Katanaut

A hidden gem. Absolutely love the aesthetic and art design. If you are a fan of cosmic horror (and roguelikes) I think you will very much enjoy this game. I also really like the story of it and how it progresses through the different warps (difficulties). Anyways cosmic horror is goated and the devs nailed it gameplay is good

The action feels smooth and rewarding from the very beginning. I enjoy how every run gives me a chance to improve, whether it’s reacting faster, making better decisions, or simply surviving a little longer. It’s the kind of game that keeps pulling me back for another attempt.

As someone who enjoys roguelites, I think this game has a really satisfying gameplay loop.

✅

Скучная нарезка плотных полуафк овощей

It’s an ok game and I get why people enjoy the dead space vibe too and the Katana Zero vibes, but… it’s a temu Dead Cells. People here in reviews get annoyed when you’re comparing it to dead cells “it doesn’t play like dead cells”. No. It does. Just not as well. I get that it’s going for something different, I respect that, but different doesn’t meant good. I wish I could give “mehh” vs negative, but can’t do positive and negative is closer to my feelings. I can’t remember last time I wanted to like a game this much and just didn’t. The vibes are alright, who doesn’t like some cosmic horror…The combat and movement had this odd “slippery” and light feel like your character is not connected to the world. It makes it feel like a flash game (if you’re old like me). So you run and spam the sword and that’s most of it. It also does the cardinal sin of having a very unsatisfying base gun. Other guns are better, but why? Why make the base pistol so useless and unfun? It’s as box standard roguelike as you expect, nothing wrong with that, but there’s so many better ones to pick. I got it off reddit rougelike dev post, on sale. I don’t regret it, but can’t say it made me want to spend time with it. Every time I play it I wished i wasn’t. So that’s not a good sign.

Pretty much every aspect(exept for music and visuals) felt either lackluster or outright bad. 2/3 or more of your main weapon dmg is locked behind grindy progression (to max out katana you need to get like 40-50 resorses which drops aproximatly 5 per run (if you don't play on highest difficulty)) and there is 9 such katanas. Not to mention you also need 10-20 of those resorses to get your +health, +healing charges upgrades, etc. Keep in mind that is rouge-like, the genre which point is make every run feel different. But you can't run higher difficulties with new weapons cose base versions of some of them are outright garbage. Also the balancing is questinable to say the list: 9th katana has a perk which allows you to endlessly stack +dmg per kill, so you can run around oneshoting everything from 1st zone (including gimick elites having 10 times more hp than final boss). But there is also katana which entire point that it let's you oneshot everything EXEPT BOSSES AND ELITES (you just get double dmg vs those), but you are also getting one-shoted. Which is practicly the beforementioned katana but with downsides, and not working for half of the game (At last difficulty where there can be more than 2/3 of enemies as elites. So this katana is outright worse than regular option there). The only reason to ever use this katana if you are speedruing for top leaderbord and skipping everything. Unrelated to those two there is elemental katana in arcenal wich, in it base form,deals -2x dmg than any other katana with gimick that it can half-as interupt enemy attacks and costing 3x stamina per swing in it's base version. Base skills/perks include OP time-slow which makes you attack faster and making you dealth 50% more dmg on top of that if you get another base perk(+crit one), Dodge-iframe multiplayer making your dodge i-frames from hades-like to beyoud god tier where you can chain attack after them and still having i-frames. Shield offhand that gives you shield from one hit which recharges faster that you take dmg. Basicly unlocking half of the game's arcenal making your runs harder to win due to diluting the item pool from those Unbalaced things. Talking about dodges - the whole game is basicly endless diarea of mobs you can have 10 enemies on one platform, but you genunly don't care about it beacouse you just spam dodge-atack and nothing can hit you. The only times you get hit in this game is either you jumped from off-screen into enemy that atacks with no wind-up the instant it agroes or elite "shivfiend" which agroes from off screen and jumps on you while you can't see the "!" which suppose to make indicate someones' atack (becouse it was off screen) That mindless dodge-atack gameplay tho made me realy enjoy the Souls-like storytelling (a/k/a everybody just gives you few words and you don't know the whole picture), becouse reading a few words and guesing was the only time my brain was at least half-active playing i-frame simulator. But, despite me liking it, i think that whole world lacked depth(or i just blind) In my opinion bosses of first sector despite havin 2-3 atacks are vastly more intersting then any other bosses (exept final boss from last difficulty which is at least visualy interesting the first few fights). Even tho rest of the bosses have more "dangerous" and "rich" moveset you still have billion of i-frames and ignoring any theortical boss rhythm. Anyway tho, those bosses spend half the boss-fight time either teleporting/charging/flying so there is no rhythm to begin with.