Astalon: Tears of the Earth

I adore this game! It plays just like an old Mega Man title (without the broken framerates) mixed with Castlevania-style exploration. The different characters make for a fun twist on gameplay while the roguelite loop makes it a nice challenge. Highly recommended!

I really, really enjoyed this one. I tore through it in less than a week, and the only thing I haven't finished is the boss rush mode. The game rewards exploring. QOL upgrades for most things can be found all over the tower - depending on how you define QOL you're looking at about 15, give or take a few. You can find a way to combat most hazards as well. The little blue orbs you collect are your currency. You use them to buy various upgrades from Epimetheus, the Titan of Death. Some of these are little QOL upgrades (Note: he also sells various buffs that last a single run, and one of my gripes with the game is that it doesn't really explain this or which ones those are. They'll show up as small icons in the top left corner of the screen. They're not significant enough to be sorely missed, but can be somewhat useful. I didn't make much use of them personally once I learned they weren't permanent) There are several elevators you can unlock as you climb the tower, but you need to find the key to use them. You can find it before you even reach the second elevator if you spend the time to poke around. Also, it is a metroidvania, so going back and having a look around once you have …

The most underrated and best metroidvanina I have ever completed, its awesome

"Would you recommend this game to other players?" If I'm being honest, in answering the question Steam's putting in front of me...not really. Astalon has a whole lot of bugs, extremely ridiculous and pointless grinds, and 100%'ing it is simultaneously a bore and a chore. The unlockable alternative game modes are outright [i]bad[/i], so they have already left this conversation entirely. And I haven't started the wall of criticism yet. If you play Astalon, you will get lost a lot. The map will do nothing to help you remember what was where, and will mislead you as often as help because many entrances to the same room don't actually link to each other. The first half of the game is plagued with the same irritation that put so many off Donkey Kong 64: the locking of specific powers and areas to specific characters, which may as well be a big ol' middle finger captioned "hey, run back to the save room, switch characters, and come all the way back here again, stupid." HP is basically unrecoverable (you can grind mobs for what feels like a 1% chance to drop a SINGLE hit point heal), and if you die, you go back to the very beginning of the entire dungeon. The story is an interesting …

Very fun gameplay. The retro style is a bit limiting in the beginning, but the feel of the game improve as you play.

Why i did kind of enjoyed it just cant recommend it. Its one of the weakest metroidvanias i played, one that fails to introduce any quality of life improvements the genre made in last 20 years, the game just dosnt respect your time. The constant backtracking, having to google even basic stuff that should be explained in the game ... all makes it feel like a game from 1995, but not in a good way. Biggest problem is having to start from the beginning every time you die, since there is no healing in the game you will be thrown back to the entry of the dungeon constantly, and each time you have to slowly walk back to where you were last. Whats weird is that game includes a persistent camp system where you unlock camps everywhere but ... they do nothing. They dont heal you, you cant teleport to them and they dont allow for upgrades ( you need to die and start from teh beginning each time you want to equip a single upgrade). Seems like a cut or unfinished feature. Also to get the good ending having to 100% everything that practically impossible without a online guide is really annoying. So despite being like 8-12 hours long, 50% of that is backtracking.