Gestalt: Steam & Cinder Steam Charts & Stats

This is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time The characters are really well thought out and well written. The story is very engaging and I didn’t feel bored a single time while playing this game. It’s somewhat difficult, but it’s not difficult enough that it’s unreasonable. and the combat is really fun

A bit on the easy side and with neverending dialogues, but the game is fun.

Short and sweet with solid but not overly flashy combat. Took me 14 hours to do everything and you could probably do it faster if you were better at games than I am. Overall, I enjoyed it and would play a sequel.

[h1]Gestalt: Steam & Cinder[/h1] [h3]A solid first-try attempt at a metroidvania genre, blending it with RPG elements and heavy narrative.[/h3] Review after 100%. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic steam punk setting with a dash of magic. Sounds intriguing? Well, it sure has a unique feel to it. The pixel art and animation are on a very high level, the music is also solid, although a bit repetitive. Overall, the visuals are incredibly polished. The gameplay mixes a classic metroidvania exterior, filled with some Path of Exile-lite upgrade system, where every time you level up, you get a skill point, which you then allocate to a node, that adds flat dmg/hp/crit chance or something like that. A string of regular nodes leads to a major node that opens/improves some skill. This also includes adding more unique strikes to your melee attack. And while the addition of the light attacks to the combo feels useful, most of the special heavy attacks are hard to execute, without getting hit while performing them. It just shows, that the general flow of the combat wasn’t tuned up to the speed of the special strikes. Also, after beating like 40% of the game, the combat difficulty curve flattens quite a bit, and you quite often can just face-tank your enemies, including bosses. It doesn’t make game necessarily bad, but the combat system could have used a bit of additional work. What I enjoyed quite a lot is a simple fact, that you not always kill bosses, after you defeat them. This miniscule thing added a human aspect to the story. That being said, the game could have improved upon a number of aspects. And one of them is… a plot. However strange it could sound, the plot is overcomplicated and convoluted. Often it falls into some sort of a soap opera like Santa Barbara or a Twilight fanfic written by a 14-year-old girl. The writers couldn’t decide whether or not to get rid of a particular character, or what a character’s true identity is, or what does the main opposing force in this world represent. These constant counter-signals did not add depth, but rather awkwardness and perplexity. This includes even world building and biomes. Lack of cohesion at times was very noticeable. The other minus I would say is the 2 types of checkpoints – one is a regular checkpoint/healing fountain, and the second type is a teleporter that are so rare, that some biomes have none. This added a lot of unnecessary hustle in the late game, when I was collecting missing achievements. I know that it’s common in modern metroidvanias, but this doesn’t help, because it feels forced and inconvenient without any reason for this to be like that. Also some locations could have used additional map markers, whenever there are story-related interactable objects, like valves/terminals, that block your main quest progress. This ties to the next thing – inability to put custom marks on your map. Like, before you get all the maps that show missed goodies, sometimes I want to keep a track of a particular treasure that I want to collect later. But because I can’t mark anything on a map, I would often forget about it. My critique might have created a feeling, that I didn’t enjoy the game, which would be wrong. Despite all it flaws, [i]Gestalt: Steam & Cinder[/i] is still a good game, which I recommend buying. My rating of the game – 7,75/10.

The story segments go on for too long, but other than that, it's a very solid metroidvania. The artstyle is consistently good, the combat has some nice depth to it and 100% achievement completion can be done in a single playthrough. I also like this game's speedrun - not much RNG, some neat tricks, easy to learn.

Me entretuve jugando este juego el combate se sintió bastante bien y el movimiento en general me gusto. Es si dependiendo de las expectativas que traigas podrías llegar a sentir que es algo corto, pero aun con eso opino que es bastante cumplidor.

A relaxing and enjoyable game in my opinion. Combat is fun and I really enjoyed the art style and soundtrack. Not very replayable or difficult,. Very easy to complete 100% during the first playthrough, which isn't very long.

This is a "buy on sale" type of game. I think the character designs and music are good. And the art style is nice as well. But everything else just feels bland. Like "ehhh". You can beat it within 10 hours.

Thank God it's a small game. A boring game in every sense of the word. boring story and disgustingly long dialogues. boring, almost dead world. boring enemies, some of them stupidly designed. boring Bosses, except Indra. There are some good things like some of the soundtrack and art design, but my feeling halfway through the game is that I want to finish it quickly.

This is a fun metroidvania with a steampunk atmosphere. The abilities are fun, controls are smooth, and the pixel art is fantastic! I also loved the music and want to get the soundtrack. I liked it that much. But there's one thing that frustrated me - the story. There is a HEAVY amount of dialogue, especially at the beginning. It's an interesting story, with some cool characters, but this is the first metroidvania I've played that went so hard with the story. It interrupts the gameplay a lot within the first couple of hours. And the dialogue is very repetitive. There's a lot of back and forth about "the abyss" and how powerful it is and will destroy everything if it's opened, yadda yadda. A lot of characters say this back and forth. But worst of all is how it ends. It's basically a cliffhanger, and really unsatisfying, especially after all that buildup. Oh, and there's no voice acting. Not that it matters, but just mentioning it. Besides the story though, the game is a lot of fun and worth checking out.