Neon Abyss

Just another sidescrolling Roguelite that starts fun, has a neat enough aesthetic, and flubs it in both the end/near-end, and polish department. Honestly, it starts with potential. You don't really put together a build so much as you play around the weapon you had the choice of picking up and decided the stick with. The egg system that spawns familiars is a neat idea that I haven't seen done before, and the passive items are... a cut below Isaac's, but fair enough. But then you have to deal with the Temple system in order to progress through the Managers. Up until now, it was just a matter of going through bosses. It was great! Just beat the bosses, and the biggest of them all were the Managers, whose defeat was your main source of... tenable progress? Doesn't matter. Straightforward, go through the levels. ...but then you have to get to Ares and Athena. Alright, fair enough, same dealio as Devil/Angel room in Isaac. Get hit a lot to get Ares' favor, and eventually his token, open purple doors/chests with your crystals (read: Mana) to start the Wisdom gauge and fill it up with the same as well as beating rooms without taking damage. Except, this game gets very schmuppy, and if you're building up a Wisdom gauge, and ANY bullet hits a Wisdom item, most often a chest, that chest becomes corrupted, for Ares' terrain, and now your Wisdom gauge is COMPLETELY converted to Ares' violence. Fill up either of those bars, and their Temple becomes available to teleport to for a reward. Neat system, what's the problem with it? Well, there's an RNG chance you can find their respective token in there. This token will get you past level 7, where you can go pick a fight with said deities. And both need to be beaten once to 'progress' further. So that's already annoying. ...And then you have to do that again, AND make sure to do it an additional time within their realm so you can go to their Temple to beat their Cursed form, as that's the next step. And after they're beaten, you get taken to the next level, where you're pretty much set up to fight a Titan. So, let's summarize. [list] [*]Start your meter with a purple door/chest, which could very well be placed at the end of the level, which sucks because you need to build up that meter with flawless battles [*]Build up meter for a Temple, with a bar that can be messed with/progress undone if you're going for Athena, like say having a random enemy hit a purple chest [*]RNG to get the token, because that isn't even guaranteed [*][b]Struggle[/b] to start the bar over again, desperately searching for an other purple door/chest as you're already in high level territory where the fights only get tougher and damage taken is doubled [*]Don't go to any challenge rooms because those will actually [b]reduce[/b] your wisdom bar if you get hit in there [*]Avoid as many fights as possible when you've got just enough bar near the end of level 7, because if you go over, you bet you won't gather enough in Athena's domain to get to her Temple for her Cursed fight. [*]All to get to a Titan, Prometheus in my case, that even on Easy (because you bet I had to fall down to it to deal with Cursed Athena's crap) has a ton of area-covering attacks and multi-stage arena changes, [*]All on a level that's reduced to just a shop and a random room, giving you an RNG chance to even get a proper amount of health back after Cursed Athena's fight. [/list] So you're forced to play a certain way only, picking up only weapons that you know won't put you at risk of self-damage and are still competent in a fight, rerolling runs because you know you won't get a second shot at the Temple before level 8 because the first one's RNG decided to not give you a token and the level layout RNG decided to bone you out of even starting a second Wisdom bar until you're near the end. So this ringer the game puts you through, has the gall to then let RNG decided whether the guns or items you get will even be any good at all to begin with. And yeah, the guns are the cornerstone to your build. If you're stuck with something bad, you're in for a bad time. A game like Isaac and (Enter the) Gungeon are punishing and maybe even sadistic, but put your skill on center display as the main reason as to whether you failed or succeeded. In those games, with the right amount of skill, you can make any build work as long as you last long enough. In Neon Abyss, bad RNG and equal design pretends to be that sort sadism, but it's fooling nobody. Enemies are spawned in dickish spots, and wallshooters will move and pop behind platforms, obscuring their appearance until you get hit. Your bullets have a myriad of colors depending on the gun, often making it blend in with enemies' far too easily. And honestly? A ton of the enemies are plain out designed to be annoying. It's one thing to have a teleporting one that claws at you if you don't move. It's another to have a variant that charges at you but will disappear if it saw you looking its way first. Too often do they delay the end of a battle because they stupidly think they can pull a fast one on me. Until they do, in the orgy of bullets and effects of other enemies. This is the sort of thing that a good Q&A team would've sussed out, or one that wasn't being ignored perhaps. OH, and the plot! Did you know that there's basically no plot? Yeah, that's why I was vague on 'progression'. Your plot is literally 'go beat all the managers'. And then sometimes a cutscene happens where this unnamed suit guy makes some vague reference to something video games related, gets told by some rando to put a feature in the game, after which you're then told by his secretary to go beat the Managers a couple of times for some vague currency of which they need 20, after which it gets implemented. And every time this 'plot' advances, you need to go do that again. That's your story. Lore is literally told purely through lore cards or whatever that you buy from a gacha vending machine with a different random currency you sometimes find. It's dull, feels meaningless, and tacked-on. The only real saving grace here is that the game's at least not as bad as Exit The Gungeon, but both put shame on the Roguelite genre that Enter The Gungeon and Isaac helped make great.

