Adventure of Samsara

Dreadful experience. Primarily due to really poor control inputs. The game looks fine, but really tries to pretend it is old and controls are laggy... which was a bug in the old days, not a feature. The worst offender is that button presses are missed about every 1 in 4 or 5 times. Just input not registered. But even that aside, the really strange lag between an input and the action on screen is unpleasant. Add to that strange decisions like making RT a dash key while also making it a "hold" key to grab ledges leads to really awkward misfires. Jumping is slow and floaty as well. The game I think tries to be "old school" but misses the mark quite a bit and ends up laggy and unresponsive. I couldn't enjoy the feel of playing it.

I am genuinely baffled how this has 90% positive reviews. Obviously anything launching the same day as Silksong was going to struggle but this was truly sent out to die. Even after the 2.0 rebalancing movement is slow and stiff, attacks are heavily committal to the point they can only be used simon-says in the overly telegraphed windows given to you, platforming is inconsistent, and overall the second to second gameplay just isn't fun. More and more it seems like "soulslike" is akin to 'intentionally frustrating design' but there's genuinely no feeling of intentionality or structure here. Maybe that's due to the rebalancing causing several different design philosophies to be in conflict. Maybe it's just not very good. Either way there's dozens of indie metroidvanias that are more compelling and more worthy of your time than this.

Yet another metroidvania ruined by sluggish input and syrup-y platforming. Pretty much all my frustrations with this game are from the game simply not responding to my input fast enough making it harder than it otherwise should be. Likely won't be finishing this one.

It's a solid 2D metroidvania. The game starts a bit sluggish, but after a few upgrades the gameplay significantly improves. This game, a spiritual successor to the Atari game "Adventure" from 1980, has good game design but lacks proper music as a clear downside. Overall a solid recommend and I would love to see what Atari comes up with next.

Combat is slow and clunky. Not for my taste :(

It's ok. It's not a bad game. It works. It's not a very good one either. Why release this on the same day as Silksong? Baffling. C tier game.