Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 15, 2022

  I was one of those folks who liked Castlevania 2, a lot. This is just better in every way.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 25, 2022

  ⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️ select start works on this game.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 15, 2022

  Next best thing to a Faxanadu sequel
• gamedeal user

  Jan 24, 2023

  It's really good with a few annoying moments. Had fun getting all the endings. I might just be an epic platform gamer hardened by playing games like NES Castlevania but I really didn't find it as challenging as other reviews say it is. It's tough, but it's not Nintendo hard by any means. The lives system is pretty generous for a game like this - throughout the game you can purchase up to 3 lives that will restart you in the room where you died until you game over and get sent back to a save point, but there are no save points inside dungeons. My first playthrough took about 7.5 hours and it took me 22 total for all the endings which was a total of about 4 or 5 runs of the game with different routes. The morality system isn't deep, but it's a lot of fun to see the effects your decisions have on the world. The bosses have great visual design but since they aren't the focus of the game, most of them have basic, well-telegraphed attacks and you will probably beat some of them on the first try without prior knowledge. There are a few puzzles, but they are all hinted at very strongly by dialog. There are a few annoying points - perhaps the worst one is that you pass by a house in the very first area that you'll need to return to during daytime to find a quest for additional good/evil points. There is no indication that you are supposed to do this. This game fuses elements of classic castlevania with the metroid-like gameplay of later entries. Dungeons contain necessary items, so you should be exploring them fully. Isn't exploring the point of a game like this? Saying that dungeons having dead ends that require keys from another path to progress is "padding" or "a waste of time" is like saying that Metroid Prime wasted my time because I walked all the way to the crashed frigate without the gravity suit and had to turn around. If you have a brain, you'll figure out that you can make timing jumps between platforms much easier by jumping before the next platform falls or getting yourself out from under a ceiling to get more height. The section before the second dungeon is child's play. If it's not clear, I'm responding directly to the claims made in the highest rated negative review of this game. This game has criticisms to be made of it, but I'm not sure why you would play a challenging platformer with metroidvania elements if you don't like challenging platforming or metroidvania elements! But get there early and people will believe anything, I guess. Overall, I absolutely recommend this game if you're not the type to whine and complain about dying a few times.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 16, 2022

  What a horrible night to have to work tomorrow because I want play video games all night
• gamedeal user

  Jan 4, 2023

  I am writing this positive review after having beaten Infernax on Classic Mode with the "Ultimate Good" ending unlocked. It took me 11 hours to reach this point, during which I unlocked 15 out of the game's total of 30 achievements. Overall, I was deeply impressed. My playthrough saw me fighting, platforming and adventuring across tightly designed areas and dungeons in a well-realized setting with very reasonable difficulty design and a steady and satisfying sense of character progression. The biggest hurdle I faced early on in Infernax was the fact that playing on Classic Mode meant that dungeons didn't have any checkpoints. Losing all my lives would send me all the way back to the dungeon's entrance and erase any progress I had made prior to saving.  At first, this punishing system made me want to switch to Casual Mode so that I could enjoy having safety nets within dungeons that would make death would less punishing. I viewed this safety net as especially important in case I died prior to a boss, because having a checkpoint within a dungeon would prevent me from suffering through any excessively long runbacks. However, I quickly realized that Infernax was one of the extremely few instances of a game where no checkpoints in dungeons was justified. Here is why: <*>Most of the dungeons were fairly short, with the average dungeon being comprised of about a dozen zones (the exception being the very final dungeon, which was about 30 zones in size). <*>As a player, I could acquire multiple lives that allowed me to restart the specific zone of the dungeon where I lost a life, so it's not like every single death would send me back to the start of a dungeon. <*>None of the dungeon bosses--or any bosses really--have any more than 5 moves, nor do any of them have multiple phases. Even the final boss only has a single phase! And although the bosses of Infernax are often visually spectacular, they aren't designed as actual difficulty spikes the way bosses often are in other games. As a result, I was able to beat most bosses in the game on my first try. The vast majority of my deaths in any dungeon were more from the platforming and the fighting against the demonic mobs that happened on the way to the boss, rather than from the bosses themselves. <*>Whenever I made significant progress in a dungeon and was low on resources or did not want to lose any progress I had made, I could always retrace my steps back to the dungeon entrance and save my progress. Because of all of this, Infernax has completely justified its reason for having its Classic Mode both be free of checkpoints in its dungeons and be brutal enough to take away any progress I made between the time I saved your progress and lost all my lives in a dungeon.  (On a side note: This is the type of reasonable and balanced approach I wish all the so-called "Souls-like" games out there would emulate. These types of games typically delight in forcing players to run through huge swathes of levels if they die to a boss with a billion moves and a trillion phases, while also of course forcing them to restart the bosses all over from phase one every time they re-attempt to fight those bosses. In these games, bosses are actually meant to be huge difficulty spikes that are distinct from the levels in which they reside, which is in stark contrast to Infernax having bosses that exist more as spectacles and less as challenges. So for these "Souls-like" games to put respawn checkpoints far away from bosses instead of right outside the boss room is just infuriating and unjustified.) Upon finishing Infernax, I immediately combed through the Infernax wiki site and various YouTube videos just to catch a quick glimpse of what else remained in the game that I had not yet seen even after reaching the Ultimate Good ending. I was extremely taken aback to learn that the game actually contained multiple playable characters that each had distinct weapons and playstyles (such as a wizard character and even a futuristic character with a machine gun inspired by the run-and-gun genre). I also did not realize just how much in the way of unique bosses there was still left for me to fight by pursuing the other morality routes in the game. For a game that only takes up 206.2 megabytes of space on my hard drive, Infernax sure has a deceptively rich amount of content and replayability contained within it that puts most modern 70 dollar Triple-A single-player titles to shame.  There are even traditional cheat codes that I could type in the game to activate a variety of effects, ranging from overpowered hacks (like infinite health and magic) to goofy ways of playing the game (such as a cheat that makes my character half-sized or one that gives me a motorcycle). It's so rare to see a game that does so many things so well. I don't think I need to go into just how gorgeous the art design and sprite work is for this game. That much is evident just from looking at its screenshots and trailers. The soundtrack also has quite a number of memorable tunes. Character dialogue is also written in a manner that is appropriate for the game's fantasy medieval setting (unlike, say, God of War: Ragnarok, which has most of its characters eerily talking like modern Californian Gen-Z youths). Unfortunately, no game is perfect. I still have criticisms of Infernax. Here is a quick list: <*>Screens/pop-up notifications that players see a million times per playthrough should be automatically skippable. This includes the post-save "the prayers quell the pain of battle" message, or any of the day-and-night pop-up images that appear when the time of day changes, or any of the animations that play when you die and the screen fades to red.  <*>It takes far too long for players to gain access to fast travel. It should have been available way sooner than is currently possible in the game. Here's one example of how the lack of fast travel annoyed me: Early on, after visiting Arkos, you are tasked with talking to a handsome guy from Darsov to find out a password for a hideout. That requires you to backtrack through 8-9 screens filled with enemies just to get to that guy in Darsov. Then you have to backtrack AGAIN through those same 8-9 screens to reach Arkos and then the Tohan Passage. Until you gain access to fast travel, you have to suffer through a lot of this backtracking, especially for a first-time player. <*>The fact that potions don't refill at save statues leads to time wasted just backtracking to villages to refill at potionsmiths.  <*>The UI needs to show timers indicating just how long you have until your familiar summons and your buffs will deplete.  <*>On a related note, there should also be a timer showing how long you have until day turns to night and vice versa. <*>Holy Charge needs an indicator showing just how far the attack will propel Alcedor forward. Otherwise, it's just trial and error until you figure out the proper spacing. This is a painful process for some of the deadly pitfall jumps in dungeons that specifically require you to use Holy Charge. <*>The dungeon maps could use more details. This would be particularly helpful in Urzo Citadel Hell, a place with lots of teleporters. Dungeon maps also need to show where locked doors are so that you can remember the locations of these doors. Nevertheless, despite these complaints, I wholeheartedly recommend Infernax. It's one of the best games of 2022. It deserved far more recognition than it did in the year's awards circles. The fact that Stray (a walking simulator with zero challenge and zero replayability) was the indie darling of 2022 among gaming journalists and awards ceremonies is more proof that the people and organizations who control videogame discourse deserve no such power over the industry.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 20, 2022

