Amazing game! Pretty tough to get all the puzzles completely solves without trial and error, but amazing way to tell a classic maritime fiction story with a mystery twist.
Slain: Back From Hell is a tough but awesome hack and slash platformer. From the gritty faux-pixel art graphics to the pumping heavy metal soundtrack this game is a joy to look at and listen to. The backgrounds, characters and their animation are brimming with setpieces and cool ideas. The game is tough as nails in some places bet never gets frustrating due to the careful placement of checkpoints. Some sections take some more tries than others but the game offers the perfect balance between difficulty and reward. In a time where the roguelike genre reigns supreme in indie games, I was pleasantly surprised that this game offers a manually designed experience that offers a reward from skilled play that is not lessened by unfair chance encounters. The controls are pretty tight, but could be a smidge tighter. Playing this game on a Playstation controller, I found it necessary to switch to D-Pad controls instead of thumbstick because the game would frequently register a thumbstick release as a short impulse in the opposite direction (missing dead-zone would be my guess), which caused the hero to turn the other way. D-Pad solves this problem though and for a classic game this would be the recommended method of control anyway. The gameplay itself is super fun, in part because the sound effects are very well designed and each hit has a nice crunch to it. There aren't a lot of attacks to choose from but the normal attack chain, the charge attack and the mana shot offer a good range of experimenting to find the right tactic for each combination of enemies. The elemental attacks that are added later in the game require to find each enemy's weakness so there is a good amount of discovery all in all without too much fluff. All in all Slain: Back From Hell was a big surprise for me as I didn't have very big expectations. It has become a personal favourite right away.
