Void Memory Reviews

I like this game but the fact that you can only use keyboard with a very limited bind gives me a a handicap in playing. I really hate it when dev don't use the full capacity of what a mouse and keyboard does. If you put games on PC its a no brainer to put MKB support no argument.

[b] SoulsVania [/b] This is a metroidvania game focused on combat and with some light to moderate plataforming, its clearly inspired by both SoTN and the Souls games, its enjoyable and the bosses are REALLY good but the common enemy is not that fun to kill, even so everything else fits well enough [b] Swing up, Swing down (or viceversa) [/b] The game uses an stamina system to dodge and to attack, but almost all weapons control the same, some are a bit faster, some have greater lenght, but they all make either 2 swings with moderate damage or 1 with heavy damage per combo, the simplicity works really well against bosses but makes normal enemies a chore to kill since your agression is heavily limited by your stamina most encounters will follow a pattern like "attack some, dodge, retreat to recharge stamina, repeat until killed, move to the next encounter" [b] Needs a Boss Rush [/b] The game does feature exploration and secrets, but the exploration is obviously not the point. the bosses on the other hand are really fun to fight and let the mechanics shine to their full potential [b] Recommended at a discount [/b]

You itching for a little bit of that Soulsy kinda Castlevania like action? I reckon Void Memory might just do the trick. I found this baby while desperately searching Steam for something to play that wasn't absolutely terrible and I'm damned glad I did. Keep in mind it's not a perfect game, there are times when it's a little too dark for comfort which can lead to MANY unfortunate but hilarious fall deaths and the enemies have two tiers, the trash mobs and the relentlessly irritating. Some of the translations are absolutely hilarious but this doesn't take away from the experience so much as enhance it with a few good chuckles. Despite the translations you can fully tell there's a nifty bit of lore going on in there with an awesome atmosphere and sweet, sweet tunes when there's music to be heard. The different weapons, accessories and sub items/weapons allow for a variety of playstyles and strategies to be formulated to fit every situation that might come your way. For some of the later bosses I'd completely rework my characters loadout to make my life easier. Speaking of bosses, that's where the game really stood out for me. The boss designs are absolutely fantastic and some of them fully test your mettle as a gamer. They felt great. Perhaps infuriating, almost exhausting at times but hot damn they felt great. At the price of 11 bucks or so, I'd buy it again. Absolutely delightful experience and I'd hope to see Gustav churn out some more of the good stuff in the future.

If steam has a rating called "Mixed", I would definitely rate this game that. Until then, let's just keep it negative now. It is a souls-like metroidvania with a long learning curve. Once you get the hand of it, it is a unique adventure to go through. Combat is clunky and requires some management. Every weapon has two-combo moveset. It is not recommended to fininsh due to the fact that the attack and dodge takes away so much stamina that makes you feel like you never exercise before––tired as hell. Plus all the bosses has a barrage of unforgiving movesets. That`s for later part. For story, you are a phantom summoned for the sake of collecting the broken "Relic" to...destroy the fractured world? Or save it? I am not quite sure what`s the meaning of my so-called "holy yet cruel crusade of relic-hunting". Almost all the lores come from dialogues, from a subjective point of view. Often time the clues I can find in game are enigmatic or straight up unrelated to the whole. As a result, levels becomes a multi-stage runthrough without in depth connection. Your progression transforms to following orders without question, a shame really for me who digs this game`s design and story. Remember the bosses I mentioned above? Here comes the part which I love/hate. I love how the bosses are designed, as well as their movesets. They are distinctive. However, I hate how unforgiving they are. On paper, their movesets are dope; in reality, they are ridiculous to a degree of losing fairness. Our protogansit`s only way of evasion is to dash forward. The problem is the AOE bosses have are often long and lasting. It is hard to tell whether the skill is over, or did I successfully escape. Mistakes are made, and half of the health vansih. Most unbalanced one is Grammartys.Being the earlly challenging main boss I don`t even know how many time I got kick in the ass by this damnable montrosity. Let`s keep it this way: imagine in Dark Souls 3, put Pontiff Sulyvahn to where Abyss Watchers is, and ampflies his speed and range. That's HIM. NG+ is hell. The difficulties rank up because there are more late-game enemies in begining, and they all hit like trucks. To this point our protagnist is a true paper doll––two-shot by everything. This is a cheap way to cover new difficulty. Bosses are even more unforgiving than before. Faster. Stronger. And larger AOE. I don`t even know why I bother finish it again considering there`s no true rewards other than achievements.(which I am obessive with, so screw myself then.) To ravel it all, I only recommend this game for first time playthrough. Other than that just don`t. DON'T.

