Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Steam Charts & Stats

It is a fun game if you enjoy a metroidvania style of game play. The hand drawn art, and the pixel art are quite good. I enjoyed the story, the ending was good. I was worried it was going to give me an Endingtron300, but no decisive ending, and open for a sequel, but works fine as a stand alone as well. So yeah pick it up, you'll have fun.

Managed to complete the game and all 36 steam achievements in just shy of 10 hours. The story was good, but the last 25% or so wasn't as satisfying. I hope they continue the story. The world building felt good and immersive (on par with Hollow-Knight). Art was very good. Platforming was on-par with Hollow-knight, though the enemies are nowhere near as varied as in that masterpiece. If there is one thing you might find lacking, its the combat (it wasn't terrible). Overall a fun, ambient experience: definitely worth it on sale.

Rating: 7.5/10 Gameplay and art direction for this game are spot on. The level design is varied and the back tracking can be quite fun to experience new areas you couldn't previously access. The story fell a bit short for me, at times completely removing me from the area I was in. Although I think the world that's been developed here could lend itself easily to further exploration. Dialogue can be a bit, odd. Sometimes going between a regular conversation and then some over the top comic book inspired dialogue, before going back to regular conversation again. I feel like I can't give this game an 8/10, as I think the story and dialogue really hold it back. But I also think that the game is too much fun and the overall style / theme are too well implemented for me to give this a 6/10. I'm landing on a 7.5/10 due to; the story being fun - but feeling rushed towards the end, the gameplay being solid - although only one boss in the entire game forced me to change my strategy to beat them (I'm not sure if that's ONLY because of my skill choices though), the art direction is stunning - really bringing you back to those early metroidvania games. Notes for future games: - I would love to see more emphasis on varied play styles - this can be in encounter design, or by emphasizing certain requirements in a fight. Only one fight had me change my playstyle at all. - Keeping with the existing theme, I would love to see more character poses for conversations to emphasize the incredible character designs. Allowing these characters to show more emotion (smug grins, shock, laughing, etc) could help convey more about them then just regular dialogue alone. I hope to see more games from this developer in the future!

I've had a great time with this. The combat system is pretty good and there's some exploration but not to the point of wanting to pull your hair out with going to the same places 3-5 times. I enjoy the music and the story.

At 20 bucks, there are so many better game you could've bought than this. Even at a decent discount (bought at -50%), I somehow feel ripped off. The game is short and very linear, about 10 hours to 100% everything. The art and music is absolutely top notch, but the combat sucks and is the single reason why I cannot recommend this game. To understand why, I'd have to dig into the energy system the combat uses. You gain energy via the basic sword attack, but it takes multiple hits to gain 1 energy. Energy is used in 4 ways: 1. basic gun shot takes 1 energy per use 2. tesla gun shot takes 1 energy per use 3. heavy melee attack takes 1 energy per use 4. puzzle solving via tesla shots, so again 1 energy per use You start the game with only 1 max energy, and you can get up to 4 via skill tree unlocks. If this is already giving you bad flashbacks to Ori 1, you've got the gist of the problem, except it gets so much worse due to how combat plays out. Combat functions on a shield/hp system. Depleting the shield will stance break and stun the enemy, which makes them extremely vulnerable to damage. The tutorial teaches that to you, as well as the fact that tesla shots do a ton of shield damage. So your first thought is, okay, stance break via tesla shot and punish, easy, right? Nope. Your basic melee attack do very small shield damage (even if you stack the break % stat), so it should really be treated as a way to recharge your energy. In addition, 1 tesla shot isn't enough to break the shield, so now you have to melee them to recharge. This means early game enemies are very spongey and tedious. So late game should be fine when you have 4 max energy right? Actually no, late game enemies' shield scale with your energy reserve, so each enemy now might take 2-3 tesla shots to stance break, and your melee attacks aren't exactly scaling in terms of how much energy they gain back, so it's still tedious. This means you'll be spending alot of time in melee, which brings me to the other problem. Enemies are pretty aggressive, except that should be fine, you have a dodge roll, right? Wrong again. The dodge roll (and backstep) is based on a stamina bar system, and stamina need to recharge after every use before you can use it again. While the bar charges pretty quickly, most enemies attack faster than the bar can charge, so you can't really get into their face and rely on dodge roll for high speed combat, which reduces it to a very monotonous hit and run style. Now, the one saving grace, is that you can apparently jump cancel out of your basic melee attacks, which actually does a waaaay better job of dodging than using the dodge roll, how ironic. The problem then is that combat is still extremely monotonous and boring. Melee, double jump over the enemy, melee again, double jump over the enemy....rinse and repeat for *every* non flying enemy until you have enough energy to tesla shot and stance break them, and repeat again because enemy shield recharges.... Which then brings me to the skill tree. One of your skill tree skill grant shield pierce on regular shots against targets, so instead of using tesla shots to break the shield to do damage, you're better off just shooting them normally instead because tesla shots don't do hp damage, but regular gun shots do a ton of damage... Basically, there is a nice concept of a good combat system in theory, but you'd never see it in practice because the implementation is completely FUBAR. It speaks volumes where the tiniest bit of enjoyment I had from this game's combat is in the very late game after I completed a long quest chain that unexpectedly gave me an equipment that basically gave unlimited energy, at which point combat finally stopped feeling like a janky mess, but as you can imagine, having unlimited energy combined with the shield pierce on high damage regular shots also means combat became even more of a joke than it was before, but in the other direction. At least it isn't tedious anymore, I guess. Oh and the story, oh boy. I feel like I played the prologue section for a main game, except the prologue ended suddenly, but I don't have the main game to continue the story, which means the story that I got up to that point was basically nonsense. There are characters, things happened, but I have no idea why they happened, what the characters' motivations are, or even *who* and *what* some of the characters are. So yeah, wonderful art, good music, all dragged to the Abyss by the combat and a story that never went anywhere. It's a shame and I really hope the artist(s) behind this game is able to partner with a competent game designer in the future, because their talent was wasted on this game.

