The Siege and the Sandfox Review (c.edward.barnes)
I'm writing this review on 5/29/2025, with full knowledge that the game has only been out a short time and some of these concerns may be addressed in updates. As it stands right now, I don't think I could recommend it to other players, at least not without some serious caveats.
The core concept of the game - a stealth-based metroidvania - is a really interesting one, and for the most part it's well-implemented. A lot of the game is really fun. That said, the enemy behavior is often kind of buggy - weird glitches around detection, movement, and sometimes even spawning position, especially with the teleporting Dustwalkers - and the controls feel too janky for how difficult some of the platforming challenges are. I can almost understand the rationale behind having a separate Crouch/Slide button instead of just assigning those actions to the usual "Down" and "Down+Jump" you'd expect to see in a Metroidvania, but it leads to situations where you'll slide to your death instead of crouching because you didn't 100% stop your forward motion before trying to crouch.
Having the Glide ability not trigger if you're still holding the Jump button, on the other hand, is completely inexcusable and makes the game harder for no reason. Likewise, even jumping to full height is weirdly unreliable, which makes certain sections way more difficult than they need to be. The puzzle-like nature of many platforming sections is great, but when you fail over and over again NOT because you don't know what you're supposed to do, but because the Sandfox refuses to do what you want them to, that really kills the fun sometimes. I almost quit playing entirely in the Tower of Silence, for example.
One last major critique is that with fast travel being limited to specific rooms and movement through the map essentially being one-way only in certain areas, those fast travel rooms are distributed in such a way that you will sometimes find yourself pretty far from any of them, with no choice but to slog your way through a bunch of enemies or poison flowers or whatever just to get back on track with the game. Even a limited-use item to teleport back to the last-used Cold Room would be helpful in solving this issue.
Finally, the narration is fun at first, but I really don't need commentary EVERY TIME I hide in a box/vase/whatever, or every time I start an area that instantly kills the Sandfox if they don't get through it in one try. When combined with the frustrating controls, the repetitive narration gets especially annoying in those areas.
In conclusion, the game has a great concept and is ALMOST really well executed, but unless the devs fix the control issues at the very least (seriously, fix the Wing Cape, OMG), I can't recommend this one. Difficulty is one thing, but it should be because the game itself is challenging, not because the character on screen doesn't reliably move the way you want them to.