Bastion of the Eldritch

While my time with Bastion has, so far, been rather short, I have had great fun working my way through the challenges of it. It is what it says on the tin: a brutally difficult and rarely forgiving adventure. Of course I have complaints, but I wanted to be clear that it is exactly what I was hoping for. I wish that the game had some time between hits from the enemies and when the invulnerability frames end, so that I had the ability to create distance or fight back - I often am left feeling as though the number of hearts I have may as well be 1, rather than the max of 5 I currently have, as getting hit rapidly locks me in animation and the enemies don't so much "hit" me as the mere fact that they are touching me causes harm. This combination of features results in me just getting pushed into a corner, locked in an unavoidable and unrecoverable spiral into death. The saving grace is that the game is relatively generous with save points. I love the difficulty, but would enjoy some more clear indicators for certain things - such as being able to tell if I'm being stealthy successfully, beyond the obvious of whether the enemies are chasing me down or not. The specific kind …

[b][h1] 6/10 - Brutal Bastion [/h1][/b] [b] Extremely brutal game, prepare your monk mental if you dare enter! [/b] [hr][/hr][h2][u] Gameplay [/u][/h2] This game is absolutely BRUTAL... you have to decide whether you want to run around alerting enemies or go prone and slowly sneak past them. You start off defenseless but quickly get a dagger to fight back with! I wasn't a fan of how enemies can hit you then almost stun lock and push you around until you die most of the time! Be careful, enemies corpses linger for a second which can sometime body block you in tight corridors. The area with leeches made me lose my mind before I eventually gave up! I don't get what's the point of having them latch onto you and slowly kill you with 0 counterplay, can't prone roll them off, stab them while on you, even tried running into torches on wall to see if would burn them off! [hr][/hr][h2][u] Visuals [/u][/h2] Nice retro pixel art style. Very dark and grungy - suits the atmosphere of an eldritch bastion! [hr][/hr][h2][u] Sounds [/u][/h2] Creepy sounds from enemies, listen out for them in the darkness. Could do with an audio slider - death screams are quite loud! [hr][/hr][h2][u] UI & UX [/u…

4/10. Top down, slow paced stealth/maze game. This is one of those games that is meant to infuriate you at the start. The designer hopes that your infuriation turns to pleasure once you master everything but first you need to get over that hump, and I couldn't find myself wanting to. The dungeon is so darkly lit that it's very hard to tell where you can even go or what enemies might be lurking there. Probably with more lights I'd be more tempted to keep on going but I died so much that it was just uninteresting. The corridors are narrow and swarming with enemies and there's not much surviving if you get caught, which you will all the time because you move very slowly if you want to stay quiet. If you're extremely patient you can wait for them to move out of the way, but that gets dull too. I think that the dev has made a suboptimal choice here: you need to hook us first before you punish us for wanting to make progress. Starting off with punishment is not going to get me invested for sure. That said the description is quite clear that this game is going to be brutally hard so I'm not going to give it a negative review for Truth in Advertising.