Recent reviews by splendid ledraps

LIT! This game kicks ass! GOOD! Highly recommended if you're a fan of ULTRAKILL.
The parkour/movement tech elements are designed well, and I like how the parkour is part of the game's challenge. The parkour is not too easy and boring, but neither is it too difficult and frustrating. Good balance!
Each level teaches you something new little by little; good pacing!
I really liked this. The focus isnt purely on just combat, and the combat itself is exciting and plenty of "oooooh- DAAAMN!" moments when your maneuvers and attacks land juuuust right :)

Beautiful
I really liked the puzzles to this game and the overall flow.
Reading and interacting with characters and things was always engaging.
The story was so well done... got me tearing up in a happy/nice way...

Go into this blind! have fun!

Good but one huge flaw:
This game needs more levels. And I don't mean this in a good way; the game has a lot of great features but the main levels can be too straight-forward and not difficult at all. And puzzle elements seem to be taught but never expanded on.

The main levels introduce a good quantity of new puzzle elements, and it keeps a fresh experience. Viewfinder does a great job introducing and teaching new elements to you, nice and easy. But that's it; often, the game didn't go into an advanced degree for these puzzle elements and it sort of just dropped them and carried on to the next one without really challenging me.
The main levels were just teaching me new things but never putting my knowledge to the test.

The Optional Levels at least filled this role.. But even some Optional Levels were pretty easy and straightforward. There was a lack of Optional Levels for all the puzzle concepts that could have been expanded and challenged on.

The Final level was at least able to do this. I really enjoyed this challenge.
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For such a well put together puzzle game; it's surprising how little content there is. I only had about 4 hours in this game while going slow and spending time listening to the lore/story and the fun secrets & trinkets.

Despite this huge flaw, I still had a great time playing.
I recommend this game as long as you are ok with less of a challenge and more of an experience.

I highly recommend this even if you're not a huge fan of Turn-based combat RPGs. This game pulls off a lot of things perfectly, maybe not so well with some things like crafting aka cooking items, but those are very minor and you get used to it with how enjoyable this gameplay and story is.

I recommend playing with hardmode on, I did first try. You can take it off whenever, but the challenge was very easy to get on pace with.
And remember you can press 'enter' to get additional dialogue with your teammates at any time, great writing! I love every character!

The biggest issue for me and people I show this too is a lack of clarity, i still sometimes dont know whats going on.
Ive had a lot of hours in some of the earlier demos and still get confused at times.

However, this game's art is still impressive. There are some arenas and level design that really impress me visually.
Soundtrack is cool.
If you love ULTRAKILL, you will enjoy learning this game's own features, and getting the feeling of jumping into something new.
There are things it shares with ULTRAKILL but the game does a creative job adding it's own flavor to it.

Im not familiar with Dungeon Crawlers, nor played any games this was inspired by, but enjoyed this game.
There are other reviews that describe the same Dislikes I had with this game.
-Story was hard to follow and understand, in general story information was just absent and hard to follow when there was some journals to read. For example, I was surprised when I found the ending level. This lead to my biggest disappointment of the game, because while the ending seemed nice, I feel like things just happened without me being able to understand what was the significance of what was going on.
-Combat can be a bit boring
-Easy to get lost. Almost feels like some things are built like a maze especially in such dark areas and a lack of a basic map really made some of the exploration painful. Despite this being one of the nice parts of the game, exploring the levels and the world, it was a bit frustrating at times.
-Although there's a lot of weapons and spells, im upset you can only choose two of each to equip at once. I feel like this limited what you could do. Why force the player to access the menu instead of just cycling through more weapons/spells on the fly? For example i would like to use the light spell while also being flexible with two different classes of attack spells and another for movement. But it's just not feasible to open the menu up (which doesnt pause time) and equip these through the menu during combat. This ended up making the combat less exciting because while some spells are great, i ended up having to keep two core ones equipped at all times. Same can be said about weapons. There is a torch for light, ranged weapons, and melee weapons of varying classes. Despite all these, you can only equip 2 and change on the fly.

However, the overall atmosphere of this game was incredible. The progression with finding new items and spells was very nice. And i think more advanced replays of the game you can end up doing some cool stuff.

Im mostly neutral on this game, but the overall experience was lovely and engaging still. But I am disappointed it didnt do better.

This game isnt terrible, but it was a just a bit boring, even for how short it was. There wasnt really anything special or new to it. Some good moments and the 2nd to last level design was pretty and fresh. The game had some goofy cuteness to it but it felt a bit empty in that aspect too. Just overall felt lacking and not a good thing for a short game.

If you're a fan of DUSK you'll likely enjoy this game.

From DUSK, there's some notable differences:
-The movement in this game is much simpler and limited. No crouching or sliding, jumps are small and dont effect your speed much, no explosive jumping, you really experience no vertical combat other than rare situations.
-The weaponry and combat isnt as interesting; the game hands you a lot of shotgun shells, and then a decent amount of Grenades. This is good because both of these are the more satisfying weapons in the game. But thats it. I found myself not having much pistol, smg, and crossbow ammo when i wanted to deal with some arenas. The proximity mines are bad. Getting enemies to have to walk nearly directly onto them is a pain. And having such a short explosive range too. There's nothing really innovative. There is kicking which makes close quarter combat more interesting at least. I found it weird how you couldnt kick during some weapon animations like reloading.
-Like DUSK with a spooky atmosphere, there are a few jump-scares. And along with it, there were some goofy events and jokes around that I really appreciated.

No auto-saves/checkpoints was a bit frustrating, i prefer not to save scum but some parts of the level would kill me and having to restart to the beginning even near the end was a bit annoying on some levels.

Despite all my negative points, HROT was a fun adventure. A must try for DUSK lovers.

Great gameplay, always interesting, and the entire experience with music, art, characters and their animations, are all a joy. Worthy of a lot of replays too.

For just $3 this was a good hours worth of time spent. I really dig the experience; it was calming and reminded me of playing older platformer games like spyro and sm64. The collectibles were mostly straightfoward and not too challenging or complex but I think I would debate that's a good thing for this context. I would definitely look forward to a game by this team to make something a bit longer and complex however.