Odallus: The Dark Call

Odallus is a game I should love. It's inspired by my favorite games of all time and looks the part. But unfortunately I found the game to be frustrating and tedious most of the time. Giving it an out-right not-recommended isn't my intention but alas, that's all Steam allows us to give. If possible I'd give it a "mixed" score because despite it's short-comings (of which there are many) I still managed to make it through the game and stayed fairly invested. BUT I am pretty much the prime audience for this sort of game. To the average gamer, I would NOT recommend this game for the following 3 reasons: 1 - The game is jank. Numerous bugs, clunky physics and unfriendly design decisions lead to a frustrating gameplay experience. Firstly, the bugs are aplenty. Visual glitches, collision pop-ins, even freezes I all encountered. But nothing was game breaking and it never crashed once. The worst bug I got was when respawning I was stuck in the floor and couldn't move. I had to quit the stage and come back in - losing progress in the process. When you die, the screen often flashes a few times showing a frame from where you died and where you will respawn, this process looks very janky and indicates that the engine is barely holding it together. You will often spawn in the ground but the game usually pushes you up out of it, sometimes it doesn't. Also I had a funny bug where I died during a boss fight, respawned and re-entered the boss room only for the boss to not reset, it was still attacking as if I was there all along, but it was partially frozen and the camera wouldn't move so I had to leave and come back. As for the physics and or design decisions, the biggest annoyance to me was the inconsistent dash-jumping. Sometimes you have full air control, other times you don't. I couldn't figure out why this occurs, it appears random. What I mean by this is that sometimes you can change direction in the air during a dash jump and other times you cannot. This leads to frustrating platforming and cheap deaths. 2 - Combat is rough. Your main attack is SLOW, with long recovery time. Enemies do NOT react to you hitting them, this means no knockback or stun for them. This prevents you from walking up and attacking an enemy, they will just bulldoze right through you. As you can imagine, this makes combat slow as you have to play very cautiously, only dipping in to attack at the perfect opportunity. That is if you want to bother with killing enemies at all. I ran from most of them as there is little incentive to kill them, especially since they respawn as soon as they re-enter the view (respawning infinitely). You do get some ranged attacks in the form of consumable items you have to BUY with money monsters drop. These help take care of annoying enemies and bosses at a distance, can even trivialize some, but for some odd reason you can't use these items while crouching. If you rely on them a lot you will run out of them quickly and will have to grind for money to restock. This is a considerable problem with boss balance. Since you may use all your items during 1 boss attempt, die and then respawn with nothing. Your options are to grind for money so you can buy more (where the price continues to increase every time you make a purchase) or retry the boss at a disadvantage. Very annoying. Fortunately most of the bosses aren't that challenging. They have a small set of moves and don't really react much to the player, so once you learn their patterns, they aren't too bad to deal with. But the fights are extremely tedious like much of this game! The reason being, most of the bosses feature a really annoying design trope, you cannot hurt them until they reveal their weakspot! Often this is totally random, or only occurs after a long sequence of patterns. This really inflates the play time and pads out fights. And for some fights this does result in frequent deaths due to the terrible ICE physics. 3 - Obtuse Design nearly ruins this game. Progression is linear despite it looking like a kind of open non-linear game. And progression isn't steamlined at all, many of the REQUIRED ability upgrades are hidden in secret areas and you'll need to find them in a specific order by going back to previous stages, eventually gaining access to the alternate stages and defeating every hidden boss to get to the final stage. It's often cryptic and there's no map. Though the game doesn't claim to be a metroidvania, it's designed MUCH like one. So much so that it leaves me confused as to why they took the stage-based approach if they wanted you to constantly have to go back to previous areas to access alternate paths and gain new abilities to progress. And the stages are HUGE. A lot of the areas look very similar so it can be easy to get a bit lost. You do unlock shortcuts which is nice but that also begs the question, why have the lives system? Once you open up the shortcuts, it's just a mild annoyance to run out of lives and have to restart the stage. But before you open the shortcuts, you can be sent pretty far back. Some stages will save your "puzzle/progression" progress though so it often isn't too bad of a reset. The worst part of the design for me was the level design. 25% of the game is covered in ice, so you will be slipping and sliding all over the place while getting wrecked by icicles, frost breath, and 2 of the most frustrating bosses in the game, oh and there's wind blowing you around at the same time. Have fun. Another 25% of the game is under water, maybe even more actually since it seems almost every stage has water. The water physics isn't too bad but it slows you down even more than your already slow default movement. There's also lots of flowing water ontop of platforms that act like conveyor belts. So you are getting blown around and pushed around constantly in this game. Then there is the most tedious part I experienced. I mentioned how cryptic finding the required items can be, well I made it through 8/9ths of the game without finding a single weapon or armor upgrade. And I only found 3 of the sub-weapons. By the later stages, enemies were taking 8 hits to kill and dealing massive damage to me and my 5 hearts. The later bosses took me ages to kill, like 5 minutes of fighting, made worse by the fact I had to wait around for them to reveal their weakspot before I could even deal ANY damage. And there's no health bar displayed so I had no idea how much progress i was even making. Having weapons that just increase damage and nothing more in a game that otherwise has no RPG mechanics is just a plain out dumb idea. Now hiding those in obscure locations is even dumber. This serves no damn purpose other than to punish players for not finding all the secrets. That's not how exploration rewards are supposed to function. You shouldn't be hiding basic necessities in secret locations. And i found over 60% of the secrets, most are just chests with money or a half heart container. No weapons to be found. When I got to the final dungeon I couldn't even get through the forced enemy fight area because it was taking like 20 hits to kill these guys. I finally had to look up a guide to get the sword upgrade and armor upgrade before continuing. And boy it does make a big difference. Was destroying those knights way faster. Anyway this has gone on long enough. So overall, I don't recommend this game for the average action platformer / metroidvania fan. It is WAY too frustrating, often employs anti-fun design and mechanics that punish you instead of rewarding you. Most people are gonna ragequit this game for the reasons listed above. But, to a small niche of retro gamers who grew up with GnG, CV, Contra, etc. You might still get a little enjoyment out of this, in a sick masochistic way. I managed to get through 99% of it, gave up on the final boss. Couldn't stand the enemies that block your attacks infinitely except if you attack them from behind. Score? Maybe a 55/100