Recent reviews by janphb

Cool game. The mechanics and everything takes some getting used to. I'd recommend:

- Headphones, not only because the sound design is great, but so you can hear enemies/fountains around you
- Reading stuff on the wiki
- Maybe watching a playthrough or part of one to learn some general strategy

I've gotten to the final boss of this game, with something like 80% game completion (90% items, 96% map, 62/99 orbs) and I can't bring myself to actually finish it. The final boss fight is so infuriating and yet so boring, with a ton of waiting around followed by an attack which if you don't respond to correctly within a split second, you are heavily punished for it. On top of that, there are 4 different boss attacks and 2 of them are impossible to attack during, so that's a bunch more waiting.

And then I realized that this is a good explanation of the game in a nutshell. A suuuuper slow paced platformer, with a high bar of difficulty due to obscurity and almost intentionally poor design, with heavy punishments for slight missteps and ever-so-slightly not-fast-enough reflexes.

Some things that were especially annoying throughout the game:

- Map traversal is super slow, and never gets faster. This is especially annoying with how rare the warp points are, and even more annoying before I discovered assist mode because I kept dying while backtracking to previous areas.

- You only have 3 hit points, and never get more. This is extra problematic considering:
A. Many of the enemies and their attacks are quite fast paced, and your slow movement speed and lack of movement abilities makes it nigh impossible to dodge.
B. There _is_ (kind of) a way to get a 2nd set of 3 hit points, BUT it doesn't recharge upon death and the places to recharge this are much fewer and further between than save points.

- Your first two abilities unlocked (out of 3 total) have pretty heavy overlap, to the point that there are specific rooms that the designers *force* you to use the first ability rather than the second by having an enemy in the room whose sole purpose is to prevent you from using your 2nd ability. I find this to be heavy-handed and poor design.

Luckily, fairly early on I found the suggestion from someone online to enable the "Assist Mode," especially "quick revive" which allows you to restart in the room you died in, rather than back at the last save point. I'm glad I did because I have 225 deaths in the game, and if I had to backtrack to a save point for every single one of those deaths, I would've given up a lot earlier in the game.

Disclaimer: I never played the old school NES or whatever games this game is apparently based on. It seems like it has a lot of references to older games. I'm sure my opinion would be different if I was the "correct" audience for the game, in that sense.

Also, one exception to the above -- the one thing that is objectively good about the game is the soundtrack. Some of the songs absolutely slap.

Anyways -- not a well designed game, by modern standards anyway. If you're playing it for nostalgia, then the standard is probably different. But if you're not, I just can't recommend this game.

The sound design and level design in this game are absolutely amazing. Well worth full price

Beautiful pixel art and a really cool religious-based horror aspect that really resonated with me. And overall it's fun, so I would recommend it. Just beat the game with 88% completion after about 23 hours. (Although I think about 2-3 of those are afk hours.)

But I have complaints. Mainly that the combat sometimes doesn't feel good. There are a lot of little things that need to be tuned in order for it to feel better. Like your hurtbox is pretty unforgiving, enemy hitboxes are also unforgiving, and several boss patterns can end up in such a way that it's almost impossible to dodge a few attacks in a row. This isn't too bad because after a while in the game you get enough health/damage upgrades that you can still get through where you need to, but the combat just doesn't feel as smooth as something like Hollow Knight.

Also there needs to be more and better-located fast travel stations. Re-traversing portions of the map to get where you want is a bore and it doesn't really seem like the map was intended to be re-traversed. Like some platforming challenges are doable from one direction but going the other way is nigh impossible and there aren't shortcuts because of how few fast travel stations there are.

Anyways, still an enjoyable game, but fixing these (relatively minor) issues would make me want to re-play it and try to get 100%. Still totally worth the price though.

It's difficult but some of the levels are just way too difficult, in some pretty unfun ways. The controls aren't great -- some basic platformer hygiene could go a long way. For example, having a jump input buffer so you can press jump just before you land on the ground and your input won't get swallowed. More playtesting to get rid of some of the most frustrating parts. More options to get through difficult parts would be nice too -- in something like Celeste, there's usually multiple options for how you want to get from point A to point B. In this game there's usually just one. And if that one way has a ridiculously hard bottleneck, it's just going to be frustrating.

