izigame.me

I have this furry friend and he's awkward to have around at parties. I need to babysit the guy like a hawk, else he'll drink too much of the fruit punch and will start to approach people to tell them about his inflatable fox OC.
Fortunately, The Siege and the Sandfox is not a furry game and you don't play as a purple Sandfoxboi either. Those are two positive points about it. Now, let's talk about EVERYTHING else.
Appearances can be very misleading, because Sandfox got what it takes to give someone a very strong first impression to start parroting "breath of fresh air, hidden gem, the DARK SOULS of metroidvanias, just like The Fresh Prince of Persia, blah, blah, etc". The pixel art is beautiful, initially the stealth is done in a competent manner and the narrator does an excellent job to be your best friend with her charming voice. But this is where the pleasury ends and the annoyance start, because I'm going straight to the core issue, which is the fact that this game is NOT a metroidvania. It's a puzzle platforming game with performance sections and forced passive stealth.
I wasn't expecting the guy to be like Naruto, but the Sandfox is possibly the thief character with the smallest bag of tricks I've seen recently, unfortunately the stealth remain the same from the first hours to the rest of the entire game because you do not acquire anything remotely interesting or that will allow you to tackle situations in a different manner or show any degree of skill to impress your friends on Youtube. There are no smoke bombs. No poison darts. No double jump. No CQC. No whistle to lure guards. No traps to trigger.
The sandfox is the master of a singular element --- the art of remaining passive while the guards walk around until he can stealth his way to the next section. You can temporaly knock out some of them with your blackjack if you approach silently, but that's it. Hell, I've recently played Katana Zero and despite of being linear game with a much shorter lenght it got better stealth. The pacing and exploration are really slow and there's no skill or way to make it faster. Mark of the ninja is a decade plus old game, yet it did everything better.
What you do for most of the game is following a string of quests to unlock what felt like a barebones kit to traverse the map that any other metroidvania would give you in about one hour of gameplay, like sliding, hanging on bars and climbing walls. Well, there's gotta be other stuff to be found while exploring, right? Huhh, something like extra HP, MP, artwork? Anything?
Nope. Which is why I say it's not a metroidvania. The big map is just there to act as padding and if the game were based on stages it would instantly become a better experience. Exploration is completely unrewarding outside of finding a handful of scrolls that will trigger two or three lines of narration and you can't even read those scrolls again since there's no menu for that. There's a clear trail of breadcrumbs to unlock the basic ass kit and going off the track will lead you to nothing but tangled paths with the dead ends.
The most annoying part is how game will dangle you a shortcut back to the start right on your face and you won't be able to use it because you lack a tool, so you are forced to backtrack all the way back. In some cases the devs just forgot to add a shortcut, so there's NOTHING you can do. Zexion is a great Metroidvania I've recently played and it had no fast travel, yet it was NOWHERE close to being annoying as Sandfox.
Well, alright, just die or load the game back to the start of the map?
You can't. The save system of Sandfox is horrid, I'm talking about NIGHTMARE FUEL here. It's a checkpoint-based save system that saves automatically without your input and you can't trigger it manually either. It's UNSUFFERABLE. I was yelling expletives due to how stupid this system is because not only exploring the map rewards you with nothing, it can get you stuck in a place far from the few fast travel points. Meaning you have to replay ENTIRE stealth sections again. You need to stand and wait for the guards to walk by, do anything else and your character is oneshoted back to the checkpoint. Oh, you just traversed an entire section to the next checkpoint then fell? Congratulations, if you fell on the top of a previous checkpoint then all of your progress just got undone.
By the end of the game I was yelling for the mercy of divine powers. I asked Odin to give me courage. Jesus to give me wisdom. Buddha to give me patience. I attempted to summon the almighty Orishas of Yoruba. I called Albert Wesker to sell me a box of ink ribbons. Anything so I could just CHOOSE to save when I want to.
I know this sounds exaggerated, but I wouldn't be so annoyed if at least the game was bug free -- it ISN'T BUG FREE and if I list all the bugs I will run out of WORDS! Levers for shortcuts and elevators can stop working, quests won't get registered, guards will glitch and won't get knocked out, some will stop moving, falling from a small ledge will kill you instantly while falling from a huge tower won't, you can spawn inside of walls, it goes and goes and goes and goes and the bugs won't end. Some of those can even hardlock you from finishing the game unless you glitch your way out. I don't like to buy a game to feel like a beta tester and in all of my sincerity, the only reason why I've finished the game was because I couldn't ask for a refund anymore. I can handle jank in indie games, but this one got me really mad.
The icing on the cake? If you finish the game you'll be permanently locked on the last checkpoint with no way back to the rest of the map. WHY? Not to mention that the last part of the game is so underbaked that it's almost like eating a bowl of raw dough.
I rate The Siege and The Sandfox as The Worst Metroidvania I've Played in 2025