Cryptical Path Steam Charts & Stats

Quite fun roguelike

I have defeated the final boss after 21.9 hours of playtime and I must say this is a solid rogue-like. First off there are only 3 bosses in the main run, they do change a little bit as you progress but not a lot, for me that didn't matter since the builds I kept getting were quite fun to use on them. I do must say that your builds are limited because you have one weapon, and one spell: Now the weapon can change in 2 ways(and some minor ways) and the spell can change in 5 ways I believe. Besides the bosses there are some challenges, I did 4 of them they can be quite annoying but that's why they are optional challenges. During these challenges you can unlock items which you can use in the main run, some of these items seemed great other's seemed a bit lacking. Overall this is a good rogue-like, the price feels fair to me for the amount I played it. I'll await your next game, Old Skull games.

Very meh game. It's just boring, and makes such poor use of the roguelike system. The "upgrades" you get are so bland and uninspired, and anything remotely interesting comes with downsides. It's like the devs are scared an upgrade might actually make you capable of killing something in fewer than 8 hits. This doesn't seem like it should be a roguelike game, and instead you should just acquire upgrades as you go. But replaying the same boring levels over and over is not exciting. I can play Slay the Spire, Hades, Binding of Isaac, or Balatro for days. I could barely stomach 3 hours of this game.

I'm going to go ahead and give this one a cautious yes. The gameplay TLDR; The pro: After losing to the first boss I did find that I enjoyed the experience and want to face her again. So that's a positive. The con: Although I don't mind the dungeon building part, I'm not super looking forward to all of the minor room battles along the way. They are kind of easy, and it feels like a bit of a chore to just get through them so I can get to the boss fight I want to have. Graphically it is beautiful. Looks amazing in 4k. Solid marks there. Audio design is... a bit lacking for my taste. Obviously very subjective but I just don't feel enough oomph in the combat, I didn't feel the music was anything stellar, and in general the sound effects were just ok. The story is great. Writing is well done, the English grammar is good. Simple little story so far, but there's nothing wrong with that. It's well told, doesn't get in the way too much, and lends a lighthearted feel to the game that I think adds value to the experience. Good job there. The menu and games UI's are very slick. Everything works great. I played with a gamepad the entire time and never had issues with where I wanted to be on screen or what button I needed to push. I was a bit worried about that given the dungeon building part, but they clearly thought this through very well. This will make an absolutely wonderful experience on the Steam Deck for those of us with OLED units that absolutely refuse to touch fingers to screen. Everything you need is on the thumbsticks or the control buttons. Well done with this design. This game has an interesting difficulty curve.... for the most part, I found the generic room battles extraordinarily easy. In fact I kind of got bored with it. Then, as the rooms moved on.. it started getting a little more hectic. Not necessarily that enemies had new abilities or were providing unique challenges... there is some of that... but it felt also like the rooms just starting packing more enemies in. That works, I guess... but it isn't ideal. That said, I wanted to push through to the first boss and see how things went. Then I got to the first boss and got absolutely wrecked. I think I did finally start to get the pattern down, so when I face her again, I think I'll stand a much better chance... but it was a very steep jump in challenge from the rooms, which were very very easy, to the boss who actually required that you have a practiced mastery of the jumping and dashing, dash cooldowns, and melee distances of your attack. It felt awkward. But then again, at least it felt fresh. Suddenly I had something challenging to work on, and that salvaged the general combat experience. The upgrades you get throughout the run were fine. I won't say they had me on the edge of my seat, but they weren't horse armor, either. For the most part, they were meaningful if you were playing with a particular style. I didn't feel that they were complete game changers, though. As far as the dungeon building piece, it's pretty well done. I mean it isn't ground breaking... it's a deckbuilding style dungeon builder. You have build points, you have a "hand" of rooms, you can unlock more and better rooms as you play the game. The difference with this game is that you earn more build points by playing through and killing the enemies. So whereas in some dungeon builder games you spend all your build points then go after some goal or quest... in this game you might find yourself just jumping in to fight a couple rooms to make build points, then jumping back out to place another room, and so on and so forth. Although when I write it, it sounds bad... it wasn't honestly that bad. It kept you moving between the game modes pretty well. As far as roguelite meta-progression, there does appear to be quite a few unlocks to move through. The abilities progression is a bit less inspiring though. There's a tree, but it isn't that huge... I can tell that they've gone for a smaller tree, but with higher unlock costs on abilities. The problem with this design is it means you frequently will find yourself after a run with nothing to spend points on, because you don't have enough of them. This can lead to stagnation, and a feeling of lack of progression. If I had one change to request in this game from the development team, it would be to expand upon the roguelite progression in such a way that you get more frequent upgrades. Think about the mirror in Hades, for example... you were almost unlocking at least a point of something after every run (at least in the early game). I'd like to see this game move slightly in that direction vice what they have now. In closing, go back and re-read the TLDR above. Overall going with a positive rating, and I think this game will shape up to be enjoyable when all things are said and done.

This game is a lot of fun, and it seems to be getting better as I play. I HIGHLY recommend watching the video which explains gameplay and concept on the store page.