Do not play this game. This game is cursed. I went into this blind and I severely regret it. Only finished it because I paid for it and I just wanted to see it through but I've never checked out of a game so fast.
This is probably the worst metroidvania I have ever played and its sad because the things that I like about it are rarely seen in the good ones: serviceable to outstanding but very varied voice-acting, great portraits and visuals, as well as animation for your 4 possible playables as well as the boss fights, and finally an exploration ethos that encourages out of order encounters, unlocking shortcuts and optional areas that are in turn also shortcuts to main areas.
Also can I just say. See the plot for this game is that you're pirates headed to be tried when all of a sudden you become rats. This ship has to have had the most multi-national set of prisoners you've ever seen because all the stereotypes are here: american indians, american americans not-guybrush threepwood, stronk jamaicans, sleazy louisianans, pompous persian princesses, bitch aussie with a pet toucan, and gypsies. All voice-acted all hammy af. Very enjoyable and I think I also liked the fact that I thought these people got turned into rats as an excuse to animate non-humans but there are in fact humans in this game both related and unrelated to the plot that you just bump into and you have to fight because you're rats!
But the praise ends there. The game by design is severely flawed. Every aspect to this is just wrong and I don't even know where to start so I'll just list a couple of bullet points on just some of the things you encounter:
The way some levels and enemies are designed you can't tell if they are actually enemies or bottomless pits or a wall. Literally the first enemy in the game hit me because I thought it wasn't an enemy. And one secret required you to make a leap of faith with no clues whatsoever when every other incident would have led you to a bottomless pit.
I say Metroidvania, but really you're unlocking some pretty useless shit. 3 bosses give you double jump, super jump, and dash. Then the rest are just bullshit. Like you get goggles that tell you the names of the enemies you kill...midway into the game. You get a backpack that increases your inventory by just a little (more on this later). Certain areas are locked behind by keys and you just find those like, why not gate the keys behind the bosses?
Most egregious boss item is a "Resurrection Ring" that spawns you where you die. Handy right? Well if you die in a bottomless pit, you spawn in that same pit and die there AGAIN. And this ring is just ONE charge. How do you recharge? You have to beat the same boss that gave you the ring. This boss, has two forms and one of them is over a bottomless pit! You have to run over there and voluntarily do this and not die to recharge it.
Every single time you die, an NPC is taunting the shit out of how much of a fail you are. And you will die alot because...
...severe power imbalances. There are enemies that hit you for a certain amount. But there are also enemies that hit you for a percentage. Common enemies btw. So it doesn't matter how much you level, they will still kill you in 4 hits. Oh by the way, there's no flinching invincibility frames so sometimes enemies can combo the shit out of you.
One of the boss relics lets you switch characters anytime, except characters only differ in combat ability instead of any kind of uniqueness. Do you wanna be the parry master (can't parry bosses btw), the strong slow guy with no range and is the only one who can heal himself, the aerial expert who sucks at anything else, or the dagger fiend who hits fast and criticals the most. Guess who I used 90% of the time? It's really a shame too as each of the four has unique dialog with the bosses and you can only ever see one of them. You won't miss much lore although one character seems very heavy into it among the rest.
So the dagger girl mixed with how broken the levelling system is, allowed me to pretty much steamroll over 80% of the bosses in this game. We're talking about them dying off before they finish the animation of their second major attack. It's that broken and I think its because of your ability to 100% crit from behind and most of these bosses having a suspiciously spacious zone behind them you can just roll into (the only bosses I found "challenging" were big bosses in the background or constantly flying ones). I would have played fair just to see how every boss is were it not for the fact that...
Save Rooms are few and far in between. You die from a boss, you have to run all the way back and if the percentage-gibbing mooks don't kill you you'll be lucky enough to start with half health in the boss room.
So remember that backpack increasing your slots by 3 per item? Well, it actually broke midgame. Suddenly I was back to pre-backpack inventory and healing in this game is ridiculous. Every item you find is either a useless collectible or food. And the menu will say ?/50 as if you'll find 50 of these but no. There are no random drops. No store for food. You will find a total of about 6-7 of a certain food before the game starves you, forcing you to go to the shopkeeper in few and far zones of the map just to buy 3/3 potions. Like I had 20,000 gold by the end of the game and this motherfucker didn't wanna sell me 99 potions (300 gold each) like every other platformer ever. It's artificial difficulty and it shows
No inventory tabs. No item sort. So everytime you want to heal or use an item, you have to go into the menu and scroll down past the collectibles like why are the collectibles on top of this shit. Yes there is a shortcut menu, but because you can only carry 3/3 potions and there are only 6/50 food in the game, the point is kind of moot.
The endgame is also one of the worst. You are locked out of every teleporter in the game and you need to rush back to the start of the map, forcing you into a boss fight where you can't directly hit them and lasts almost forever. Mercifully you can skip them using the aformentioned optional boss shortcut route but its still a terrible slog and an obvious attempt to pad the game and btw, I hope you actually were working to unlock those areas instead of exploring for no reason because the game doesn't warn you of this teleport nixing malarkey and just drops it on you for no reason.
Oh ya and the game has references to Monkey Island, Hollow Knight, and for some strange reason the rather obscure or less talked about indie game Rime which has nothing to do with the motifs of this game but whatever. Just such a weird allusion.
2/10. I struggle but, this game is still better than Syberia 3.
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It's not so cliche anymore when it's happening to you.