THE DARK DWELLERS

A short but very atmospheric platformer in the spirit of the dark Dark Souls. There are only 4 weapons, 6 bosses, and 5 skills to learn. But it's fun to play. This is not a dynamic rush; to win, you need to be very careful and check every move. Pleasant pixel graphics. There are criminally few levels; I want more :)

Can't get over the controls. Why is keyboard binding allowed but those who play with a controller are forced to use this HORRIBLE layout? I shouldn't have to download a third-party app to bind my controls.... this is the 2020's, you should be able to change your buttons in the game. Cmon!

Ehhhhhh, a very light recommendation, if you know what you're getting into. In a nutshell, this has rather weak gameplay with some good ideas, but the presentation is good enough to keep one interested. This is not a Metroidvania. There's a couple "abilities" needed for progress, but one is gotten before you need to use it, and the other one is guaranteed to be with you before the only area where it's needed. I guess getting the latter early might have made a couple sections slightly easier, but not to a degree it'd have made a difference. Instead, it's an almost entirely linear dungeon crawler, with one area that gets revisited a few times and one choice of order later down the line. Oh, and I guess some of the early areas do offer minor forking paths, these barely show up in the bulk of the game. Similarly, any expectation of it being a Soulslike should be abandoned beyond the combat focusing on stamina and iframe-dodging. It's not an RPG, with your stats staying basically the same. You lose 25% of your currency upon death with no way to regain it, but honestly that's not a big deal as there's only two vendors in the entire game: one which grants you the consumable cure for a s…

Unskippable, very slow, voice acted dialogue. I had to turn it off.

Yes

This is not a good game. The controls are odd and unresponsive at times, the game also forces your character to move forward on every melee swing leading to you missing far too many attacks which would otherwise have hit. The levels are almost exclusively linear corridors broken up with instant kill pits and annoying traps, with no side paths or exploration save for bonfires in lone rooms. The bosses and probably all normal mobs are either extremely basic or just straight annoying to fight. The unresponsive controls combined with the placement of the more annoying ranged enemies and the level design leads to a lot of seemingly unavoidable damage. Where the only way to avoid it would be to dodge but if you dodged you would roll off the platform, probably into an instant death pit or trap, so your only option is to tank the damage. The special blood magic abilities are all are completely useless except the basic ranged attack which the game forces you to use to progress in set areas. I genuinely don't get the thought process behind special moves which cost health to use in a game like this where health is your most valuable resource due to the extremely limited healing optio…