Shadow Labyrinth Review (Jeff)
I'm completely removing my previous early glowing review. It's not a terrible game, but it's got a lot of jank. And not the fun kind of jank.
There are some odd decisions made in terms of level design, often time the main path forward is illusory wall, there are entire paths that just sort of lead nowhere, or to a tiny amount of resources. It feels like the world was crafted and then they threw darts at a board to decided which rewards would go where.
Bosses come back to life after a while, there was one case where I defeated a boss, saved, opened up a shortcut to skip the boss area, died, and when I came back the boss was back and it turned out the shortcut I opened up (cut down a rope to climb up) was part 1 of two ropes I needed to cut down and I had to refight the boss.
Sadly I cannot recommend this game anymore at this point. All the enemies act in the same ways, there is variety in artwork but not in attacks. Your options for upgrading are limited, there isn't any skill tree or real customization other than some very typical charms.
Platforming is bizarre, you often fail to grab on to things except when you don't want to grab on and it forces you. The slide move is fast but you can't slide off of a ledge. Jumping horizontally will cause you to jump very far sometimes, but not others. If you touch certain hazards that cause damage, you take damage and then need to wait 3 seconds to void out and be placed back on the map, in most games it's more like 1 second. Momentum is non existant in this game. Attacking stops all forward movement, air dashing does this weird thing where it pops you up a few pixels and changes your elevation a bit.
There isn't any knockback so when you attack something it just sorta slows down, if something flys at you and you fly at it, hititng it just stops both of you in place.
If you use all of your stamina in a boss fight you are essentially dead, it takes maybe 15 seconds for it to recharge and you cannot dash while it's recharging. Some bosses force you to dodge very frequently and the charm to reduce dodge stamina consumption is mandatory, not optional.
I'm going to keep playing but I'm really disappointed in how quickly the game fell a part. It's almost like they put all their effort in the first 2 hours so you couldn't refund once it falls off a cliff.