Star of Providence Review (Restrife)
This was tough for me. I'm a huge fan of roguelikes, bullet hell, and twin stick shooters. I still ended up refunding this game as there are things that didn't particularly feel good to me.
For reference, I managed to make it to floor 5 up to Overlord on my second run, eventually beat him and get to "spoiler" territories (in under 2h-ish). The game IS a good game by all metrics.
The reason why I refunded it is that it got to a point where I started to notice how heavy this game is based on RNG, and the grind needed to get to meta progression upgrades to help mitigate this was going to be quite high. Normally, this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but I felt that PC controls aren't as smooth and at times felt unresponsive. Hitboxes seemed like they were off (both on myself and enemies) at times not even in a "I shouldn't have been hit by that" but the opposite... which is odd. Loot de-spawning if you accidentally leave a room is awful, SPECIALLY in rooms where loot is there, you are fighting enemies and you dash outside of the room (for instance, after blasting open a secret room), this was specially bad on weapon container rooms, as you can only have 1 gun on you, you are forced to take it or leave it, I couldn't figure out if I was just able to "recycle" any of the offerings and get some HP shards instead. So if I had a gun I liked equipped and tweaked, I had to drop it or just forsake the rewards. Given the hectic nature of the game, I often felt like I was in/out of rooms a bit too fast some times and this would happen more than it should've. THAT is frustrating, way more frustrating that some of the bosses (which are awesome, btw). Maybe these things get better down the road with more meta-progression unlocks, but I didn't want to wait and hope for it to be the case.
Anyhow, I figured I was not going to enjoy those aspects specially given how much I see I needed to grind, and knowing that the game will (as is with these kind of games) feel repetitive quickly at some point. And it IS a sweaty game, the "gamer cred" you'll get from this game is tangible lol, really fucking difficult but equally as fucking rewarding! So keep that in mind if you do want to stick around and see how "good it gets".
That being said, I still recommend this game, and I might end up picking it up later down the road. Just right, given my current circumstances, is not the right game for me.