Darkest Mine Steam Charts & Stats

I really wanted to like this game, I like the concepts, but the controls, hitboxes, and overall gameplay feel so janky, that it became more frustrating than anything. Half the time I take damage it's because I didn't move/attack in the intended direction. Gripes follow in no specific order: The game pretends to let you use analog stick or d-pad for movement, but if you try to use the d-pad, up and down straight up don't work. I had to map my d-pad to the analog stick axes to actually use it to play. You can't jump down from platforms with down+jump or even just down, which would be fine since there's no crouching in this game, but no—the only way to drop down through a platform is by dashing downward (???). Speaking of dashing, in this game, dashing is too slow to move as far as it does without being able to cancel out of it. It is far too easy to dash in a direction, have an enemy wander into the spot where the dash ends before it's finished, and you come out of the dash and take unavoidable damage. And speaking of platforms, enemies freely move through them but your one ranged weapon can't fire through them, making certain rooms and bosses far more difficult with that weapon than with any of the others, for no good reason, since it's obvious its damage and attack speed are clearly what's meant to be the means of balancing it against the other weapons. Enemies do contact damage, fine—but you can't move through them, and your default recoil time is so long that it's very easy to be body-blocked by one or more enemies pushing you into a corner after taking a hit before you can act again, giving you no choice but to dash (which does go through enemies), which often leads to the dashing gripe above. I only regret giving it an entire stream of attempts before giving up on it, because I've now played it too long to refund it. It's been a pretty long time since I've given a game a negative review, but seeing this at 100% positive, I had to say something, lol. The fact that the achievement for killing 100 monsters, which I got in about an hour of playtime, is an achievement 40% of players have, definitely makes me wonder about these reviews. Also, as of writing less than 1% of players have beaten the game on its first of five 'ascensions', after it's been out for months. And literal 0% on ascensions 2-5, lol.