Castle In The Darkness Reviews

This game is designed to annoy you, and doesn't want you to play it. So just don't! That simple. Plenty of other much better metroidvanias out there. My one million complaints if you're interested: 1. No Map, so it's hard to tell when you "took the path that wasn't the dead end with a treasure" and no, this game is not designed in a way that having no map is fine. There is backtracking and remembering where you didn't go very necessary to find secrets. So it would have been extremely useful to have a map. 2. Game has pretty cheap difficulty with instakill spikes, only save checkpoints so backtracking is absolute suffering until you get the warp ability far into the game. If you missed some item, going back for it is a massive pain prior to getting the ability to warp, so if you make a simple mistake of exploring in the wrong direction have fun being locked out of an item for most of the rest of the game. 3. Game does not recognize an Xbox one controller. 4. Game glitches on resizing the window when you boot it up for the first time. 5. Game doesn't let you change equipment whenever you want, only at save points. Why give multiple weapons if you cannot easily switch between them? 6. Game lives in the shadow of better games. Constant blatant references to games it was inspired by. Lots of enemies based on things in nintendo games, fairies that damage you by saying "Hey! Listen!", power up shroom enemies. It's pretty cringe. Only one of them made me laugh and it could have done so even without the reference - this was when you open a chest as a gift from the NPC, get 1 coin from it, then most players instinctively go back and hit the NPC with their sword out of annoyance, expecting nothing to happen, but the NPC instead dies instantly with a small blip. Of course, they have to make this character look like link and say "It's dangerous to go alone, take this" as well because they can't come up with their own ideas. Candles in a castle placed conveniently in hitting height that explode and drop fire that hurts you when hit instead of hearts like in castlevania just to trick you yet again. Angry faces on rock block enemies that drop down to try to crush you in a castle just like in mario world! Ugh. Get your own designs please. 7. Often background elements are interactable, but look like they aren't. Such as pots in rooms of inns or pots in dungeons. The game has bad visual design in this way. I kept dying because i hit my head on something i thought was a background detail and plummeted into a pit. 8. Game's audio does not mute on alt tabbing out of it 9. No pause button, only alt tab to pause 10. Due to how fast enemies annihilate you if you get even touched, it's superior to simply fight nothing ever if possible since the risk is too high to your health. This is not how this sort of game should be designed, the player should not be discouraged from fighting enemies. 11. This is kind of rudimentary game design, but usually you design levels so that skilled players can flow through the level by feel. However this game is designed in that if you do that, you will be hit with 17 traps that do insane amounts of damage to you as if it was one of those "look how hard it is" games from back in the day like I Wanna Be the Guy. Which isn't hard, it's just intentionally designed to trick the player in ways that instantly kill them. This is crappy game design in my opinion. It's obviously not one of those "jokingly bad how dishonestly the game is designed", but you are constantly hit by things placed exactly where you need to stand to accomplish something unexpectedly. It's so annoying to play through blind as a result. 12. Often spikes way too easily blend in with the background. For example in the cave area frequently there are only one or two of them so they look like harmless stalagmites. The visual design is just not good for such a instantly punishing hazard. Oh look, a couple NPCs around a comfy campfire. Oh walking into the campfire just about instantly kills you in this safe zone just to be annoying. Too much crap like that. Everything is designed to aggravate the player on purpose. 13. The hitboxes are not well done for bosses, frequently you will get hit by them when it seems like you were not within "touching" distance. 14. Enemies that look exactly the same as enemies in earlier areas so you cannot tell them apart now drop deadly projectiles when they die, resulting in you getting tricked yet again into getting hurt. You're supposed to design games so that people aren't cheated into learning to be good at the game, they learn by instinct and get better as they go 15. Some cracked blocks break when you step on them, others don't. How can you know? You can't. You just have to know already, like everything else in this badly designed game. 16. Does not obey the "two rooms away rule". Which I think is a grave sin of game design. For those that don't know, the "two rooms away rule" is a rule that states you should respawn enemies only when you are two rooms away from a room you already cleared. Otherwise, if it's only one room away, checking a room and deciding to go back respawns the entire room, which discourages exploration in this sort of game. It's an elementary rule that everyone should know by now. 17. "Hold jump button to skip" does not work on some cutscenes for absolutely no reason. Did you even test this function? The only reason seeing these cutscenes multiple times happens anyway is because of bad saving mechanisms. Just screw off devs of this game. This game feels dishonestly designed, half broken, and has nothing really of note style-wise. You're just a knight saving a princess. It's the most bland crap. The only thing I can say about the game that is good is that the bosses are actually pretty fun to fight as they are the one part of the game NOT filled with bullcrap tricks to instakill you. What you see is what you get basically. It feels like this dev loved making bosses because of how many there are in the game, but needed to wrap it in some crappy precision platforming trash for some reason.

Gameplay is difficult and save points can be very unforgiving. Requires near pixel perfect movement and timing, but hitboxes are consistent so it doesn't feel unfair. Definitely gives retro 2D platforming (for my fellow dusty, aged peers). As a potential added bonus, it keeps your butthole nice and tight with the sustained puckering. According to a friend.