I am sorry, but too many things about this game are just aweful. The list of stuff i encountered when briefly testing it out: - It does not have any sound options. - It does not have proper fullsreen, and will leave most of your screen black to present itself on a tiny rectangle in the middle (and no, it's not a 4k-screen). - The game crashes when i accidently press any key or button that does not have a functionality within the game. - You can only access the options from the menu, not ingame. - You can only access your inventory when at a savepoint. Even to just take a look. - Items descriptions in your inventory do not tell you anything useful but a tiny bit of generic lore instead. - freesound.org - Walking animations are absolutely aweful and do not fit the walking speed. - Enemies often walk in place and are intangible while doing so. - The combat system is aweful (you find out when fighting the first boss: You can not dodge anything neither by jumping, nor movement nor dash. But facetanking works just fine!) ... and many more to come, i will never encounter, since i put it back into the corner where it came from. Please mind, that i usually have a huge tolerance for... questionable... games, but this one is not only borderline unplayable, but also not worth playing, sadly. Even if the game might look nice in some screenshots or split-second video-material, you will find that it is not like that in reality.

If you are a fan of the old side scrolling castlevania games, especially SotN, this is a must have. From mechanics to the music, void memory delivers an amazaing game experaince. The game lets you explore how you like with oodles of secrets lurking throughout. Combat can be challanging at times but, everything is fair. Be perapred to sink an easy 20 hours into your first play through. The only negative I have with the game is its lack of support for a full screen mode, which is not ground breaking for me at least. For under 5$ on sale, you would be getting quite the steal. Even the orginal price tag of 16.99 is worth it in my opinion.

THE POSITIVE: I like how smooth the combat feels, although the controls a little weird but you get used to it. the art style is gorgeous, and you can change the player model to many different cool appearances, it has a wide variety of weapons to use which encourages different playstyles. it even offers a side weapon. somewhat like Bloodborne. THE NEGATIVE: I was enjoying it very much until I finished the first half of the game, I reached an area so frustratingly difficult, I never played it again. Difficult as in: the run to the boss drains all your resources only for you to reach an overpowered 1 hit KO boss to finish the job and kill you instantly. And you can't change the resolution past 1600x1200. Not recommended for impatient and casual players like myself. If you like the difficulty then by all means go ahead and play it.

