Cathedral

I've played this game for almost 40 hours over the past two weeks, so I feel like I've given it a good run. That being said, I can't honestly give this game a thumbs up. As a metroidvania there are some glaring issues. In metroidvania games the player can backtrack to pickup upgrades that will help them progress. But in this game the upgrades are so minute, they are almost non-existent. Such as.... 1% increase in weapon, 1% increase in shield... for a total of 4% increase in both. I mean, come tf on. You grind for gold to buy these minute upgrades in the store, and after three upgrades at three different stores you essentially run out of upgrades to buy, and you are left with tens of thousands of gold just sitting in the bank, rotting away. What is the point? The upgrades don't help, and you need help as the game progresses because it gets INSANELY hard towards the end. It makes no sense... the game plays through at a constant level of difficulty, until you get to the 2nd to the last l...

Gameplay wise Cathedral is fine. Comabt, movement, enemies (for the most part), and bosses are just fine. Where the game drops the ball is in its level design. And by God does it turn into an absolutely unpleasant slog. The level design problems are as follows: Big map with poor interconnection between areas (Lots of unpleasant backtracking) Over abundance of overly complex rooms (Think Castlevania clock tower sans medusa heads) Too many rooms with too many enemies Lack of check/save points later in the game (Even more backtracking if you die or want to quit) You can only change some of your movement/puzzle solving abilities at shrines (More backtracking) I finally gave up at the Desolate Mine. An area that's dark, has no map, almost pitch black, and has infinitely respawning enemies that can shoot at you trough walls and off screen. I just did not want to be in the game anymore after that.

Its not a bad game, but really needs some love from the developers. The lack of an item to warp back to a town or different statues later in the game really hurts it's potential for speed running. The difficulty curve is also a little high with enemy stats feeling unbalanced later in the game. Enemies do way too much damage and take to many hits to defeat. I want to 100% this game and achievements, but there's no way I'm playing the game a second time and not buying armor upgrades. I'm guessing in the last few area's then everything becomes a one hit kill on you, and that's just not fun.

I'm probably not softlocked, but boy it sure feels like it. Wandered around for an hour trying to find progression and after one too many pitfalls that required me to do the same three rooms over again (and again and again and again), I wish I played this when I first bought it because it'd be a refund. It's obvious it wants to go for the retro vibes, including difficulty, but I value my gaming time more and more as I get older and don't feel like bashing my head against the wall looking for the one block I didn't break or whatever the heck it is I missed. Feels pretty crap to have only realistically played this game for an hour, before an hour worth of retracing my steps did absolutely nothing. I don't know, maybe I'm just an idiot and didn't see the obvious thing but the constant backtrack loops for a missed jump is really irritating.

I had a pretty bad time with this one overall. It doesn't commit too many egregious sins, sure the music can get annoying and the end-game feels like a disjointed add-on - but really it just doesn't do all that much particularly well. I wanted to have a good time with it but sadly it wasn't to be.