  This is a really mixed bag for me but I liked it enough to finish it. As far as the good, I love the theme and the general feeling of the combat is pretty good. I grew up on these kinds of games and I'm a huge metalhead just like these devs. Let me crack skeletons in the face, give me cool satanic shit to look at, and name all your achievements after metal songs and I'll at least check out your game. Although I thought the basic enemies were nothing special to look at the bigger enemies that give their artist some room to work with look awesome. You don't often get really grotesque things in pixel art form and that for sure was a big highlight for me. The cutscene and pre-bossfight images are incredible. Now for the bad... Your health is represented as blocks and the damage done seems to be number based or damage was just broken at times in my playthrough. There were times where I got hit by the same attack and it visible took away different amounts of visible blocks of health. This made it really hard to know when I should have been healing. This feels kinda like Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest and I incorrectly assumed this was going to be linear like 1 and 3. There's lots of backtracking through a bland overworld and some absurdly vague hints on how to progress the game that you will likely have to look up much like the infamous crouch in a corner BS from Simon's Quest. You can eventually find a teleport spell to make backtracking not as bad but it's very late in the game and easy to pass up. If you're into replaying games for both the good and evil routes, there looks to be a lot here from the little bit I looked up on youtube. I rarely replay games unless they're amazing. On a single run this felt a bit lacking with enemy variety and the good route is kinda bland. I'd highly recommend playing evil if you want something more memorable. Castles can be cleared while missing incredibly useful power-ups in them. One wrong turn means that you might fight a boss while leaving some parts of the castle undiscovered. If you beat the boss, you get warped out of the castle and have to go back through the castle again to find the power-up you missed. I really don't understand why they didn't make these impossible to miss since I think you need every last one of them to get through the game. Potions. You need to go out of your way to fill them up and they're the one thing that does not reset between deaths. If you drank a potion in a boss fight and die, you'll reset to the last room you entered with everything restored except for potions you may have drank. I hate RPG elements in games that are not designed to be a role playing game from the ground up. It's just an added layer of nonsense that could easily be replaced by scaling enemy damage and health with your player's stock attack power and health in mind.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 13, 2022

  A gore-soaked love letter to us maniacs that enjoyed Simon's Quest and Adventure of Link
• gamedeal user

  Apr 16, 2023

  Basically like Castlevania 2: Simon's quest, Zelda 2, and Rygar combined with some decisions that dramatically impact your abilities and the gameplay. Edit: I should add that the co op is extremely good and probably the best done of any game in this format that I have seen.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 17, 2022

  Excellent Metroidvania with faxanadu , simons quest, and zelda 2 elements with a pinch of darks souls , i have put in over 30 hours and would definitely put in more