Eldritchvania

Awesome metroidvania where La-Mulana meets H.P. Lovecraft (Call of Cthullu). Strongly recomended to metroidvania fans!

Not really familiar with lovecraftian material but the game is probably faithful to the theme with all the lore you can read about creatures and events. A lot of it is bloat to get to the important stuff for solving puzzles though. Not that I would call most of it a puzzle. Basically a Simon says of doing specific things at specific locations. Lot of running back and forth between puzzle rooms and getting instructions on the opposite side of the map. It is a small game yet very tedious. Not as hard as it's inspiration, La Mulana though. Lot of small frustrations add up sadly with rigid movement, short attack range, bad hitboxes, no fast travel, lack of healing methods, stingy currency system and shops selling QOL features that should be in the game from the beginning. Some of it is solved as you progress (more or less) but too little, too late.

This is the kind of game that, had it come out around the time of Cave Story or La Mulana, would've blown people's minds. It isn't that time, and this game isn't going to blow anyone's mind, but it is a very competent exploration and puzzle game with action that is worth getting through to continue the exploration and puzzles. If that sounds like your jam, then buddy have I ever got a recommendation for you, because at the low low price of $0 you can't beat this value!

Hand drawn art style, challenging puzzles and platforming... i've only just begun my journey but I this game already delivers... and for FREE. You aren't going to find any better bang for your buck than this.

I really enjoy this game—truly! As a Lovecraft fan and a metroidvania lover, I believe this game deserves to be a paid title rather than a free one. It offers a wealth of content, with challenging puzzles that put your skills to the test. I'm amazed by the effort the developers put into it, as well as the stunning artwork. I absolutely love this brilliant little gem of a video game!

Really solid game, I feel like a cheater for not paying for this, congrats to the team that developed this and made it free. Music is good, graphics as well, game has good puzzles.

"Eldritchvania" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is a particularly tedious platformer with hand-drawn/"babby's first Wacom tablet" style drawings for the game assets. Intended to be a Metroidvania with 70 rooms... well, more of a bad thing doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. This wasn't successful on Steam Direct for a slew of reasons we'll get into now. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. This looks a lot like it was designed for consoles, but released on Steam instead by mistake. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this never made it to the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. Even though the game looks pretty bad (and decent visuals are a minimum requirement for any game), we can be fairly sure this is not an asset flip. This is because the game assets look so bad, no self respecting asset creator would publish them. That's a fail. There's also the old adage that those who lack the budget and talent to make their own game assets of any level of quality usually lack the budget and talent to do the rest of the job of game development properly, too. This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam. GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed to appeal to the 130 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? What's the verdict? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.

Great puzzle metroidvania game. Highly recommend (and its free)!