Sundered is one of the Metroidvanias I will always come back to. It's beautiful, eerie, fluid, and has a difficulty scale.
On that last point:
As someone nearing my first half-century, I don't have so much time to dedicate to git gud like I used to, and my reactions are not great. I love games that are more accessible like this. I will leave the owning metroidvanias at challenginig difficulties to my daughter, and enjoy being able to succeed at my own level!
this game is pretty to look at with the cel shading and is really fun to play once you get used to the progression and mechanics of it. the lovecraftian aspect slowly creeps into the game and is pretty awesome!
Replayed it like six times on another platform. It's not without flaws, but it's beautifully animated, the progression is satisfying, the tech tree is varied enough to make each playthrough at least somewhat different, and you've got a few different endings as incentive to do those extra playthroughs.
Overall, a solid "Metroidvania" I'd recommend to any fan of the genre. (Tangentially, on the genre name, some have suggested "Search-Action" but that's stupid; I would however be open to "Exploraction.")
picked this up on sale. fun platformer game, as others have said, roguelike metroidish game. great graphics. good sound. works just fine on my MacBook Air M1 (2020). if you like this genre, definitely worth picking up.
I was a little put off at first by the sometimes uninteresting generated rooms and I worried that the overwhelming enemy waves would be a death-grind until you had earned enough meta progression points to be able to weather them. Thankfully neither one is a core gameplay element and after the first boss fight I was hooked.
The Metroidvania skill progressions are very evenly doled out and keep the game fresh and interesting. Each one lets you access areas you couldn't before, as expected, but also lets you selectively ignore the would-be grindy parts of the level you just conquered. The inevitable backtracking always increased in pace and never became a slog.
The combat is one of the best parts of the game. Your character upgrades are helpful, as expected, but the game also constantly pushes you to do better as a player -- more combos, better timing, better use of abilities until they become ingrained (and often essential for the challenges in the next section). If you enjoyed the combo-heavy, dogee-heavy aspects of the combat in Guacamelee you'll definitely enjoy this too. (To set expectations, this game doesn't really have the same tricky platforming as well though.)
The story, art, setting, and ambiance are all fantastic. I was totally invested in the dark and gloomy setting and my character. A few tense areas (and every boss fight) got me legitimately worked up.
