Panta Rhei - Guardian of Time

First off, I followed this games development since its idea almost 5 years ago. Starting with a tech demo and gradually finding its way until its now finished. And it was worth the wait. The graphicstyle is amazing, looking incredibly cute and polished, while the music adds the right touch to every situation. Now for the combat: Its smooth. While the powers and modifiers arent crazily complicated and weird like in other roguelites, they add enough to each run to slightly push you into a different playstyle. The time abilities add a lot of versatility in combat and a nice addition to normal map movement and lets you discover a few additional areas. All in all, the game is definitely worth the price and a lot of fun. While its still rough around a (very) few edges, im sure that the passionate team of developers will fix that as well, I saw what they are able to do and they are just incredible.

I don't often leave reviews early enough to be within the refund window, and given what I've seen so far this is very much a sideways thumb kind of review at the moment, but this game hasn't gotten much attention yet and I do think it's good enough to be worth a look so I'll mark it positive for now. Just temper your expectations, this is very much a small dev team sort of game. And maybe wait for a sale. + Style is neat. Almost a claymation sort of aesthetic in the game world, and the cutscenes are well animated. + Time powers so far all make sense and seem to have a high skill ceiling. So far I've gotten self time reversal to repeat attacks and break shields, environment time reversal to manipulate traps, time freeze to lock enemies or environment objects in place, and time stop to set up teleports. I know there are at least two more waiting in the wings as well, just from what I've seen along the way. + Roguelike elements all seem to be working. The per run upgrade pool I've seen so far has been decently varied, the permanent upgrades seem all right as well and are tied to progression and not just attempts. Haven't played long enough to know how good they actually are but I was able to get a good-feeling and -performing build on one of my runs and at least one or two of the capstones in the permanent tree definitely look to be worth pursuing. + The world isn't actually randomly generated. The contents of the arenas between areas are randomized but they're all small circular platforms in between two other areas with fixed layouts, and the routes between those areas are also fixed. Could be a good or bad thing depending on the player but I happen to like this approach, not everything needs to be a forever game even if it's a rougelike. ~ Moveset doesn't feel great early on. The whirl attack is just better than your other options in almost every situation, the third light attack has a huge lag tacked on for no reason that makes it actually slower than the whirl which incorporates a heavy after two lights, and the other heavy combos all take as long to execute as the whirl while being less responsive. ~ Teleports are hard to aim, at least on controller. Your destination gets plopped down as soon as you tilt the stick far enough and there's no aiming reticule. Unsure how to solve this though without potentially messing up other parts of the controls. ~ Annoying enemies at the start. This might get better later on as I find more enemy types, fill out more of the upgrade tree, unlock more moves, and Git Gud™, but the starting enemies include a blob that keeps turning invincible and running away every time it attacks, a giant blob that spams projectiles and knockbacks, and a floaty thing vaguely reminiscent of a dragonfly with high mobility and a *massive* PBAoE that's really hard to avoid. ~Enemies seem to like to spam relatively large AoEs but the dodge doesn't seem to have iframes so you kind of have to facetank and hope you recover more from the kill than you lose from the fight. You [i]can[/i] dodge with the teleport, but the enemies like to give themselves shields that make them immune to everything but the rewind power, which uses the same energy meter as your dodge. - Bugs. I haven't cleared the refund window yet, and already I almost got softlocked twice, once by an invisible wall that I managed to teleport past and once by the game losing track of what state I was in and locking out my controls until I took damage. Those aren't the only ones I've seen but the rest are pretty minor.