LogFAQs > #976101847

9 Years of Shadows (Steam)

A beautiful metroidvania with a couple unique systems. You get a handful of elemental armors as major powerups and you use them both as progression upgrades (e.g. water armor lets you explore flooded areas) and to deal extra damage to enemies by hitting them with their elemental weaknesses. But you can't always breeze through doing the latter, because sometimes e.g. plant enemies will be in a water room, so you can't use fire armor.

There's also a very unique health system. By default you die in 2 hits, but you have a shield that regenerates a little whenever you hit an enemy. This shield is also the ammo for your projectile, and enemies chunk off huge amounts of it when they hit you. When it's fully exhausted, you can either refill it quickly by passing an active reload QTE or by standing still for a few seconds to charge a heal. It's a lot like Hollow Knight, but it slightly fixes the problem with healing in that game, which is that you can just keep yourself topped off by healing anytime you get hurt. Here you can only heal when you're most vulnerable, so screwing up a heal is pretty devastating (often a game over). There's no way to get back lost HP other than reaching a save point, but shield is easy to get back, so there's a real risk/reward to being aggressive or spamming projectiles vs. playing safely and defensively to preserve shield.

My biggest issues are that the game's pretty linear, the enemy variety is very very low, and the story is kind of half-baked despite how emotional it's clearly supposed to be. Amusingly, the two most common complaints I've seen from others are that 1) the game is too easy and 2) the game is too hard, so I guess YMMV on that.