The Last Faith Review (Regurgitation-Imminent)
I may recommend this game in the future; but for now, there are some major bugs that make it not worthwhile. Wait till they're fixed!
In particular, I just booted up my game for the day and discovered . . . my save file is completely missing. No sign of it anywhere on my machine when I go to poke around the folders. Just gone. I imagine this is due to the crash last night that gave the message "access violation", which led me to stop playing for the day, but the message seems to indicate the file was already deleted at that time.
I have had to deal with constant crashes, and an ever-annoying bug where the game kept resetting my choice of "move with analog or d-pad" *during play*. So I would freeze in place and suddenly start cycling through items while trying to move. This is very frustrating in combat, ESPECIALLY frustrating when jumping over death pits, and continues to happen with a keyboard emulating a virtual controller; in particular, when this happens, I can see the inputs fed to the game by the virtual controller do not translate into actions on-screen for a brief moment, (most visible by writing a script to keep the right analog stick constantly rotating and watching it briefly dip back towards the centre when inputs are interrupted), so I believe the game engine is creating a situation where it believes the controller has been disconnected, (impossible for a virtual controller to be disconnected), and the reconnection process defaults to movement on the analog stick regardless of what your options are set to. This also leads to stutter-y movement at the same instances when you do not change the default option.
More minor glitches include that I couldn't equip charms or items, or in general fill blank spots in my inventory with items; it only worked if I replaced a weapon with another weapon. Another was a more fun glitch where you can gain jump height by playing with the camera; I think infinitely. In general, I have seen so many things I believe were unintended that I'm not fully certain how many minor glitches I've seen and how many were intentional design.
I am unable to properly review this game as a metroidvania as of yet, because while I've played 19 hours, not all of them have been horribly productive and I haven't come across any movement tech except for the double jump so far. Many of the game's progression items that I have found are of the type "collect four of these to get a door somewhere else to open", which is the most boring form of metroidvania progression by far. I also do not have the movement items needed to collect all such items for any one place yet, (except for a starlit lake with a very fun boss, but the presumed reward room is locked behind a glowing door I can't access yet), so I might be missing the excitement of a fantastic reward behind them. There are a lot of large areas which appear to have nothing of importance in them whatsoever, but I may be incorrect because I haven't unlocked everything.
As a soulslike game, it mostly has satisfying combat, if a bit simple, but is weak in many areas introduced by the metroidvania format and some poor level design. For example: do you like jumping down random pits to find out what's in them? That's necessary in this game! A lot! That also causes you to die. A Lot! And like early castlevanias, the game is littered with enemies designed to knock you back into pits. So you will lose your accumulated experience points very often.
There's a lot of enemies and bosses which kill you in one hit, which while they were satisfying to overcome, I can't help but feel that I was meant to find out how to level up somewhere along the way, and nowhere in the various menus can I find any option to do so. Not that I would have had a terrible amount of XP to do so with, because getting back to where I died past a gauntlet of one-hit KO enemies was usually a roughly 50/50 chance once I got good at the area.
There are a lot of challenge rooms which you aren't meant to be able to beat when you can first access them. This is great in a metroidvania, as it allows early access to advanced areas or equipment for skilled players. This is horrible for a soulslike, because now all of your stockpiled experiences points are locked behind entering that challenge room to reclaim them, and then beating that challenge room where the enemies one-hit kill you and have many times the health they normally do.
The game is obsessed with shortcuts, which I view as a positive, and you will often finish a challenge room just to find the road back home again. I think challenge run and speedrun routes will be quite interesting!
Some minor design elements stick out as not fun; grabbing a free-floating ledge is incredibly precise, and there are many places I did not realize were platforms because I did not grab any ledge when trying to climb them. Many jumps REALLY stretch your horizontal jump limit and I don't see the point of that; a notable amount require jumping after rolling off a ledge and achieving what I believe is sub-pixel precision, which I'm not down for in causal games. There are a number of places prior to the double-jump acquisition which actually seem downright impossible to get out of with the movement tech availible to you at that point, so say goodbye to your accumulated XP if you end up down those pits :/
Overall, discounting the bugs, I would anti-recommend this game *so far* for metroidvania fans, and recommend it to soulslike players as a 2d soulslike with metroidvania elements.