Odallus: The Dark Call

This game is exceptionally unfun. I've been gaming since the 90's. I've played every classic Castlevania title, beaten Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, and had fun doing it. I like challenging platformers, clearly, and in my quest to play as many as possible, I've run into several awful games. Some have been easy, some have been hard, but they all shared similar traits, issues in design that made them unsatisfying to play. This game contains several. 1. Lack of Recovery Time - The recovery time is so short in this game, that you can easily take a ton of damage from an enemy by being knocked on top of their sprite. 2. Lack of Decent Knockback - Enemy attacks fail to knock you away, compounding with the above problem to cause enemies to jump on you and quickly drain your health. 3. No Range - Part of what made classic Castlevania so fun was cracking that chain whip. It allowed you to attack without having to get right up next to an enemy and risk a cheap hit. Here, you swing a sword, and the hitbox is actually a bit shorter than the sprite! You also swing slightly upwards, forcing you to duck most of the time, and even then you have to get so close to land a hit. 4. Too Big - This game looks and plays a lot like the much-hated Castlevania arcade game, Haunted Castle. That game and this game, Odallus, suck because you have a huge sprite making it hard to dodge incoming fire, Note that in Synphony of the Night and Rondo of Blood, your sprite stays small. Well-animated, well-detailed, but small. This allows for a more fair challenge, as you have more room to maneuver, even when enemies and attacks flood the screen. 5. Too Much Memorization - You should be able to play dynamically, with unpredictable enemies that have attack patterns you have to counter with skill, even after memorizing what to do. But bad games often have cheap traps, forcing you to rely entirely on memory. Like this game. I've run out of room, but in summary this plays like a bad NES game. Retro =/= good.

It looks great, It plays like an authentic 90's game But the decision to pad the game out with time wasting mechanics such as redoing the same sections over and over are the reason I wanted a new game and not an actual game from the 90's

I'll keep this one short and to-the-point: This is a really well-crafted Castlevania-esque game with *seriously* killer art direction that escalates to the point of being semi-Lovecraftian towards the end of the game. The difficulty curve is absolutely perfect (don't listen to other whinging reviews about it being too hard) in that it provides a good, gradually increasing challenge while still being completely fair and never requiring speedrunner-esque twitchy pixel-perfect reflexes. The last boss in particular really ramps it up and feels like the final encounter with a powerful demonic entity, and the satisfaction and sense of conclusion from beating him is great. There's also a fair, but not overwhelming, amount of backtracking required to get to alternate stage paths and better armor, weapons, and spells, so the Metroidvania crowd out there reading this will get a bit of their fix as well, while those outside of that loop will still appreciate the added depth and sense of accomplishment from finding everything and getting gradually more powerful. Overall, this game is an absolute blast and fans of dark fantasy will get more than their money's worth for a pittance of 10 dollars.

These days, the word "Retro" gets thrown a lot without purpose. True "retro" games are bit more rare. Odallus is retro in every sense. It has NES style graphics, even though it uses effects and scrolling that could be only be done on 16-bit systems. You can apply a CRT filter to simulate scanlines and rounded corners, and it looks really nice that way. The controls are fine and simple, and they do recall Rastan more than everything else, even though the pace is closer to other classic platformers like castlevania. Even though the game is level based, and not a true metroidvania, you character gains new abilities that unlock new paths when revisiting levels. The difficulty is spot on. Not as hard as the games as it tries to emulate, but challenging enough, even though some hardcore players may find it easy. The soundtrack is absolutely blissful. It sounds very sorrowful and complements very nicely the decayed atmosphere of the game levels.

This is actually inspired by a Sega Master System game Called Lord of The Sword. It's very closely related in style and progression, almost to say it's a spiritual successor.