Kingdom Shell Reviews

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This is a pretty amazing achievement from a near solo dev. The platforming, boss fights, and secrets are all there, along with a pretty good story. Definitely worth a play if you like metroidvanias.

First of all, this is an extremely technically competent game. Fighting is fun, enemies are fun to kill and fun to avoid, platforming is fun, secrets are EXTREMELY FAIR (you shouldn't ever need a walkthrough, just do something else and trust the game to be fair if you don't yet know how to solve a specific room), bosses are original (except We Have The Radiance At Home, but vastly improved by not having to fight the Hollow-Knight-equivalent again if We Have The Radiance At Home kills you) and fun. There's a secret-alert upgrade about 1/3 through the game, so if you don't want to look for secret passages, you don't have to (although those hold health and mana upgrades). Two difficulty levels, normal and game journo, I played on normal. The Xbox controller works. The pace of the game and the challenges are such that the buttons never compete for fingers, no need to remap, no need to contort your hand to press X with your index finger or anything like that. For achievement hunters, all achievements can be easily gotten in a single playthrough without a guide and extra effort, as of the current version nothing is missable. One drawback is the penalty for dying which is mechanically gloating, as if death alone wasn't punishment enough, but I handily avoided it by just quitting on death (or quitting before I died if a boss fight was going poorly) until the very end. There's no Hollow Knight style quick return to checkpoint: usually, to save progress, you need to get to a checkpoint (go back via shortcut, or loop through a new path, or find a new checkpoint, or go back the hard way), which I love. The map is good but doesn't show obstacles. It can be remedied by putting markers. There's only one kind of markers available, but you can usually differentiate by context what's what. The art is pretty, but all the same I couldn't shake off the feeling it's a retread of the themes I've seen somewhere else. Let's see: cheerful forest, dark and decayed forest with a female boss that's not quite what she seems, pretty-to-nasty illusion boss jumpscare, shoot-them-up sequence against a comical character, East Asian air temple, emerald caves, lava level, slowly rising platform you ride as things fall on it from above, cloud step, ornate gilded flowery palace looking like the inside of a certain music box, and when I entered a PURPLE MAGIC TOWER WITH LAZORS (also sliceable bubbles) it finally hit me: hey, developer, I see you played [i]The Messenger[/i], one of the best games ever! Don't misunderstand, the sprites themselves are completely original, and there's a level that's astoundingly beautiful and original thematically. But you can't unsee that everything else is a retread, especially the PURPLE LAZOR TOWER. (Incidentally, [i]The Messenger[/i] has verbal gloating in addition mechanical gloating on death, fuck that, too; I was quitting to desktop there, too; Kingdom Shell's developer chose well to get rid of at least one type. But I wish he copied the one-time monetary penalty, so you wouldn't get punished over and over for repeatedly dying to the same boss until you potentially can't even afford healing.) Lots of unique animations for cutscenes, an amazing attention to detail of body language and such even for npc sprites. The storyline is... well... I'm old. You know that old joke about a guy who started with dial-up and developed a fetish for pixellated tits? Well that's almost me, I started watching movies as a child with broadcast tv that I usually didn't have a programme for, and intermittently working stolen cable. I'd catch a movie 20 minutes in and the screen would go War of the Ants on me during key scenes, to say nothing about series. Out-of-print books were hard to get, I would get stuck with volumes 2 and 3 of a tetralogy, or 2 to 6 of a seven-book series for over a decade. The TL;DR is I love a story told in bits and pieces if I know they're bits and pieces of a coherent complete version that the author kept in mind, not just JJ style mystery boxes. This being the style of storytelling in [i]Kingdom Shell[/i], I had fun playing, even though the writing is all over the place, from genuinely brilliant to "autistic furry visits Auschwitz" level of retarded. But in the end, I got the complete coherent version with every t crossed and every i dotted, and it sucked. The good bits went nowhere. I got the bad/stupid ending, too (there's only one ending). Really I'd forgive everything else if it had a good ending. I thought the final battle was to specifically prevent this garbage from happening.

*Finished off-line* Absolutely brilliant, epic game ! Such art and absorbing story, now one of my favorites. Bought on Steam just to leave my grateful review here. --- Disclosure and spoilers: 69 y.o. slow gamer. Didn't enjoy the game at first as too unforgiving for me, started it various times. Finally used C.E., and it became a joyful complex romp. C.E. for the old gamers: Health is Type Double. Each full flower. 3 petals + short stem, equals Value 2.0000 (search for that, ever in the same screen). No petals, only stem equals Value 1.0000. Example: 4 full flowers (3 petals+stem) equals Value 8.0000. Once the address is found you can freeze it, but sadly, the address changes on *each* screen change, yeah... The effect is lost on the next screen. But !! Max quantitiy of Lives and Max quantity of Ether are 4 Bytes Exact, and both Values can be changed to whatever you want (99,000 for example), making you practically immortal for the rest of the game. Both must be searched and found in 1 screen only, best at any save point screen, of course. Other advantages, jump height, coord x,y, etc, too technical for this review, sorry.