傻逼游戏，枪射程还没我尿的远，打个怪还要贴脸，近战更是跟脑瘫一样，收益低的要死，打一个大关攒不到几块钱，商店里面那些东西连个说明都没有，道具配件每次拿到手才发现是鸟用没有的屁货，还有我宁可不要这司马宠物也不要他们在我打架的时候乱跑

Contains many bugs, some of which are 6+ years old. On each of my runs, a bug occurs that completely negates the ability to go down through platforms, forcing me to restart each time.

It looks pretty but that's about it. [b]Spoilers below if you care.[/b] The game has not received an update for an extremely long time, likely because Neon Abyss 2 has released (which I would also not recommend...but I digress). [i]Also don't let my low playtime fool you, I have longer in this game on GOG (85 hours currently). I initially got it there as part of a bundle and then got it here just recently.[/i] [h2]Pros[/h2] [list] [*]The gameplay loop is pretty fast [*]Difficulty mostly comes in the form of challenges. The base gameplay loop is quite simple once you learn enemy and boss patterns [*]Bosses are designed quite well, although learning how to target different bosses is a bit confusing [*]There's a lot of "item variety" (read more on this in the cons section) [*]"The Bar" is quite interesting, you can modify runs quite a lot and the DLC gives you another route to go down. Cards are also pretty cool, allowing for in-game cheats to be obtained via a gacha system. [*]The concept behind unlocks is good and the progression through the unlock tree is reasonable [*]The concept behind secret rooms and alternative rooms is good, although maybe a bit basic at times [*]The visuals are well developed, some of the weapons could use a bit of variety to set them apart but most have active and passive effects that already do that. [*]Item set requirements are maybe not the most well suited but the actual effect is good for most item sets [*]Enemy variety is good, there's a lot of different types and movements [*]Pets are good but the overall ability quality varies heavily. [*]The fandom wiki is pretty useful if you are the type of person to read a wiki to learn about a game although it contains some misinformation here and there about certain item effects and is very sparse on further detail (such as rooms, game mechanics, etc). If you just want to learn about items in a natural in-game way, use the character "R-6" as they have a passive which exposes item descriptions. [/list] [h2]Cons[/h2] [list] [*]Your melee attack is literally useless, the only use is when you get an item that passively provides melee attacks. There is no dedicated melee button and the only way to do it is to get super close to an enemy and while holding the direction towards them tap your attack button. You [u]will[/u] get hit doing this. [*]Keywords are never explained. For example "Jump Marks" are the little markers you get when you jump multiple times before returning to the ground, you would never intuitively know this without getting more jumps. [*]The hit registration for bullets is some of the most infuriating game design I've ever seen. Most enemies will tank far more bullets than they theoretically should be able to, as if they have i-frames. This can be observed while having a high fire-rate weapon and instead choosing to tap-fire. Enemies that should drop armor when chasing you, instead don't, and as such become completely immune to bullets for an extended time before they drop interest and then re-lock on to you where you might get lucky and have their armor drop. If you run into a room shooting, some enemies will die while the vast majority will start out with some i-frames and take no damage for a couple of seconds. [*]Some pets like "Blue Doctor" are common and very effective but others which are uncommon/rare like "Iron Windmill" barely do anything (what a surprise that its a melee one) [*]Eggs are by default capped in the game settings, this is never communicated and as such can ruin some builds if you never notice that picking up new eggs does nothing [*]The platforming is clunky and annoying, some platforms you can seamlessly hold down to go through, others you will stop momentarily on when descending which can throw you off while fighting enemies. [*]Contact damage is the number one form of damage in this game, almost everything deals contact damage...except for a lot of bosses which is quite jarring when you first discover