Kharon's Crypt - Even Death May Die

Kharon’s Crypt is so original, polished, and just oozing with atmosphere. One of the greatest games I’ve ever played. It is a top-down Metroidvania where you play as Death trying to escape captivity. You work your way through a giant dungeon - imagine a Zelda dungeon but as an entire game. Coming from someone who struggles with top-down games, this one changed everything for me. The gameplay is excellent. On top of gaining abilities in a traditional Metroidvania fashion, you also inhabit the corpses of your enemies to gain their utility as well. The dungeon has puzzles, incredible boss battles, riddles, and secrets everywhere. I played this over the course of a few months, with a total play time of 44 hours to get 104% completion (out of 113%). It is MASSIVE. I can’t think of a single complaint. A couple optional puzzles stumped me, but that was the only bit of healthy! frustration I felt. This game is an absolute masterpiece, criminally overlooked, and is an absolute must play.

Kharon's Crypt is similar in concept to the 90s Jaleco arcade game Avenging Spirit, where you also played as a ghost that possessed enemies to utilize their skills to traverse stages. Adding a Zelda spin to that formula helps elevate it beyond your typical Zeldalike, with clever puzzles and even an equipment system to keep things fresh. The bestiary entries and short stories you pick up are also intriguing!

I wanted to like the game but the game does not respect your time at all and have too much backtracking / jumping through loop to solve puzzles. Once you possess a monster means you have to backtrack and repossess another monster if you lose the body which is made even more annoying by the labyrinth nature of dungeons with one way passageways and such. P.S. bosses HP is too much

This is a really great game that does a lot of new and interesting things and does them well. It has a great, spooky vibe and has some dark world building behind it. Towards the end, I was getting more and more aggravated by little issues that added up, and I think if I didn't beat the boss in a single go, I might have a vastly different feeling about the game. But in spite of those issues, I enjoyed it and will recommend it to fans of Metroidvanias and top-down Zelda games. Pros: + You have an interesting mechanic where you play as the specter of Death, and are weak and intangible in your shade form. All you can do in that form is float over and through obstacles, stun enemies, and possess them. Once you possess a body, depending on the body, you have some unique attacks and abilities, can pick up treasure, and use items. It makes the game a bit easier than it would be otherwise because if you take enough damage to destroy the body you inhabit, you are still a shade with full health and just need to survive until you can take another body. Body swapping plays a pretty important part of the game and the puzzles + Some of the best 2D Zelda-style puzzles out there. It reminds me of the GameBoy Color Oracle of Ages/Seasons where you whole dungeon is a puzzle and you need to check the map, navigate it carefully, and manage to bring the right thing to the right place to move on. A lot of the puzzles might be a bit familiar, but a lot feel like fresh takes on that kind of puzzle. And there are a ton of secrets. + Challenging (but not too challenging) boss fights. Big boss fights have a trick to them like the best kind of Zelda bosses. You have to solve them as well as avoid getting hit and giving as good as you get. They aren't super tough, since it's easy to survive as a shade and you just have to stay alive until you can snatch another body. I beat every boss on my first or second try. + A lot of secrets. This game really makes you scratch your head to find everything. You'll find a room accessible by possessing a mouse and find a chest in there. But you need hands to open a chest, so you need to get a body with hands in there. How do you do that? If you're observant, there's a way. I scoured the map and only got 85% out of 113%. Unfortunately, I'm not going to try and get everything. More on that below. Some things that annoyed me: -No fast travel. For a game that is challenging to navigate as this one, not having fast travel is a real pain. If you didn't solve a puzzle three floors ago, all you can do it walk the winding way back there on foot. Sometimes you'll have to re-solve puzzles as you go, or swap bodies to clear specific obstacles. Luckily you don't *have* to backtrack much, each couple floors are self-contained and once you move on, revisiting those floors is only for the completionists who want every thing they can find. But since these games usually cater to completionists, and so does this one with an achievement for finding 113%, it is a pain. -Having to swap bodies can be a pain. Often puzzles require a certain body to solve them. And the bodies you inhabit are somewhat fragile. If your body dies and one isn't available, sometimes you have to travel back several rooms to find a new suitable one. Often the game will accommodate this with infinitely spawning creatures in certain rooms, but not always. Also there are enemies who will pretend to be pots and bushes and will charge at you and explode. These pretty much are just the devs saying "F-you" to the players. - Saving requires a special item that is consumed on use. It's not too bad as far as these things go, there are a number to be found and every store sells them. Each scroll you buy gets a little more expensive than the last but I was in the final area and had plenty of money to spend so it was never really a problem, but it was kind of a pain. There were times when I saved out of desperation while possessing a body with just a couple hit points. If I wanted to then abandon this body and grab another one with full health and weapons, I would have to burn another scroll to do so. This will never not be a downside for me. - These three things combine to make the game more tedious than it needs to be. I can't just open the game, warp to an old area, look for items and secrets I missed for 5-15 minutes, and save and quit. I think if these things weren't so annoying, the game would be 9.5/10. Instead it's closer to an 8-8.5/10. Still recommend it, but I'm probably not going to try for all the secrets or play it again. - Also, the final boss fight was annoying. Not super difficult or challenging, but annoying. It was one of those bullet hell style fights where there were only a few points of vulnerability. It went on for too long imo. I didn't feel happy I beat it, but relieved I wouldn't have to try again. All in all, the good outweighs the bad by a good margin. These annoyances only keep it from being a "must play" imo. If you like old-school games, including their annoyances, this is a great one to play.

