Lovecraft's Untold Stories

NOT RECOMMENDED. Not fun. Most of the game is focusing hard to not step on the many barely visible mines (some of which release spawns of enemies) on almost every single screen dozens of screens per level. When that does not kill you, the beefy enemies rushing you in groups at lightning speed will in a second or a half. When you die, all of your stage progress is wasted. Roguelites are supposed to give you something when you die so that it does not feel like grinding the same level over and over again without changes. The enemy cheapness has many levels. My favorite is the generic ice enemy that fires a trishot from outside the screen and a single tri-shot has a massive hitspot that covers almost half the screen. Even on Easy, you cannot take more than a couple shot without dying and there is no reliable cure for the insanity that cannot be reliably reduced. The main game content consists mostly of you dying and wondering why you are still wasting time on this non-fun game. The Cthulhu theme is just an underused skin in the game - it wants to be some kind of difficult isometric view shooter, though the appeal of a game that requires perfection and perfect focus for hour on end will wear out its welcome fast. The pixel graphics make the details look crummy and the many mine objects difficult to spot. Oh and one of those "mines" will spawn parasites that will touch you and give an insta-death timer. So your dude will explode and your progress get wasted unless you find items that game is not likely to give you. Lowering your difficulty does not make it any less unfair. You have to have some kind of unhealthy redemption complex to like this game. The game runs okay, might choke a bit at times and the loading times are quite long. You will be loading quite a lot because of dying. Get NetHack instead. Now that is a roguelike. Or you could try Door Kickers - that game is fair and fun in co-op, they say.

I got this for free and wish I had my time back. While the presentation of the game, its pixel art and style and top down view is honestly impressive, a beautiful facade hides a complete mess that should go back into early access stat. The Detective prologue was actually awesome - balanced rooms with both combat and explorations, interactive story elements that would influence your sanity, just a couple deranged cultists trying to get you and a boss - gave me a lot of hope for a mythos based game. Sadly the devs completely forgot to actually make the game playable and the game devolves into a bullet hell with completely cluttered screens where you are unable to even understand where your character is before the ganging up begins. Enemies aren't content to shoot you with unavoidable attacks, but simultaneously inflict bleed, poison, mental damage, electricity and corrosion together no exception as you spam healing. The worst are the omnipresent TRAPS, even hidden by decor, so much you can't actually traverse some rooms or right where you enter the room with more unavoidable damage, the instant ganging up of an insane quantity of enemies in cramped rooms,enemies able to hit you behind walls, regenerate, multiply, summon more, and not being able to walk without tripping bleeding spikes, freezing vent, spider nests completely kills the fun. I unlocked the witch,a glass cannon killed in one hit facing late game earlier character bosses in the prologue, and I was done the moment chapter 3 boss had an army of unkillable phatom limbs with a room overrun with stun traps that make your character go insane. And that was after shoggoth bullet hells, getting stuck behind crates and having to restart, getting uncurable wounds like internal bleeding that just kill your run with little chance of recovery aside from very rare late game drops. It's like the devs heard "make it hardcore" and thought bad design choices were a substitute for fine balancing. What a wasted opportunity.

Which unfortunately ruins what is a pretty interesting game. It's like OG Resident Evil meets Enter the Gungeon. The Exploration, atmosphere and environmental story telling is thematic and strong. It reminded me of wandering the Spencer Mansion in the old Playstation Days. Combat is, okayish. I am ok with the controls being kinda poor if the goal is to heighten a sense of vulnerability in the player. But given other design areas, it seems like that is not unintentional. The controls are poor. They are poor with a controller, and even worse on mouse and keyboard. And it's not like there arent games like this out there with WAY better control schemes. But the real killer is that if you play anything above easy, there is no option to save your game progress outside of completing a level. Some levels take anywhere from 1-4 hours to complete. Assuming you don't get murdered by a boss, if you run into one too early you can end up leaving a level too soon, and with no ability to return, your end game is already lost. God forbid you have kids, pets, or any outside responsibilities, you will lose hours needlessly because the developers have stated online that they do not wish to EVER include a save and quit option. Unfortunately this just straight up ruins the game for me. Which is sad. There is a workaround such a random save point appearing within a level, but that is not a viable substitute for save and quit. On easy mode the game autosaves every two rooms, which is nice. Honestly though: I am not sure the game is worth the built in frustration to continue.

Let's be honest here, the game has its issues, one of them is the weird balancing. Just a few examples: the second chapter of the Professor story is incredibly difficult even compared to the following chapters; The final bossfights are maybe a bit too easy; mini-events are confusing at times at times and are often extremely dangerous; checkpoints are far and few between, and that is the only way you can access your storage during a chapter. This can be tricky but I don't feel to disagree with their design choice here. Difficulty: started at normal, turned it down to easy when I started other characters. If you find it too difficult, don't be ashamed to play on easy. Unless you're after the 100% achievements it doesn't really matter. Still, you CAN replay the game in ANY difficulty later on, so... Lastly: mental damage. Yes, it's bad, and sometimes doesn't even make sense. The item to restore it does little to actually heal the damage. My advice is: be careful and ignore some events if your character can't handle them at that moment. It's fine, just beat the level and move on. You can replay the chapter as you please once you finish the that character's story. (Ehm** once you get a certain necklace you won't have any more problems with mental damage ;) ) There's a storage that allows you to share the objects collected through all your runs. That said, I suggest you to USE the items when in need, don't be a hoarder like me :/ Aesthetically it's gorgeous, design-wise here is simply top notch. My knowledge of Lovecraft's writings is superficial at best, so I did not really understand the meaning a lot of the text that was thrown at me, but that didn't hinder my enjoyment of the game in any way so this is a good experience even for people that don't know the source material. To wrap the review up: don't listen to all the negative reviews, it can be hard and relentless, but give it a chance, it's a good game.

It could have been good as an explorative RPG with plenty of oppressive atmosphere and Lovecraftian lore, content and intrigue, but with no save option mid-level, no narrative to drive things forward, not many weapons for each character and some punishingly unbalanced combat, it becomes a dull, repetitive chore. As a randomly generated rogue-lite, the levels are far too long, far too unbalanced and there isn’t enough variation to make a second run worthwhile. It doesn’t explain how a lot of the mechanics work and it’s also buggy with sound effects cutting out, artifacts not working and enemies constantly getting stuck on the environment. The minimalist music and design aesthetic adds to the atmosphere, but there’s only 1 or 2 tracks and they get boring after a while. There’s a good variation in enemy types, but they move far too quickly, shoot too much and as such, combat (and the game) can change from fun to challenging to frustrating to dull too easily. However, the biggest issues are the design choices which significantly spoil the experience. • Status effects are applied frequently and for too long, often once per room and always require a special (limited number of) and normal heal item to cure. • The merchants infrequently appear, are overly expensive and trading system is unclear. • The sanity meter has no indication of what will or won’t affect you, forcing you to die or miss out on lore content. • Side quests, which lead to a whole other level including boss, are essential for beating the game yet easily missed.