u/CarmineGaeta

Time: 40 hours

Difficulty: 7/10

A wonderful and heavily underrated metroidvania, set in a unique and atmospheric taoist cyberpunk world with outstanding art direction, sespite its simple narrative, the game does a great job making you care about its characters, more than many recent games have managed to, the gameplay is stellar and takes inspiration from other masterpieces, feeling very similar to Sekiro with its parry system, while also recalling Hollow Knight in its exploration, build variety and overall metroidvania structure, the challenge mainly comes from completing the game on normal difficulty, which requires solid nerves and some experience with the genre, even with equipment and ability upgrades, combat remains punishing and enemies can still kill you in just a few hits, the difficulty is especially focused around the bosses, which force you to learn the timing, patterns and moveset of every encounter in order to defeat them, as for the trophies, you’ll need to fully complete every area, progress through the side quests and keep an eye out for a couple of easily missable trophies.

ID: Veyn99

Time: 20 hours

Difficulty: 4/10

Housemarque cooked once again, this time taking everything that worked and was fun in Returnal, polishing its flaws and bringing it back in Saros, the result is a roguelike that’s among the best visually, particle effects and constant lighting work in these sci-fi horror environments are a real treat for the eyes, gameplay wise it’s fast, arcade, and very responsive, giving you the freedom to experiment and adapt different strategies in every fight, especially as you unlock new abilities, weapons and variants in each new area, bosses raise the bar and really put you to the test, with hundreds of projectiles on screen that will make your eyes cross, in these cases, dying and restarting can actually help you come back stronger and better prepared thanks to the massive skill tree, trophies have been simplified and made less RNG-heavy compared to its predecessor, you’ll need to defeat every Overlord, complete the epilogue, get 25 kills with each weapon and clean up a few miscellaneous trophies that aren’t too demanding, the game is also more accessible thanks to the carcosian modifiers, which can make a run easier (or harder), still, I’d recommend experiencing it as intended on your first run, since it’s well balanced and really rewarding.

ID: Veyn99