Marrow

I only played for twenty-two minutes before checking out. It looks nice and the music is good. Unfortunately it has a checkpoint save system and is incredibly dark and hard to see anything. You also cannot see your health without pressing a button and I guess you have a limited supply of "checking your health"? So you don't know how careful you have to be or if you should go back to a checkpoint. Checkpoint save systems belong in the past. I have limited time and limited patience for having to do something over and over again because of a checkpoint. Also, you have to hit a two key combo to exit the game? I just alt-tabbed and quit it from there. Anyway, I wasn't having fun so I quit. If you have more time and patience for this sort of thing you may very well enjoy it.

Marrow is incredibly hard, in a lot of ways due to obtuse design, obnoxious enemy placements and terrible visibility, the ability to see your remaining grit and clarity being a limited use thing feels really bad early on, but by about halfway through, if you've been exploring properly you'll start to feel like you have so many uses that it won't bother you anymore. the lack of a map is also overwhelming at first, but can be lessened by drawing your own map or making notes. The Visuals, sound design and setting are insanely good, doing a great job of making it feel like you are slowly descending into a location beyond human understanding, where people went too far. the bosses are, in my opinion, not very good. largely requiring you to brute force or just stand waiting for it to be possible for you to interact with the fight and almost all of them have attacks/random enemy spawns that make them just not fun overall despite all of the issues the game has, all the pain and suffering and misery it caused me, I came out having really enjoyed the experience, its a hard game to recommend, but if you think you can look past the flaws and go in knowing that some parts of the game are going to be really not fun, then I would definitely recommend it

I bought this game at a steep discount for one reason - I owe it to the author, because I was able to enjoy the game in its entirety, effortlessly, thanks to DoshDoshington's extraordinarily deep-dive playthrough on YT - and the developer deserves it. The game threw me back to 1989, when I played Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga - a game that struck a very similar painful yet artistic vein.

I'm not sure I would really recommend this game to everyone. I mostly give a thumps up because I think the dev had a vision, that would not be very popular, but stick with it. And I think it's more commendable than anything else. For the game itself? The enemies and world design is pretty cool. Music is suprisingly good most of the time. Sounds design is unique and memorable. But it's really hard. It's also very not clear where you need to go. A map would have been nice (there is a guide with an hand drawn map that is very useful if you are stuck). Some places are very weirdly design (reservoir save point is so absurdly hard and isolated, you should almost avoid it). And the last boss can kiss my ***. A memorable but janky experience.

If you ever wanted to get punished for trying to play the game, with clunky controls, piss-poor combat, metroidvania/dark souls checkpoint/save system WITHOUT a map to navigate, HP bar that isn't visible at all times (you have to press F to see it, and then it goes on magical cooldown, which is also non-visible), zero story (like seriously - nothing, not even an obtuse introduction) - then oh boy are you in luck, because MARROW ticks all the aforementioned boxes! A game designed by someone who knows ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about game design, that isn't fun, has a monotonous soundtrack that goes on and on and on... even IF the theme of weird (almost-Lovecraftian) horror is there (in terms of art, and barely), all the other negatives I listed makes it a no-buy for anyone who wants to actually stay sane and not descend into madness for real - even at deep, deeeep discount - do not buy!

The game is so dark you can't see platforms, the enemies are invisible, you can only see your health once, enemies stunlock. etc. This game is pure frustration. Avoid it.

恐怖的氛围很到位，但我看不懂它在说啥玩的我很疑惑