The Good - The pixel art is beautiful to look at; you can tell they put a lot of love into it. - The music blends nicely with the background, making traversal across the map enjoyable. The Bad - The combat needs some work. Light attack combos don’t make enemies flinch, so they often hit you and interrupt your combo. The same issue applies to heavy attacks. - The story isn’t bad (it has some good twists), but the gameplay is frequently interrupted by dialogue cutscenes that don’t add much to the story or the characters.

A good game, but not more than just good. It's on the shorter side, with me beating it 100% in 7.2 hours without guides. The story is also just good it gets more interesting as it approaches the end, but at the conclusion, the story leaves you on a cliffhanger, which was pretty disappointing . The map is kind of messy checkpoints seemed sometimes random the tp, which you would assume would be useful, i didn't use more than a couple of times, and even that was only to go to town to buy something and then teleport back from where I came and even that was kind of tedious. The town was also just pretty empty with there just being random empty buildings that you can enter. Also, the map felt pretty linear i never felt like I had any choice about where to go it was just go from point B to point C to point D. The collectibles around the map were nothing much either, with most just being items I never used since I never needed more than just the health flask . At the end, there is some fun platforming for the corgis, but that's just it. The enemies were actually pretty interesting, with a nice variety, but unfortunately were nothing more than just damage sponges. The bosses, on the other hand, were disappointing none of the bosses really felt like a boss fight they all had very basic movesets and were pretty underwhelming. It feels hard to recommend this game it has a great art style but at the end of playing it, I just felt like there was so much wasted potential. If you like Metroidvania games, it is worth buying while on sale, but otherwise i just can't recommend it.

wow that combat sucks. someone had a couple of neat ideas here but they didnt manage to put a compelling system together... i think i get what they wanted to do but its not working. there are all these skills in the skilltree and whatnot, but all you ever need is your basic combo, dodge and a couple of bullets here and there. but the enemies dont stagger, so you can only really combo when they are stance broken, which is an instakill anyway. all the rest is very well done, love the art, music, worldbuilding etc but i wish there was a better game beneath all that

4-9 hours long but realy fun and quick indie game, tho ending is made too much sequel depended so expect ending to be disapointing.

The absolute embodiment of mid. Gestalt has all the genre affectations you’d expect from a Metroidvania, but there’s nothing to sink your teeth into—it doesn’t really offer anything substantive on its own. More baffling is that I feel like I’m the exact target audience for this game. With its simple leveling system and stat-based equipables, Gestalt has an “RPG-lite” feel very much informed by the Iga-helmed Castlevania games. I love those games, so I expected to at least like Gestalt. But games like Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow had the benefit of being genuine trailblazers in their own way; once the feel of Gestalt sets in, you realize you’re playing a pale facsimile of a formula that’s nearly THIRTY years old at this point. Again, I want to reiterate that Gestalt isn’t a bad game, per se. But, in the grand scheme of the genre, there are so, so many better Metroidvanias that you should be playing first. If you’re a diehard MV-fanatic who’s played both the hits and the second-tier games, and you’re really desperate for a new title, Gestalt may do the trick. I myself may revisit this down the line as well. Otherwise, though, there are better games at lower price points, so I can’t, in good conscience, recommend Gestalt in that context.