Virtue's Heaven

Another fun game from MOKKOGRAD! Still rocking a delicously retro color palette and cool explosion, Virtue's Heaven is a fun Metroidvania borrowing some stuff from Hollow Knight (such as capacities to equip) in which you punch stuff to make them explode, while hugging your friends to restore so of your power. The music is great, the art is good, the story is one we need more of today about humanity, sharing and caring. Like some others, I am not 100% sure I understood how your attacks get stronger and stronger, which meant some boss fights went for a bit too long. I feel like the game could have made with an NPC just allowing us to train and test out some combination to really get what we are doing, but other than that, I had a lovely time playing this. Definitely the kind of game you'll revisit down the line.

Unfortunately not a game for me. I can see the craft and the ideas behind it, I just cannot enjoy it. Still, it is most likely a good game, for reasons that may become clear by the end of this meandering review. It is a game with a message, first thing it does is hit you in the face with it, then does it again and again. It is a message I didn't need to hear. I agree with this message, I [b]resonate[/b] with it. The game was preaching to the choir. To be fair, the few instances of dialogue, or longer monologues, where an idea is explored for longer than two sentences are pretty good, I really liked them, it is a shame that [i]most[/i] of the time the writing you find is mostly composed of short "barks" that might as well have been my own thoughts, echoed back to me. For full disclosure: One thing that made it a worse experience than it should be was the way the camera rubberbands up or down for a fraction of a second under very specific circumstances. It is probably unnoticeable for most people and, in fact, I did not notice it until I realized it was causing the most severe episode of motion sickness I've had in years. At one point during the last stretch where the wall textures…

a really remarkable anti-capitalist metroid-like. Unlike other games where progress is gated by the items you don't have yet, you become stronger the more progress you make and that helps you reach new areas

Extremely fun to move in, with a lot of ways to combine your acquired powers for massive, satisfying damage. A good game for people who like the adrenaline rush of flying through a screen and clearing it instantly. Fun boss variety, and the color choices work really well!!

Short but sweet, fun stuff

This is a cautious thumbs up. When the game flows, it really flows well, MOKKOGRAD really knows how to sell a power fantasy, how to make cool moves and how to make the explosions go hard. My biggest gripe with the game is that after reaching the final boss I still don't understand how the damage/power scaling works. Sometimes I will be doing massive damage and other times I will be doing almost no damage and I'm never sure why. There are several systems at play here that are never fully explained. I get that it's probably meant to be something that one experiments and figures out, but idk, I feel like I'd enjoy it more if it was just explained to me. And understanding the damage/power system is extremely important, as it will mean the difference between destroying a boss in less than a minute, or doing chip damage to it for 20 minutes. Definitely recommended if you are not afraid of experimenting and figuring stuff out on your own.