it. [*]The room generation is very predictable, secret rooms are the only exception, but even then its very basic. [*]Room rewards range from nothing at all to a couple of coins and very rarely an item. Special rooms are very hit and miss, you could get a chest that drops a single coin which is very frequent. [*]The arcade games rooms are usually blocked off by a roulette door, where you have an unusually high chance of blowing up the door, preventing access to the arcade game room [*]Item variety is a bit hit and miss, there's some interesting synergies but there seems to be almost no item pools (except for those special side rooms, like the faith rooms) so almost every single item is random [*]There's also many items that do essentially the same thing, yet very few that increase your heart containers which is unfortunate. [*]Some of the achievements are ridiculous. Such as "Key Master - Unlock 999 chests". If the game was fun then maybe it would be reasonable. [*] Most special rooms are quick time events [/list] [h2]Cons: Gamplay Bugs[/h2] This section is continued from "Cons" but goes over things that I consider to be a bug rather than a game design fault [list] [*]Inability to go down through some platforms [*]Item sets sometimes do not activate their effects [*]Eggs sometimes just cease to exist when traveling between rooms [*]Character effects (such as those provided by Fatal Dance) are present during the piano rhythm arcade game which makes it borderline unplayable [*]Normal enemies sometimes refuse to take damage, hardened enemies are even less likely to take damage even when exposed [*]Player created explosions have a really strange hitbox, you can sometimes hit yourself with the Red Dragon and other times the rockets just go straight through you and enemies near you [*]Sometimes when throwing grenades, they don't follow the defined trajectory [*]Secret rooms sometimes don't get opened when throwing a grenade at them [*]Items that prevent contact damage while midair do not work all the time when falling [*]Chests, boxes and other semi-physics objects often spawn partially in the floor [*]Collectibles on the ground can overlap, this is especially common with grenades and hearts. If you have full hearts, and the heart is in front of the grenade you cannot pick up the grenade. If a heart bounces next to a door that requires interaction you cannot open the door because the heart is blocking the interaction [*]Ticket rooms (Level-?) can range from working to fundamentally broken or unplayable. For example Ticket-6 sometimes has the pillar not fire bullets, and it also sometimes just targets the player even if your cursor is in a direction not towards your player. [*]The chrono shift (DLC) route can sometimes skip entire floors, or never allow you to reach the final floor, instead looping all previous floors or just straight up crashing the game. [/list] [h2]Conclusion[/h2] Its a [b]5/10[/b] for me, you could probably play it for a couple hours then delegate it to the bottomless pit of your library never to be seen again.

现在已经非常非常不建议购买。 1.好久都没有更新了，内容很少，玩法非常重复，玩一会就没意思了 2.好久不更新搞2代也不给一代更新

只有捡起来道具才知道效果，使得多选一和商店的场景体验非常差。

The gameplay is fine but after playing for 27 hours there's reasons I don't want to finish. Overall I enjoyed the game because I was using the character that can see descriptions, but as I don't even want to finish it because it's cons are so big and I couldn't find mods to fix them, I wouldn't recommend it to others. - You can't see what an item does unless you choose a specific character or collect a specific RNG item that gives the ability to see item descriptions. Playing a roguelike where you're forced to blindly choose between 2 item names (theres 500+ items) is insane game design. - There's no balance to the economy during a run. You're either constantly starved of gold or items or you got some RNG powerup that gives you far too much. The baseline amount of gold is not balanced to the cost of anything. EG: Clearing a room of enemies will give you 0-3 coins. up to about 7 coins. many doors are locked and require 1-2 keys. 1 key is 30 coins. So unless you get a key or gold enhancing powerup very early in the game you will miss so many powerups you are weaker for the whole 2nd half.