Chasm

I had anticipated for this game for quite some time considering promising reviews and when i finally got it became clear that it wasn't worth it. At first glance its fine game, metroidvania, loot, decent fights and progression feels nice and fun. Closer to middle of game you cant help but start to notice more and more of "paper-cuts" scattered all around. Backtracking is excessive, money is scarce, weapons variety isn't that big as it seems at first glance - you either use slow-but-strong or fast-but-weak one, good that your inventory isn't limiting you so you can carry both and switch if needed. Room design is another thing - procedural level creation is interesting, but when you see same-design room in row its getting annoying. Even worse thing is that game not so good at following metroidvania rules. Generally when you get new upgrade a lot of new areas gets accessible to you leading to new secrets and loot, but not in Chasm - some upgrades is either almost useless (basically no place to us them) or completely optional and can be skipped completely Story is quite nice at start, but unable to keep any meaningful suspense for long enough - from middle of game its became obvious that is it all about, who is bad guy and who probably will be final boss. Graphically game is totally fine for pixel art lovers and pleasant to look at, but lacking in eye candy (however, old castle parallax scrolling background looks superb) area. In term of environment Chasm doesn't invent anything new either - cave\mines, jungle\garden, castle...crypts is disturbingly macabre however, its impressive. Overall Chasm feels like a good attempt which is falls apart, unfortunately. Maybe its too much reliance on procedural generation or just lack of soul, but i didn't found Chasm memorable enough to love. So, should you buy it? Maybe, but be prepared - chasms isn't place where only good things live.

I'm reviewing v1.07 on Hard difficulty. I first tried Chasm at release once and only remember that the backgrounds seemed repetitive, the controls unresponsive and so I stopped playing after maybe 30 minutes. Now, however, I have a very different impression. The controls are still up to taste in my opinion. They are very deliberate in that once you attack, you can't move for the duration of the attack (old school Castlevania fans might love this). You really have to learn the enemies' attacks, time your own ones well, commit to them, dodge. Only around the very end of the game you will have enough money to buy a decent amount of healing potions. Until then, you will spend more time trying to dodge every single attack and possibly even avoiding enemies entirely. Or luring them towards you so that you don't have to fight two at once. All of which is a lot of fun once you get used to the basic mechanics. The animations are absolutely gorgeous - so detailed and smooth that it seems like the game's biggest strength to me. I also quite like the chiptune soundtrack that got added later. Some aspects that I didn't like are: Missable things at the beginning of the game that block an achievement (for that run of course). They didn't ensure that room layouts for bigger, more complex rooms aren't used more than once in an area. You may see some of them even 3 times! Drop rate also seems low at times. I would say that this also a matter of taste, as I seem to recall not bothering with farming for all items in SOTN either but there are also many others who complain about this. In my opinion, the game doesn't lend itself to procedural dungeons. Its spirit is that of a regular Metroidvania adventure, not some Dead Cells or Rogue Legacy time sink. But one can always ignore that. All in all, I for one enjoyed playing through it once as a single player experience very much and hope that the game has made enough money that we will see a sequel that continues to improve on things.

Basically it's not for everyone. Overall game is great however it relies heavily on dungeon exploring and only few open spaces are present. While game carefully gives feeling of open spaces it's setting is mainly present underground, so it might give you claustrophobic feeling sometimes. Other than that it works really well on Linux and game wise it's very similar to Castlevania rather than being Metroidvania on it's own in some parts. I won't reveal too much, it's definitely worth playing.

First GOG review, here goes. The game looks great. It's a modern pixel-art game, you know what to expect & it delivers. The animations & environments are quite well done. You can turn on a CRT effect, which is just kind of dumb but whatever. The platforming is stodgy. This has been said in other reviews, but boy oh boy is it particular. Gameplay is slower than a lot of contemporary Metroidvania affairs. Your little dude stops cold when he swings his weapon. Also, you probably will have to grind a while to beat the game... but I don't mind grinding. Figure out the enemy's attack pattern -- especially if it's tough and/or high xp -- and defeat it, return and repeat and level up and see what neat weapon or armor or gadget eventually comes out of it. The monsters are very well designed and have interesting attacks and patterns, especially in the last two levels. Some are pretty creepy. Oh, and the drops can be neat. Really fun beasties! But the familiars (Bird Hat and Sword Hat, is there another one I missed?) are tough to recommend as an asset. The leveling for them feels wrong and they feel laggardly in play. The biggest drawback is how much you will backtrack. Metroidvanias have this flaw baked in but it felt worse in this one, I think because the little guy moves a bit too slowly and his jumping is weirdly less free-feeling than it should be. If there was a map annotation feature it might be a bit different, but you can only mark things with a star and it's hardly useful. The rogue-like aspect of this was totally oversold, but maybe I should have played through this twice to get a different seed. I can see it being trying to find all the artifacts and plot-forwarding stuff in different maps, vs like replaying SOTN where everything is where you left it last time you played. This is just a bit more than the sum of its parts; like the computed grade is a C+, but it's from a student you weren't expecting anything out of, so you round up to a B-.