Astalon: Tears of the Earth

If you save your game in a bonfire before a boss and die to that boss, the game sends you back to the beginning of the dungeon and autosaves over your bonfire-save. What's then the point of bonfire-saving? When low on HP in a boss fight, it's better to exit the game and reload your bonfire save, than risking to die and having to backtrack all the way due to the autosave. And if you accidentally die to the boss, you'd better kill the game (finish the process in Windows Task Manager) to avoid the autosave. When you have to resort to that kind of tricks, you know a game is not respecful with your time. The only way to level up your characters is after dying and being sent back to the start of the dungeon. This is a real dealbreaker, because you cannot plan or speed up your grinding or farming. Astalon is not a skill demanding, high difficulty soulsvania. It just looks like one. In reality, it's a grindfest where you are expected to die again and again just to be fed artificial repetition until you level up and power through any obstacle. That's not fun. At all. And it really hurts, because the pixel art, the music and the atmosphere are top notch, but the gameplay loop is boring and grindy. It takes away from you the short term goal of trying not to die. It even takes away from you the excitement of reaching a bonfire, or the frustration of dying to a boss. This is the first time I have asked GOG for a refund. Go play Castle in the Darkness, Momodora or Alwa's Awakening for a proper metroidvania/soulsvania.

You'll see a lot of people call this came a "roguelike" or "Soulslike." It is absolutely not, and if you go in with that expectation, you'll be disappointed. There are no randomly generated maps and you do not lose any progress on death (other than being sent back to the start of the map). With that out of the way, as somebody who's been playing metroidvanias since the original Metroid, I love this game. It's got a huge map filled with secrets, lots of power-ups, multiple unique characters to play as, an interesting setting & story that gives you just enough details to figure things out on your own but doesn't beat you over the head, a surprising amount of non-linearity in how you can explore the tower, and a great soundtrack. The way death works in this game ties into the story; one of the characters has a pact with a supernatural creature that revives you and sends you back to the beginning of the tower when you die. Between deaths, you also get the opportunity to buy power-ups using currency you've collected. This does mean that every time you die, you've got a bit of backtracking to do to get back to where you died, but it's not as bad as you'd think; you'll unlock lots of elevators, teleporters, and shortcuts that make getting around the tower pretty quick. On top of that, in true Metroidvania style, it makes sense to regularly backtrack through areas anyway after you get new power-ups so that you can find secrets you previously missed. The beginning of the game is the hardest part; your characters start fairly weak and slow, but a few deaths later after you've managed to accumulate some enhancements, you'll find yourself making longer trips through the tower and dying much less often. It's a challenging game, but fair, and you can really make it as easy as you want by buying enough upgrades. It took me about 15 hours to do a blind 100% play through, and I'm looking forward to doing it again.

Despite its lovely 8bit style graphics it is just a great blend of Metroidvania like exploration and Souls-Like. You will die, quite often, but as you unlock shortcuts throughout the gigantic tower this rarely ends in frustration. Instead you will brought back to the towers entrance, stronger than before and more cunning. The feature with the three different heroes works well and is also changing a bit throughout the game - right at the point where it starts to become tedious going through the same areas over again with another character. Only cons for me where - some minor bugs with my Xbox One pad where commands where not recognized anymore until restarting or displacement effects when the character was moving somewhere he couldnt fit. - some areas felt quite repetetive and didnt offer as much variance as they should

I picked up this game on the Switch when I found out the art was done by Ryūsuke Mita. I went in with no knowledge or expectations and found a really tight Metroidvania with a fun upgrade gimmick that I wasn't expecting. I really like a game with some difficulty, but find that many games that do that overdo it in frustrating ways and it ends up tedious. Having the game turn death into something productive actually rather than just a setback helps cut through any frustration from the frequent deaths. Some characters are more satisfying than others to play as. I found most of my time was just spent as Kyuli due to her extra mobility. Not that there isn't any frustration, though. Some of the placing of elevators is frustrating later on in the game, when you have to track repeatedly through the same rooms to explore the remaining corners of the map. Some of the upgrades that expand your roaming room in the game are too easy to just not find until very late in the game, or even miss completely, so the late-game exploration ends up very tedious rather than fun until you find these. There are also a lot of bugs. I had inputs eaten frequently, especially during occasional extreme slowdowns on the Switch version. I also had graphical bugs like a character's flashing locking them completely white or something of the sort, occasionally had my character spontaneously disappear and I'm unable to move until I take damage. Fortunately, they're not too often, and don't detract from the experience too much. I like the diversity in the areas, and the game does a good job of just avoiding falling into the same old predictable environments; the settings feel more like classic Castlevania than Metroid. It's a fun game with a good gimmick and decent difficulty, and I thought I was nearing the end long before I actually was, and I love being surprised by a game being bigger than I expected. Really a must for Metroidvania fans especially.