Cathedral

This game was played in its entirety on a MacBook Air M1 8gb ram 7c gpu running MacOS Sonoma. All achievements unlocked at their appropriate times. There was a moderate movement bug encountered in the game, and it did crash on me approximately five times in my nearly 40 hours play through of the game. TLDR: An amazing retro Metroidvania with best-in-class level design, awesome chiptunes, and an extreme level of difficulty if you're going for all achievements, and only moderate difficulty if you are not. Overall, this is absolutely a positive review, and if you like what you read below, I urge you to grab this one. I'm going to start with the negatives, as there are a few, and they are substantial at times. There is a terrible movement bug with the game. It is repeatable every time, but how often it affects you will depend on how you play. The bug occurs if you change directions (left/right only) completely twice or more in a very short time period. This does NOT OCCUR with the d-pad, only the analog sticks. If you left, right, left in very quick succession, your character will be running right while you are holding full left. The reverse also occurs (running left while holding …

This is classic NES in its mind, body, and spirit. Really f'n good, incredibly f'n fun.

Cathedral is a sprawling retro-inspired action-adventure that takes the recognizable foundations of classic 2D platformers and builds a much larger exploration experience around them. Developed and published by Decemberborn Interactive, it deliberately captures the appearance and atmosphere of an older console game while incorporating conveniences and design ideas associated with modern Metroidvania adventures. Its colorful pixel art might initially suggest a relatively straightforward platformer, but beneath that presentation is a demanding journey filled with interconnected locations, secrets, puzzles, challenging enemies, character upgrades, and substantial amounts of backtracking. The story places players in control of a mysterious knight who awakens without knowing how he arrived in this strange world. After encountering a spirit named Soul, the knight begins searching for answers and eventually becomes involved in a quest surrounding five elemental orbs created long ago by the demi-god Ardur. Each orb is guarded by a formidable protector, providing the adventure with clear long-term objectives while still leaving plenty of room for independent exploration. The narrative rema…

Great classic styled Metroidvania with swift movements and fun exploration. Backtracking can get a bit tedious sometimes.

Fun game and quite difficult

Tl:dr review - Fun Metroidvania with a touch of Zelda mixed in. Highly recommend it, but be warned it doesn't pull any punches. For starters, let me start out by saying this is quite well done for how few people worked on it. The art is great for what it is, it has good game feel when you get the hang of it and especially when you get some of the different "charms" in the game, and the OST is really solid. I will say it's not perfect and I do have a fair few nitpicks and gripes, but I feel the game is still a decent time, even with the negatives I've got with it. To get things rolling, I guess I'll start with the nitpick of the game's difficulty, or rather the damage ratio as the game goes on. I don't mind a decent challenge, but I guess I've been conditioned by other games like this to think that when I get my gear upgraded, I'll be on even footing with enemies in the current area I'm tackling. Definitely not the case here. Even by endgame, with all upgrades, common enemies would easily do 2 to 4 hearts out of my max of 10, and the bosses could easily kill me in about 2 hits at this point. I also understand that's probably why they give you 10 potions you could use if you hunted…