Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Review (part1/3) – Having just come off the back of playing Blasphemous and Ender Lilies – two notoriously hard souls-like Metroidvanias, I thought I could put myself through one more hard game. This looked hard so I booted it up. It is hard. But on another level. It’s way more punishing.
For starters, your health is tiny and you have one health refill through the majority of the game. I only gained a second health refill near the end of the game. You can only take a few hits before you die. Which is really frustrating when I’m trying to explore. I found myself having to traverse from the same checkpoint over and over in almost every area. Just to get slightly further or to take a path I hadn’t taken yet. It doesn’t help that the checkpoints are so far away, and you have no idea when the next checkpoint will be. You might have gone right near one but there is a fork in the road so you end up going past it. That is typical of Metroidvanias but because the map system is so awful, you have no idea if one of the paths will likely be a save point. You see, you don’t see anything on the map until you find a light beacon that will show an area of the map. Sometimes you can clear a whole area of the map without seeing the light beacon and only getting it later when you get a new power up. Having no map when exploring a new area is a crap idea. At least you can mark points on the map to clear later. Although there is a weird UI decision that when you bring up the menu for what colour circle you want to place on the map, you can’t see the yellow one because your character icon is a black circle on it overrides the place of the yellow circle. The other thing that hinders exploration is the lack of fast travel points. You do get them but they are massively far away from anywhere. You can find yourself in places where it will take ages to get to the nearest fast travel point, all the way having to risk dying over and over in the same places you have already explored.
The endurance metre is another bad idea borrowed from Souls games. This gives you limited hits or dodges before you have to stop and wait for it to recharge. But really limited. 2 hits from a powerful weapon and you’ll be lucky if you have enough spare to make a dodge when they retaliate. This really kills the pacing and is especially tiring when you are trying to dodge past a group of enemies only to get to the last couple with no way to dodge them.
This game relies on parries though. In most games, this is a choice but it is heavily encouraged here because swinging your weapon takes ages because your stamina runs out so quickly and the enemies are like tanks. When you parry, you get to absorb a decent chunk of the enemy’s energy (sometimes) and also absorb some of their health to fill up your health vial (sometimes). This mean you have to choose to try to kill an enemy with a parry so you can fill up your vial for a health refill later, but this risks getting hit, which is a massive risk to take with the amount of health they take off you. It’s hard to time it too. Especially on new enemies. It’s very annoying dying on a normal enemy when you could have just killed them with your sword. Parrying the bosses is absolutely vital too, but you never get any health refill (breath) so you don’t get the opportunity to refill your heath vial in the whole fight.
(part 2 of review continued in the description of the next video)
Rating - 6/10
Difficulty - 10/10
Played on PC
No cheats used
Some Deaths cut out
DONATE
buymeacoffee.com/retro2vr
paypal.me/Tinkstonten
BTC - 3Q9mg5pjT4YZgAvHQha6izYDrX3nbJqMPZ
ETH - 0xb2ed8dcbb290beb31ff2f25c6c023b10ee7afb91
MATIC - 0x9051a87257812febda27691fc84bdd54500eb26f
DOGE - DL3afUvT2UxhkoXsUZNXZS4nwxJny3s4Zm
#grime #grimevideogame #grimegameplay
Review (part1/3) – Having just come off the back of playing Blasphemous and Ender Lilies – two notoriously hard souls-like Metroidvanias, I thought I could put myself through one more hard game. This looked hard so I booted it up. It is hard. But on another level. It’s way more punishing.
For starters, your health is tiny and you have one health refill through the majority of the game. I only gained a second health refill near the end of the game. You can only take a few hits before you die. Which is really frustrating when I’m trying to explore. I found myself having to traverse from the same checkpoint over and over in almost every area. Just to get slightly further or to take a path I hadn’t taken yet. It doesn’t help that the checkpoints are so far away, and you have no idea when the next checkpoint will be. You might have gone right near one but there is a fork in the road so you end up going past it. That is typical of Metroidvanias but because the map system is so awful, you have no idea if one of the paths will likely be a save point. You see, you don’t see anything on the map until you find a light beacon that will show an area of the map. Sometimes you can clear a whole area of the map without seeing the light beacon and only getting it later when you get a new power up. Having no map when exploring a new area is a crap idea. At least you can mark points on the map to clear later. Although there is a weird UI decision that when you bring up the menu for what colour circle you want to place on the map, you can’t see the yellow one because your character icon is a black circle on it overrides the place of the yellow circle. The other thing that hinders exploration is the lack of fast travel points. You do get them but they are massively far away from anywhere. You can find yourself in places where it will take ages to get to the nearest fast travel point, all the way having to risk dying over and over in the same places you have already explored.
The endurance metre is another bad idea borrowed from Souls games. This gives you limited hits or dodges before you have to stop and wait for it to recharge. But really limited. 2 hits from a powerful weapon and you’ll be lucky if you have enough spare to make a dodge when they retaliate. This really kills the pacing and is especially tiring when you are trying to dodge past a group of enemies only to get to the last couple with no way to dodge them.
This game relies on parries though. In most games, this is a choice but it is heavily encouraged here because swinging your weapon takes ages because your stamina runs out so quickly and the enemies are like tanks. When you parry, you get to absorb a decent chunk of the enemy’s energy (sometimes) and also absorb some of their health to fill up your health vial (sometimes). This mean you have to choose to try to kill an enemy with a parry so you can fill up your vial for a health refill later, but this risks getting hit, which is a massive risk to take with the amount of health they take off you. It’s hard to time it too. Especially on new enemies. It’s very annoying dying on a normal enemy when you could have just killed them with your sword. Parrying the bosses is absolutely vital too, but you never get any health refill (breath) so you don’t get the opportunity to refill your heath vial in the whole fight.
(part 2 of review continued in the description of the next video)
Rating - 6/10
Difficulty - 10/10
Played on PC
No cheats used
Some Deaths cut out
DONATE
buymeacoffee.com/retro2vr
paypal.me/Tinkstonten
BTC - 3Q9mg5pjT4YZgAvHQha6izYDrX3nbJqMPZ
ETH - 0xb2ed8dcbb290beb31ff2f25c6c023b10ee7afb91
MATIC - 0x9051a87257812febda27691fc84bdd54500eb26f
DOGE - DL3afUvT2UxhkoXsUZNXZS4nwxJny3s4Zm
#grime #grimevideogame #grimegameplay
