Hellpoint

Sure I hated the platforming, and how the Architect yeeted himself in a hole during that awful escort quest. But the main points of the game are the setting, the exploration and the combat, and those were fun all the way through. Can't comment on the story because I had a hard time understanding it all, but that may just be me being dense.

The interface is just horrible, the X button on your gamepad is your item pick up and interaction button BUT the A button is the button you use to close the text prompts that pop-up when you interact with anything in the world. As you can imagine this is super annoying, and no, you can't change your buttons in this game. You can't damage enemies that are "spawning in", even though they give the responses of getting hit. Whenever you die a new enemy spawns in the area where you died, this is a mirror version of yourself, this enemy is super aggressive, insanely fast, can spot you from a mile away, has moves that you yourself are incapable of; like stopping mid-dodge roll and spinning 180 degrees to attack you just because it wants to, etc. It's a complete pain in the ass to deal with this bullshit. The "tutorial" level is a complete mess that punishes you for learning and experimenting. This darksouls-like game apparently had the idea that jumping was THE best idea ever for this kind of game and made it a main feature. Expect death pits everywhere. Even worse is that the camera does not follow the character when he jumps, you have a very high jump, this leads to the camera jumping up wildly when your character jumps onto higher platforms. But despite the jump itself not being pitiful, platforming is still terrible, because you have no mid air control over the jump other then fucking yourself over by slowing down, which won't help with jumping on small crates but will make you miss long jumps over death pits. You can't see a lot of the walls in this game and rooms feel larger then they need to be with no rewards. A lot of the game world isn't so much dark as it is simply not visible at all until you are 1 foot away from it, this leads you to hopelessly run with your face against walls trying to see if anything is there in rooms that are way bigger then they needed to be. This also goes for some of the death pits btw, good luck spotting those. -character limit-

This game has become one of my favorites. Exploration: One of the best I have ever seen, it has A LOT to explore with AWESOME quality. It creates new ways of exploring, I consider it a pioneer for many mechanics that I really want to see in new triple A games. Most open world games have to learn from this indie game. Believe me, the exploration will blow your mind. 1000/10. Combat: Gives a lot of liberty to the player, You are very fast despite Your build, combines fire weapons with melee weapons in a very satisfying way. Despite that, the enemies and bosses are very easy, the only difficulty for some late-game bosses is the high damage. It doesnt have a great game design for the combat. 7.5/10. The combination of combat and exploration is carried by the incredible exploration and makes You forget a bit the low difficulty. Parkour: Each section is super scary, super special, super satisfying, it really awards skill and guts. There is a problem with fall damage, sometimes You die to clearly low places, take a little jump with 0 fall damage but 1 meter away of it You die to fall damage... The exploration may need You to make clearly way too far jumps, I do not think this situations are enough different to make a logic on when to jump. 9/10 Story, lore and characters: Lore is very interesting but really hard to follow, specially because of the lack of characters or important parts in it. You learn a lot of lore via items descriptions, new mechanics, exploration, etc... Story: Has a lot of interesting plot twists, changes Your point of view in many themes and your in-game objectives, makes You want to explore more and get better details. Characters: There is not a lot of them and You will not find them commonly, some of them feel credible and sum to the atmosphere. Overall 7.5/10. This game is incredible and unique, a true hidden gem. Even if You are not a souls fan, You will really love to explore its world if You have enough time. 9/10

I've never played Dark Souls, so I can't make the obvious comparisons, but this is definitely a sadistic and challenging game where you will die a LOT, and not always fairly. Enemies will ambush you or have attacks that can instantly kill you, and a fall from any of the many, many platforming sections is certain death 95% of the time (it's possible to just take damage, but this almost never happens). Death carries real consequences too, as you'll be sent back to the last checkpoint and lose all of your unspent experience- which can be regained if you manage to pick it up from where you lost it, but if you die on the way it's gone for good, and the enemies respawn. Difficulty aside, the game definitely has issues- the jumping is nowhere NEAR as responsive as it should be, nor is the heal button, sounds or music will often cut out and leave awkward silence, the plot is extremely sparse with almost no characters to speak of, and there were some questionable choices made, such as having lots of items that are mostly cosmetic in a game where equipment stats are critical, adjusting difficulty levels via consumable items, or, infuriatingly, not having a pause function. I can understand wanting to keep the player on their toes, but forcing them to die if they have to pick up a phone call or something is just stupid. If this all makes the game sound terrible... surprisingly, it's not! The levels are gloriously complicated, fun to explore and packed with secrets, the monsters are unique and frightening (especially the Thespians, which I can only describe as vile walking tumors with built-in Shakespearean ruffles), the weapons are varied and have powers to unlock, and the challenge gradually becomes less brutally impossible as you gather levels and items and develop a combat style. The satisfaction of exploration, strategy and hard-fought victory outweigh the frustration. I got this one as a free giveaway, but I'd honestly say it's worth picking up on sale, at the least!

This game has good art direction and several nice ideas. The concepts of weapon affinity (weapons get better with use) and time-related events are interesting and the combat does have a nice punch to it. The levels are are fairly large with a lot of loot and secrets to encourage exploration, which fits the objective of the game - to acquire data. However, there are game design decisions that can make the game more frustrating than enjoyable. For starters, the inventory UI isn't great. It doesn't provide as much information as it should and you can't even see the stats of equipment you craft. Despite weapon affinity being a core mechanic of the game you can't see what abilities you've unlocked, and you can't even review key codes you've found. Another frustrating mechanic is the platforming. Which isn't bad in itself, but you take fall damage and the jumping controls aren't great, which can quickly get really annoying. The difficulty spikes in this game can get absurd. One minute you'll be dealing decent damage, and then suddenly you'll face an enemy that kills you 2 hits and takes little damage. It doesn't help that the hitbox for some weapons are broken; some attacks will just go straight through enemies and deal no damage. It doesn't help that when you die a special enemy type called a ghost will spawn. This was a novel concept at first, but it quickly grew old when they started to make difficult encounters even more difficult. They don't spawn in boss arenas at least. Overall, this game is ok as is, but it really needs another patch to refine it a little more. There needs to be a rebalance and some QoL changes to make it feel like less of a chore to play though at times. Funnily enough, it reminds me a little of Dark Souls II, but with less polish and much worse UI. Whilst the souls games were frustrating at times, they did enough stuff right to balance it out, a balance that Hellpoint lacks at the moment.