9 Years of Shadows

The game's pixel art and music are pretty good, as is the animation, and I love the armor change system.While the game is short on gameplay, the price is worth it. The story sure got my attention, but there is something lacking to exploration since this is a linear game, you can visit previous areas to get some missing collectibles, but this is not that necessary, unless you're going for 100% completion.  I hope to see more from this studio or even a sequel if possible. 

So someone cared when they made this game, that much is evident. But they didn't stick the landing. The game is a pixel art metroidvania, but fails at a lot of it's core mechanics. As a metroidvania, it doesn't reward exploration, the path forward is always obvious, and there's only a few places where you can go back to get some pickups you couldn't reach before. There's an upgrade system that requires said pickups, and for you to spend coins that you find scattered around, but the coins are so plentiful that it's never a decision point, you find more coins in the first hour than you'll spend in the entire game. The fighting is weak, your moves are slow and can't cancel out any of your attack animations and find yourself locked into attacks in the time it takes for enemies to do a windup animation and execution, and it just feels a bit cheap. The health system in this game is a bit different, where they do try and do something a bit innovative, but I personally ended up not liking it. So you've only got 2 hp, but you also have 'energy' and as long as you have energy, nothing will actually take away your hp. And if you do run out of energy, you can do a quick time event to try and restore some, or take a longer action to restore some health. The problem is the window of the QTE is really tight, and in any boss combat, the longer health restore is either completely useless because you don't have time to perform it, or absolutely breaks the fight giving you effectively unlimited HP. And also, even outside of boss fights, a lot of basic enemies will absolutely destroy your shield in one or two hits, basically making this system moot. This leads to weird difficulty swings with parts feeling trivially easy and other parts that are just frustratingly hard. The epitome of this is the last boss fight, where the game basically removes the healing system you've had for the whole game, and decides to have a superhard bossfight like nothing else you've seen in the game.

Awasome gameplay, beautifull art, horrible healing system. I'm still interested for Mariachi Legends.

9 years of Shadow fut une belle surprise pour moi J’avais pu testé à l’époque la démo et j'étais bien hypé par ma découverte. Une direction artistique magnifique , coloré et bourré de clin d’oeil aux mangas et animés ( surtout saint seiya ) Un gameplay original et qui fonctionne bien. Il faudra juste un petit temps d'adaptation pour le maîtriser pleinement car la mort est si vite arrivée… Mention spécial au boss de fin qui m'a bien fait rager…. Le level design est plutôt classique , ca manque un peu de variété et on fait un toujours la meme chose a force et les ennemis ne réagissent pas trop L'héroïne est vraiment réussie et on a vraiment envie d’en découvrir davantage sur elle et le lore. Les personnages secondaires sont quant à eux un peu gadget et ne sont là que pour des quêtes contre des boss ou des upgrades. Justement l’histoire est relativement simple et facile à comprendre même si ça manque de véritable rebondissement. La durée de vie du jeu est un peu courte à mon goût pour un metroidvania, il faut compter un peu moins de 10h de jeu pour en venir à bout et à 100% Un metroidvania assez classique et qui possède quelques maladresses, mais qui a du charme.

the last boss is a trash fest. Literally designed by trolls who don't play their own game. I would've finished the game and left a great rewiew. Instead I was assaulted by liter braindead design. You want to be in a spefic armor but they've placed stupid objects that force you into another form in a place that is so bad and you are constantly hit by stupid attacks. Worst worst worst design. FIre all of them.