No soy nada aficionado a escribir reseñas, incluso si involucran a videojuegos que han sido trascendentes para mí. Pero ciertamente, me daría mucha rabia que una obra a la que se ha puesto tanto mimo y que a todas luces está tan inteligentemente diseñada, pasase un poco sin pena ni gloria. Un juego con claras reminiscencias a Oracle of Seasons/Ages de la Game Boy Color, con una banda sonora muy bonita (preciosa de hecho, en el último nivel), que sabe medir perfectamente los tiempos, exponer su argumento de manera muy original, y que pule muchos aspectos con potencial de sus predecesores. Muy recomendado. Para mí 10/10 (poned TP´s eso sí, que la muerte está mayor para subir y bajar escaleras)

Oftenly, I take a look at all those modern retro games on the Steam and think "man, those look half-baked" --- and I was fortunately surprised that Kharon's is not one of those. Kharon's may look like just one more Zelda homage, but it's actually a game with very competent design where you will be facing puzzles 90% of its time. If you are one of those guys that love finding secret rooms, hidden chests and collect lore pages, Kharon's will be a joy to play. The combat in this game is intentionaly a bit janky, you need to time attacks and from which direction you will be attacking otherwise enemies will deflect with their weapons and shields. Bosses are enjoyable puzzle battles that need to be defeated with the use of specific items and strategies. To be fair, there are some cons: there's a hefty amount of backtracking because the puzzles are many, the dungeon floors are big, there's no fast travel and many times you need to bring a certain monster body to a room for the solution. [b]As for the difficulty of its puzzles --- here's my score system: [/b] [b]10 - La Mulana[/b] - The royal crown. The type of game that is incredibly hard to beat, with a strong chance that you may give up halfway or be forced to use an walkthrough, PLUS it got very hard gameplay, enemies and bosses. MISSABLE ITEMS. [b]8~9 - Talos Principle, Mist[/b] - Properly lectures you how the puzzles work, slowly ramps up and by its end every single one of you Neurons need to be activated. Can be beaten without solving all puzzles, but got a lot of incredibly challenging optional content. [b]6~7 - Isles of Sea & Sky, old Sierra games like The Dig and the Gabriel Knight [/b] Will get you brain working, puzzles are fun challenges and you will eventualy make to the end as long as you don't give. [b]1~5[/b] - Stuff for normies [b]EX: Fez, Void Stranger, Animal Well, Tunic[/b] - Requires you to do stuff OUTSIDE of the game, like conjoined community effort, ARG, decrypt codes/radio signals, change your system clock, open the game in a certain date or hour, visit "secret" websites. Can be beaten in a normal way, but you will miss "the core" of the game SUPER SIKRIT ENDINGS. The sort of game for only people that "get it" and this sort of content is probably obtuse, boring or pointless for many. I rate Kharon's Crypt with the difficulty level ranging from 6 to 7, with some of the late game optional challenges achieving an 8. 90% of its puzzles are of the logical format, the type of "use an item on X", "slide those blocks here and here", "match patterns", etc. There's no much need for abstraction of clues, except for one or two rooms. Just be mindful that some challenging puzzles are obligatory to progress and reach the ending. Kharon's Crypt is a quite a jewel of a game and I'm looking forward for what the Dev got next.

Very cool game. Fantastic art and some cool gameplay concepts. Highly recommended.