Dark Devotion

I love this game. You can't button mash, you can't run all over to avoid the pressure of the fight, you have to react efficiently or you will take a hit. It's hard, but it's fair, and you don't have to push many buttons during during the fight : hit, block/cast, roll, change weapons, move. Learn, die, repeat, triumph, the beloved basics of video games. I play on ubuntu 22.04 and wine 9.0, it works flawslessly.

Yeah, this is pretty solid. Think Darkest Dungeon's sudden banes/afflictions mixed with the need to memorize Dark Souls: PDE's enemy patterns. Now add more pixilation and a random loot system that seems to scale to... your items? It's the kind of game that wisely rewards long dungeon runs. I find myself not wanting to stop for the sake of keeping the all-powerful items I've accumulated over the hours... and then I die. Then I head straight back in out of spite... and eventually die. For those who aren't aware, dying means losing everything but your boons/blessings. Restarting the game in any way means losing everything entirely. Your progress through the dungeon and interactions are seamlessly saved without any notification, mind you. Other than the joy of finding better items and defeating bosses, I really dig the lore. There are letters, books, NPC's, and item descriptions to read through for those interested in the plot. The game even has an unlockable library that stores all of the first two. Bug-wise, I think I've encountered on or two, but nothing major. Recommendation: Don't treat it like a hack & slash, do exhaust NPC dialogue, and do pickup (most) equipment even if it's just to switch back to the previous. That is all. Post-13.5h Update: I've since encountered a minor, moderate, and major bug separately. The moderate one was annoying. The major one was during a specific boss fight and required me to restart the game.

This game is hard. Each time you die you loose all the equipment collected during your trip, keeping only soul, weapons and object that will be added to the forge at the begining of each run. Souls collected unlock skills. Plus, there are secret to find that will improve your stat definitly. The map is not procedural, so you can explore as you wish, find all the hidden objects. The weapons are in number : spear, sword (two of one hand), shield, magic, bow, knives, scourge, etc.. depending on you playstyle. The gameplay is simple, you can hit, dodge and parry (depending on your gear) but jump is impossible. Each time you make a move (expect run), you consume your endurance. When you have no more endurance, you can't do anything and hace to wait for it to come back. Like a souls game, you will have to learn the enemy pattern to progress. There are 17 bosses to beat, each one of them with is own style, design, pattern. This is the best part of the game : the felling of progression is nice, as you learn the boss moves progressing into killing it. To make your task easier you will have teleportation hotel to activate, so you don't have to do all the path again if you die and return to the begining ( warning : one hotel can be activate at a time!!). The story is there, desseminated on the map, there is just enough lore to keep you interested. The graphics are good, and animation are fluid so that if you observe well, you can lear patterns easily. Some blackspot : you can't remap your keyboard and adujst the sound. There is a gap of difficulty at the final boss. All the others bosses, you get a nice felling of progression, but for him that is another story. Attack pattern are more random, you will need to dodge or parry more, therefore with big weapons that uses more endurances are almost no use. If you like dark souls game and 2D platformers go for it. It took me 25h to beat all the bosses, but i didn't find all the secrets. I encounters no bugs, nor crashs. The game has been fixed, so don't take into acount all the bad review about that.

the game is a bit hard to get used to, especially since you can't change controlls. at first i died a lot, but then i realised, how big your invincibility window during your dodgerole is, i don't even know if blocking has any use appart from abilities that require you to block. if you could give half stars, i would give 3,5 instead of 4.

I'm playing this game on switch and the only reason I write here is because of all the negative comments. I don't know what the game was like in 2019 when most comments were written but by now it seems to work flawlessly (since I only have it on switch I can't say anything about Kb/M or controller support but since it runs on the switch controllers I'd assume the problems have been solved). Another thing: The game itself is hard as others have mentioned. But you don't lose everything when you die, it's just your current equipment and blessing you found along your last run. There is a weapons smith in your home base for whom you'll earn or find new crafting recipes so you don't need to start over with the same basic sword and shield again and again. Also there are skills which you can unlock with experience points which will persist over your fight / kill / die / repeat-cycle. Yes it reminded me of blasphemeus too but I found this one more interesting, more beautiful and more varied in combat. I'd rather compare it with dead cells though you won't see the kind of flow you often get going in dead cells due to those nice time or streak based buffs. I'd suggest you give it a try when it's on sale :-)