I am saying that YOU, or at least 99.99% of anyone reading this, will not no-hit them all. You'll see why if you play the game. Some of these fights are absurd to no-hit, with so many cheap attacks and multiple forms. Again, I *love* tough boss fights. But if your boss can be memorized to the point that you can no-hit it, that's actually boring and terrible boss design to me. It should be a struggle, it should be barely won. You know, like these fights. Except they still expect you to beat them flawlessly... wtf were they thinking??

So, you might be thinking, ok, the bosses are messed up, the controls are messed up, but, isn't this game all about the platforming? Yeah, except, you can't platform nearly as well with an analog stick, and because of their awful, poorly thought out control scheme, you need to use the analog stick to move, since every button on the controller is already used. And besides, you need the left stick for aiming the arrows too. Oh look, another crippling game flaw that would've been neatly sidestepped with better controls, and 8-way aiming, removing the need for the god-awful left-stick aiming. Not only that, the platforming sections, which also should've been tons of fun, are made to be as excruciating as possible in every way.... with every long difficult section that ends in a dead end (with a power-up or switch or whatever) requiring you to then do the section backwards to get out of it. If you hit the spikes, 98% of the time you get respawned at the end of the dead-end, and have to get back out again the hard way. I think this would've been fine for some areas, particularly some optional challenges. But doing it basically every. Single. Time...... it's so obnoxious, it just feels like the devs don't respect the player's time, and just want to jack up the playtime as much as possible. All in the name of it being "ohhhhh so hardcore, we're the most hardcore difficult metroidvania!" I hate to break it to you guys, making obnoxious crap that's just poor design, and to waste people's time, doesn't make your game the most hardcore or difficult. It's neither the hardest bosses nor the hardest platforming I've ever played in a metroidvania, so get over yourselves.