I was greeted by an intro that was heavy on Amiga "retroness" and short on creative writing skills. The text tells of a world where humans are screwed because they don't have mana energy, but all other races do and thus must commit to the life of slaves. It feels very much like an allegory to the indentured servitude of the lower classes in a modern day capitalistic society, but all that seems coincidental when the next few screens reveal how humans are killed "whenever" their villages are discovered in the wild (as if it's a random occurrence rather than a conscious effort by the dictators to quell rebellion) and only decide to fight back when, after a particularly perculiar raid, "particular" villagers are kidnapped rather than the entire village ransacked and murdered. I assume it's hard to find good writers or translators in Brazil, so with that in mind I continued into the game. You're tossed into a world that looks like the combination of 80's game resolutions with 90's game color depth, capturing (or just chasing) the same art style of games like Dead Cells or Kingdom. The animations are smooth, the silhouettes of enemies clearly delineate their type and they all cleverly telegraph their attacks and I was looking forward to the vaunted skill-based combat. Apparently, "skill-based combat" simply means "we didn't use random numbers when calculating damage", as you're essentially confined to a Binding of Isaac-esque control scheme with the addition of a dodge button. Hardly a read, dodge, parry and punish style you'd see when other developers haughtily profess their combat system. They combine it with a random dungeon generator that is rife with dead ends (because those dead ends might be passsages in *other* run-throughs!) and rooms full of the *same* enemy configurations each time (this is what they call the "handcrafted room" experience). It very much feels like a game straight out of a game jam with a few months of "polish", unremarkable and overpriced.
