Recent reviews by Sethlon

Gestalt: Steam and Cinder is a game that I've been looking forward to ever since I got my hands on it at a PAX South demo booth, and its full release did not disappoint!

Positives:
+ Smooth Controls
+ Beautiful Pixel Art
+ Great Music

Neutral:
+/- Game Balance (Skews on the Easy side of things)
+/- Game Length (8ish Hours)

Negatives:
- Story
- Bugs

On the Positives:
Controls: The controls in Gestalt are simply delightful. Attacks are crisp, jump height is extremely flexible, and a lot of actions can be animation cancelled into dodges or other actions. I fell in love with this game after playing only the demo of the very first level because it just felt so good to play at its core level. The extra movement options you unlock as the game goes on (double jump, divekick, airdash) is just extra icing on the cake. Combat and movement are the core of any action platformer, and here they feel great!

The Art: The pixel art is gorgeous. Character designs are unique, enemy designs are clean, and the background art is beautiful. There are lots of amazing backgrounds that (for better or worse) are used simply set dressing. The Scrap Sea region in particular has several backgrounds that I took a lot of time to simply sit back and gawk at.

Aletheia's animations are incredible as well! Clearly a ton of work has been put into that, from her standard swordplay to her basic movement to the flaming flourishes on her special attacks. The highpoints of the animation of the game in motion definitely meet up with the high level of detail in the background setpieces.

On Music: Gestalt's music has a pretty unique feel to it - a Western twang mixed with enough other elements to give it its own identity. I'm not well versed in musical critique enough to speak on it more than that, other than to simply say that I think it's a standout accomplishment in the game worthy of praise.

The Neutrals:
Game Balance: Gestalt intentionally skews itself on the easier side of things. If you're experienced with action platformers or metroidvanias, you'll probably breeze through it. Even if you're not skilled in this type of game, if you do all the bounty boards and sidequests and collect all the accessories, you'll likely breeze through it. The boss design is elegant in my opinion, but not overly complicated. if you're looking for a game that challenges you in difficulty, you'll likely come away disappointed. (Though I would recommend trying out a low level run or speedrun - things get significantly more difficult when you're underlevelled!)

The extra abilities you can unlock in Aletheia's ability node tree are a hit or miss. Many of them feel powerful and have their own useful niche, from the divekick-esque Dropkick's aerial mobility to Ground Slams quick aerial damage to Charged Concussive's strong stun capabilities, etc. There are some that feel a little vestigial, however, mostly in that they take too long to set up and are likely to get you interrupted by enemies. Much of the back and forth of Gestalt's combat involves getting quick attacks in and dodging out of the way when your opponent swings at you and then dishing out big amounts of damage when/if you stun them. Attacks like the dodge attacks or higher number of light attack combo strings are difficult to work in against active opponents, and against stunned ones it's generally better to be using heavier hitting attacks. A bit of a shame, since dodge attacks and particularly the final light attack combo are IMO some of the coolest animations in a game that sets a really high bar for that sort of thing. Combat still comes away as being pretty satisfying in my opinion due to the responsiveness at its core, but it is a slight shame these elements don't get to shine as much as they could have.

Game Length: Gestalt isn't a terribly long affair. On my first playthrough, I 100%'d the game after about 8 hours of play. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on the speed you take the game. Some might find this a little short, though I felt pretty satisfied with that overall.

The Negatives:
Story: Gestalt is at its core a narratively driven action platformer. With that comes with lots of dialogue. If you're the sort of person who hates reading mutiple lines of unspoken dialogue, you'll probably have a bad time.

I enjoyed the majority of Gestalt's story, personally. There isn't as much side detail or random people to talk to that I might have liked for this sort of narrative style, but what is there paints a pretty solid picture of Gestalt's world. While the overall story won't be winning any awards, the characters themselves all have believable personal motivations and interactions.

Unfortunately, the story does not have a satisfying conclusion. If you're the sort of person that doesn't like cliffhangers, you'll likely be disappointed by the ending. The game feels like it has more story to tell than what ended up being included in this title, and I can only hope it gets expanded upon in future games.

Bugs: Gestalt launched in a kind of buggy state, with a bevy of minor glitches as well as some major ones. Personally I only ran into minor ones in my launch day playthrough, and I will say that despite some gamebreaking bugs being a thing at launch, the dev team has been very hard at work squashing those bugs post release. As of writing this (7/26/24) there have been six different patches released a little over a week after the game has launched. That's almost a patch every day! Members of the dev team are also very active on the game's Discord server, working directly with people who have ran into major bugs. This is noted as a negative here for posterity, but with how things are being polished up I'd be surprised if any big major or minor bugs make it past the next couple of weeks.

Overall while it has its flaws and it might not be for everyone, I greatly enjoyed (and am still enjoying!) my time with Gestalt: Steam and Cinder. Come for the wonderful art and music, stay for the incredibly tight movement and combat controls.