A fateful night of sorrow and ancient magic changed the life of a young child forever, and with it, everything else as mankind knew it. For 9 long years, the world has been submerged in the deepest of shadows, robbing every object and living creature of their color, their joy, and most impor...
A fateful night of sorrow and ancient magic changed the life of a young child forever, and with it, everything else as mankind knew it. For 9 long years, the world has been submerged in the deepest of shadows, robbing every object and living creature of their color, their joy, and most importantly, hope.
Many brave souls have tried to venture inside the corrupting depths of Talos Castle, a long-abandoned orphanage from which the curse stemmed. All have failed, except for one. Armed with little other than her halberd and sheer nerve, Europa’s daunting quest is clear: enter the castle, find the source of darkness, and return color to the lands before it is too late.
However, this adventure is not for Europa to face alone. In her most desperate hour, Europa encounters Apino, a cute magical bear with the ability to heal, cleanse the corruption and protect his allies.
While exploring the castle, Apino can shoot powerful projectiles at enemies, open locked doors and shield Europa from ranged attacks.
Enhance your battle prowess by acquiring elemental armors. Master the might of lightning, water, earth and fire to defeat a vast assortment of enemies.
Use the elements to your advantage to travel the map dynamically, surprise bosses while you change armors on the fly and perform strong combos. Obtain special abilities to swim against waterfalls, travel underground tunnels or glide through warm air currents to access hidden locations and uncover their secrets.
Meet enigmatic composers that will aid you in your mission. With the special appearance of Michiru Yamane and Norihiko Hibino, both as NPCs and composers of several tracks tuned to 432hz, a soothing frequency used in what’s known as healing music. And there is more to music than meets the eye. Hidden bosses with musical attack patterns lurk in the shadows ready to strike. In fact, music is the binding thread that brings gameplay and storytelling together; from collecting musical notes, to performing a healing lullaby to restore your health, music is all but the soul of the game.
I’m about three hours in so far. Despite the short playtime, several aspects of the game have already caught my attention — it’s visually stunning, has some really interesting gameplay ideas, creative design, and an engaging story. It’s been a great experience so far. Highly recommended for fans of Metroidvanias.
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.
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.