[h1]Metroidvania meets Soulsborne in the worst possible way.[/h1] [b]EDITED REVIEW FOR THE "ADDENDUM"[/b] I would like to preface this addendum of my own by saying I really want to like this game. I honestly do. But there is still so much wrong with it that I can't recommend it in good faith. I replayed the whole game expecting it to be more balanced and approachable only to be sorely disappointed. Only one enemy was "balanced," the Red Zombie, which was impossible to handle pre-patch. Everything else that could have used some rework (enemy spells/mages, mini-bosses) did not get one. Some weapons feel worse off and only cemented the Mace and Iron Flail as being the best weapons while everything else is useless (either due to stamina consumption or attack speed). Items don't feel much different either and the healing items didn't feel like they were buffed much. Now, lets talk about the "New areas." They, sadly, suffer from the same issues as the base game. The mini-bosses there as well as the one boss I made it to are frustratingly unfair. They have more attack chains than your Stamina can handle and are able to warp around the area so you can't really outrun them to get some breathing room. The damage output of the one boss was so bad that she had two attacks that were OHKOs on my character. Whats worse is that one of them shares an animation with a much less severe attack. She also has a "predictive dodge" mechanic that will move her out of range and nullify your first attack chance which severely limits which weapons you can use and is compounded by the stamina issues. Because of all this, the rest of my review still stands as well as my rating. [b]The Good:[/b] Outfits – The one unique thing about this game. You can find outfits that can customize and change your characters appearance, and even gender. Unfortunately, that’s it. [b]The Bad:[/b] There is so much wrong with this game that I don’t even know where to start: [list] [*]Gameplay - [i]Void Memory[/i] fails to live up to the games it took inspiration from. Platformers are usually fair and make sense. If there is a floor below the one you are on and you see a hole above the floor below, logically, you should be able to jump into said hole for a possible shortcut, no? That is where you are wrong. [i]Void Memory[/i] places bottomless pits even in spots where you should drop down to the floor below. So good luck figuring out which hole is safe and which is death. Even worse is there is no way to have the camera move to check out any possible jumps you make. They are all leaps of faith. Another issue is that the developers decided to be cheap and make it so enemies get free kills on you. Anything that can shoot you, can knock you back and they tend to place them near bottomless pits, so have fun with that. They also took the idea that more enemies makes it more difficult which results in nothing more than artificial difficulty that is frustrating. [*]Lighting – The game seems to focus on your character and your character alone. In some areas, if it is out of the “Radius of Light” that focuses on your character, you will be staring at a black screen. It doesn’t help that this can cause trouble with platforming areas and even some bosses. [*]Combat - It starts off okay and then gets tedious as enemies will respawn as you move between screens. This is compounded by the fact that the developers either A) left an area barren with no enemies or B) loaded an area up with as many enemies as possible. The end result can usually be a cheap death or two as you try to deal with the melee enemies while the ranged ones rain death upon you. The other issue is the difficulty spikes of combat. It goes from no challenge at all to pure frustration that can lead to rage quits. This includes some enemies that can do obscene amounts of damage, shoot a never ending stream of magical homing projectiles (that launch you and/or stunlock you), or, with one hidden one, that can either yahoo kick your character off the cliff or launch them back into the next screen thus resetting the fight. [*]Controls - They respond. Most of the time. It was frustrating that many of my deaths resulted in the dodge failing because it failed to register. [*]Menu – There is none. At least not in the typical sense. [i]Void Memory[/i] decided to be innovative in the worst possible way by removing a player’s ability to access the menu at any given time unless it was at their “Bonfire” mechanic thing. It is only there that you can change out gear including weapons and sub weapons. What this means is that you may end up dying a cheap death because you literally can’t hit an enemy with your current set up such as the dogs (at least I think they are as you hear barking before they charge you). [*]Leveling up – Your level and HP go up. That’s about it. Your weapons seem to do a fixed amount of damage no matter how high your level goes. Worse yet, you never gain any form of defense meaning you can take a large amount of damage from some enemies and bosses unless your manage to dodge. [*]Story – I honestly have no idea what was going on with the few tidbits I got. Items have sparse information and NPCs are few and far between. It also doesn’t help that you need to return to the “bonfire” to read the new item description. I feel as if this hurts the lore potential as some items may relate to the location found in. [b]Conclusion:[/b] All in all, [i]Void Memory[/i] is a poorly made game that favors cheap and artificial difficulty over an actual challenge. Its own innovative design only hurt it more rather than allowing it to stand out. Avoid it at all costs unless you are a true masochist. [b]3/10[/b] [b]EDIT:[/b] [h1]Now with a mixture of Smash Bros. [/h1] I tried to be tenacious and keep playing in hopes that maybe it might get better only to find even more wrong with it. I would like to add that the Developer took inspiration from the Smash Bros. Series too. [*]Hitboxes – Sometimes the hitbox of your weapon will just not register. Now, I could understand if it was a smaller weapon, but when you are swinging a weapon twice the size of you and it goes through an enemy, one that you just killed 20 times before for it to not connect means there is something wrong. This happened to me over water which, in this game as most enemies tend to knock you back, you can’t swim in and is an instant death. [*]Stamina – The [i]Soulsborne[/i] game series allows their players to raise up their stamina meter in order to swing heavy weaponry more than once. Not in this game. Your Stamina meter is set to a fixed maximum amount which means you need to micromanage if you like swinging around building sized weapons. This can be frustrating if you decided to try out a new weapon only to find out that you can get about two swings off before you have little to no stamina left which leaves you with fewer dodging opportunities. This is only made worse in that you can not switch weapons until you get the next “bonfire” or return to a previous one. [*]Physics – I had mentioned earlier that there was a secret enemy that could yahoo kick you off a cliff or kick you back into the next screen to reset the fight. Little did I know I was actually playing Super Smash Bros. in disguise with my damage percentage set to 100%. While most enemies tend to launch you back enough to drop you over a bottomless pit to your death, there are a few that can send you flying across the screen like the aforementioned one. Even worse is that some bosses can launch you to the moon, or as close to the celling of the screen as possible. One of of the unscheduled skybound flights I experienced was with a downward slam attack, which should have put me down for a nap rather than launching in to the air. This is only made worse because if you are stuck in the air, you are a free target for any possible follow up attack as you can’t perform air dodges.