Another thing Celeste does (that this game doesn't) is putting a lot of care so that for longer levels with many different challenges, the most difficult/interesting part is at the very beginning so that you don't get tired of repeating really annoying parts over and over where what you're really struggling with is later on in the level.

The instant-respawn right when you die is kinda interesting but ultimately I dislike it. It's too jarring and gives no satisfaction, no reset, no feedback when you die. And you're dying a lot in this game. I think a death animation would also help make the deaths feel slightly more satisfying. At least give something slightly interesting to look at when you're taking away my progress.

More in-depth gameplay than FTL, with more interesting stories and better art. It gives me the satisfaction of exploration where FTL never did.

Super fun, lots of weapons and enemies. Devs are always updating it too so constant new content is a nice bonus.

Pretty cool game. My only complaint is how long it takes to travel across the map for different random quests.

TL;DR play Dead Cells.

This game is a knockoff of Spelunky, with major D&D-type RPG influences, so you have a few different weapons, a few different characters, and so forth. It's reasonably fun, but super unforgiving and IMO the balance leans just too hard to the difficult side, leaving it a little unfun. But for hard-core rogue-like fans who want a game that will kick you down and not give a single hint as to what you should do differently, I suppose it's probably pretty good.

It could be argued that this game is relatively similar in difficulty to Spelunky or Dead Cells. I've played Dead Cells quite a bit and Spelunky just a little bit, and already the experience is a lot more approachable than Vagante.

Dead Cells
- does a lot to make everything you do feel smooth and good -- responsive moves, double jumps, dodge-roll, smash attack, etc.
- has unlockables like a larger health flask, more starting gold, better items, etc. This gives A) a sense of progress even if you don't make it to the end, and B) gradually makes the game easier so you can get farther.
- has a ton of item options, so even if you don't find the particular item you're looking for that run, you're guaranteed to find something that will at least give you a similar playstyle (i.e. another shield, another trap, another grenade)

Spelunky
- each run is pretty similar because you're at least the same guy each time.

Vagante, in contrast:
- every move feels clunky, with zero dodge options, and every attack has a long wind-up time. Such a long wind-up time that it's actually impossible to hit anything while jumping with your sword if you're the knight, because you can't start the wind-up and THEN jump like you can in Spelunkk.
- very few unlockables, and then they're not cumulative, you just choose 1 different perk at the beginning of the game. Also it's really hard to unlock stuff and takes forever so most runs where you die will just feel like a waste.
- very few item options -- you'll usually find 1 or 2 choices per floor and so those are the ones you're stuck with. The shopkeepers are very stingy and their items are super expensive.
- very little healing. You're penalized for not fighting the boss at the end of each level because you won't get XP, but if you do fight the boss, good luck doing it without taking any damage because there's hardly any healing.

It's a cool idea but there are too many aspects of the game that are intentionally unforgiving and uninviting. I'd be very appreciative of an easy mode, or even a non-hardcore mode.

The mouse controls are honestly awful. Why even show the mouse pointer if it's useless? The game seems like it has potential, but that the devs didn't care to implement mouse controls.

This game is all about pointing in a certain direction, to jump onto different walls, or aim your attacks, and so forth. The mouse controls force you to drag your mouse a certain way, so where you're aiming is totally dependent on the direction of the mouse movement, not on where the actual mouse pointer is. However, at the same time, you DO have to worry about where the mouse pointer is, because if it's at the edge of the screen and you can't move it any further in that direction, you're screwed.

Devs, this game seems cool, but PLEASE fix the mouse controls to something less frustrating. I honestly do want to play this game but right now with the mouse controls in the state they are, I just can't say it's worth my time. Luckily I got it in a bundle so I didn't lose money on it. It's just weird to me that they say "controller strongly recommended" when this game seems like such a good fit for working mouse control ...