It has the makings of a pretty decent game, but it’s clear that the early access period still has plenty of bumps that need ironing out before the final product. The story is about a soldier who survives an attack on his ship by an octopus and ends up on the shore of a country that is at war. There’s quite a lot of talking with people you encounter in the nearby village, and you can select different topics to learn more information, but there’s no quest log to keep track of anything.
What’s more important is the gameplay, and although you can’t get away with simply mashing the sword button to defeat everything, you still have plenty of mobility and options for dealing with enemies, while also having enough room to make a mistake here and there. However, you really need to watch out when jumping, because falling into holes hurts a lot and takes a huge chunk out of your health bar.
Jumping feels pretty nice because you can combine it with a dash that works as an air dash to give you more distance. As a matter of fact, simply jumping is never enough, and you always have to use an air dash to clear a jump. The only problem with jumping happens when you jump and push into a wall too soon, which causes the character to stick to it. You need to jump straight up first to gain some height and then push in the direction you want to go.
On the ground, the dash lets you go through enemies and their attacks. There is some timing and distance involved because there is contact damage and barely any knockback, which is why you can’t just stand in one spot and attack with the sword. There is no stamina cost for attacking, but you do use stamina when dashing. Fortunately, it recharges pretty quickly, and the same goes for mana, which is used to cast spells.
The first spell, Fireball, already shows you that you can deal with most encounters without much trouble. The reason for this is that enemies only start coming after you when you get several steps away from them. If you are on the other side of the screen, you can simply spam Fireball because they won’t react to it at all. Even if you go into direct combat, most enemies can be killed by using the same strategy of hitting them once, dashing to the other side, hitting them again, and repeating the process.
Enemies die after a few hits and give you experience, while also dropping coins and, more rarely, materials. Both coins and materials are used at the blacksmith to improve your weapons. There are four different materials, ranked by rarity, and you’ll need better materials if you want to upgrade a weapon past a certain threshold.
As for experience, it leads to level ups and gives you points that can be invested at campfires to improve five main stats. Might and Mind increase sword and spell damage respectively, Vitality increases health, Defense reduces the damage you take, and Luck improves your chances of landing critical strikes.
Resting at campfires restores your health, refills your usable health flasks, and respawns enemies, although enemies also respawn whenever you move to another screen. Besides upgrading your character, campfires can also be used for quick travel to any unlocked campfire. This removes a lot of the backtracking that would otherwise be needed to return to the village or town to improve your character.
There is also some customization through gear and runes, which offer different perks when equipped in the four available slots. The first rune, for instance, gives you more coins from enemies. Speaking of loot and gear, you don’t lose anything when you die, so everything you have collected is safe. You do, however, waste time because campfires are spread pretty thin, meaning you’ll have to walk for a while, especially if you die during a boss encounter.
The bosses hit like trucks and can kill you in two or three hits, usually while you’re trying to drink one of the painfully slow potions. On the other hand, some of them can be cheesed. For example, I was able to lead the skeleton boss to some stairs and hit it repeatedly without getting hit back. Sadly, the loot it dropped fell straight through the ground and was lost forever, which was especially annoying after actually managing to beat it that way. There needs to be a balance because the game does a common error seen in most games: easy basic enemies, and then huge difficulty spike with bosses.
The map is pretty basic. It uncovers entire rooms when you enter it the first time, which is sometimes problematic because some are huge. The map also shows the exact layouts of rooms and sections, but it doesn’t show anything important such as treasure, collectibles, or save spots. Treasure can be a bit problematic because chests are often hidden behind fake walls. These walls don’t look any different from the rest of the environment and only disappear when you hit them with your sword, so finding everything can sometimes feel more like randomly swinging at walls than actually exploring.