Good and challenging game. Boss fights are also pretty varied. The dodging involves stuff other than using phantom maneuver at the right time, which is pretty cool given how limited your character's mobility is. It's hard to see if enhance defense is still active or not. The light blue aura is hard to see since your character has a lot of white. I don't have this issue with enhance attack and enhance stamina so it's definitely the color. At first I died a few times from pressing Phantom Maneuver and not having directional key held down. Took a while to figure out why my Phantom just sat there and took lethal hits lol.

I cannot fathom the 94% positive rating this game has. As someone who loves every Soulsborne game and has beaten each one multiple times, this is nothing like them. Salt and Sanctuary as well. The difficulty of Dark Souls and games like it comes from good design, the difficulty of this game comes from BAD design. But I will start with what this game does right. The pixel graphics are gorgeous, and the game knows it. As you progress you continue to unlock new outfits which completely change your look and even sometimes animations, and that's something I genuinely appreciate. The music is acceptable. Some of the animations are very fluid and satisfying. Unfortunately that's where the positives stop because this game does just about everything else wrong. Horribly translated dialogue means you have at best a vague idea of what's going on. I'm still not sure if Danche was a person, place, or organization because it's referred to as they and it at various points, and spoken of as if it takes individual actions. Combat is clunky and unenjoyable. It lacks all of the fluidity a modern Metroidvania should have. You can swing your weapon twice before you're out of stamina, and for all the several levels I gained, my stamina, health, and damage never seemed to increase. For a game with even partial controller support it really wastes its button economy, and the gameplay suffers for it. Subweapons/spells are tied to the same buttons as movement and attacking, and its very easy to fire off a spell in the wrong direction because you're trying to evade enemies at the same time as actually fucking doing anything. Meanwhile I have at least three buttons that do nothing which could easily have been used for items/subweapons. Movement can be described at best as slow and difficult. Control in a game with only 2 dimensions is the most important thing, but if I'm fighting the controls as much as the enemies I'm not having as good a time as I could be. Then you have the Metroidvania aspects, where the game fails once more. Staples of the genre are shortcuts, powerups, and secrets. The one shortcut I've found thus far took me from a random pit in the ground... back to the save point I was just at. You find a great variety of weapons and subweapons, but they're all either "as good" as anything else, or outright useless. Nothing you get feels like an upgrade or an unlock. Which brings me to the next point. The progression in this game is almost purely cosmetic. I've seen no notable difference in performance between the seven weapons I've obtained thus far. Just some different movesets that, because of the clunky combat, offer zero situational advantages based on the one you choose. Conceptually great; weapon and item variety would be very welcome in a Metroidvania normally, but the execution of this, as with much else in the game, is poor. It is clear that very little care went into the design of this game, in its levels, encounters, and even fundamental gameplay. Half of each level is just instant death pits that you can't see because of the lighting, and the number of leaps of faith in any given level is actually impressive. Because the game takes the babby's first game development approach to its design, it tries to substitute killing you for entertaining you, mistakenly thinking that that's why you're here or the reason that games like Dark Souls are successful. This game isn't punishing you, it's just insulting you with its consistently poor design choices. This became especially apparent to me after fighting an enemy that could kick you right off the map with zero counter play. If you get hit by the kick it's just over. Instead of making this long distance knockback the setup for a different ability it made it a cheap move that either knocks you back into the previous area resetting the enemy's health, or off a nearby cliff. It's not a boss either, just a horrendously designed optional fight that gives you a non-upgrade as a "reward" and loops you back to the save point you were just at. Add to that its multitude of ranged attacks which far outclass your own, a magic arrow spell chain that takes out 80% of your health and stunlocks you if you get hit by even one of them. Can be avoided, but good fucking luck because your I-frames don't last long enough to dodge through all of them. Again, just poorly designed and rewards circumstance more than skill, and is simply unsatisfying even when you eventually win. This game lays the foundation for a great title, but fails to make good on any of its promises. The lack of polish across the board makes this a thoroughly unenjoyable game, and I wish I could see what everyone else apparently sees in this negative experience, because I do want to like it (and it's too late for me to get a refund).