Gave this a go since it looked neat, but holy shit what a surprise. This is a game runs DEEP. The most fascinating and Darksouls ass thing I've played since Darksouls itself. Superficially simmilar to Salt and Sanctuary, but better in every respect (in my opinion). I expect coverage on this to slowly blow up over the course of the year, but here's my reccomendation at any rate.

I keep hearing about this game, but first time I've heard it compared to Salt & Sanctuary. I thought it was more along the lines of Ori or something?

@csl316: It's much more like Ori in how it looks and plays, but more like Salt and Sanctuary / Dark Souls in that it has layers upon layers of cryptic hidden stuff.

How come nobody told me about this? This game looks awesome!

This game is phenomenal.

I'm enjoying the game so much. The music is beautiful, the hand drawn animations are really cool, the bugs are cute, the art in general is great. It's challenging but seems fair, and I'm glad they went all the way with it and included the whole drop your souls when you die thing. I'm not that far in, but so far I'm impressed. Hopefully the GB guys take a quick look at it eventually.

Will check this out when the Switch version is out.

Okay this is totally a game for me. Thanks for mentioning.

I just beat it, clocking in at 24 hours. Well, I got to the end credits that is. But only 67% completion. There are stages and bosses from the trailers that I haven't even seen yet, which is kind of cool. And I have no clue how to get to them. But this game is all about exploration, so I guess I'll continue exploring.

I kind of want to pull a Brad and say that this will definitely be somewhere in my Top 10 of 2017. Do I think there will be 10 games better than Hollow Knight this year? No I do not!

I am about 6 hours in and am finding it to be pretty incredible. The platforming is super tight. Combat is satisfying. Upgrades are creative. Has a sense of exploration that I haven't felt in a long time. The art is incredible (the animation on the stag is so good!). There seems to be a massive amount of content. It's only 11 quid. Great great great game

I tried telling all of you weeks ago and no one listened!

I've been playing it a bunch. It's okay. It's a metroidvania and not very similar to Dark Souls aside from the corpse run stuff. The art is pleasant to look at for sure but it's nothing spectacular, and compared to other games in this style the environments are pretty boring and monotonous. Areas are distinct from each other but within each area everything just kind of looks the same. Not much sense of place, doesn't feel like a cohesive world. Compare it to games like Symphony of the Night or even the subsequent handheld Castlevanias and the level design just doesn't hold up.

Also, it's been generally very easy and when you do get to a somewhat challenging part there's the issue of save points being relatively sparse. Even dying just two or three times on a given part can end up feeling like absolute torture when every time you have to spend several minutes running through easy, boring, monotonous shit.

The abilities you unlock as you go along are pretty cool and the boss fights seem well-designed, the last one I completed (mantis fight) in particular was really great. The regular enemies are generally uninteresting and a bit tedious to fight though.

It's a decent little game and props to the developers for putting in the effort with the hand-drawn art, but it doesn't do anything that hasn't already been done much better in numerous other games. It's not something I'd recommend unless you're really craving a metroidvania and have already played all of the better games in the style.

hey cool, another switch game i'm kinda interested in. sort of wish salt and sanctuary would come to switch as i liked it quite a bit but fell off playing and would like to get through that first.

The regular enemies have gotten more interesting as I've progressed. Also, I've run into one cool area that actually kind of felt like a place rather than a tileset, though in general the areas continue to not be as interesting as I'd like.

Also worth mentioning that I've been having performance issues. I'm talking chugging with single-digit FPS. The game runs perfectly fine for the most part and these episodes usually only last a second or two, but they're not that infrequent and are extremely frustrating when they happen e.g. during crucial moments in boss fights which has happened probably a dozen or so times so far. One time the game dropped to single-digit framerate and kept running like that until I restarted. The nearest save spot was only two screens back but I couldn't reach it because even something as simple as jumping between platforms became impossible due to the horrible framerate coupled with some really bad input delay. This shit is not acceptable.

@icemael: Yeah I've had the exact same performance issues. It made me give up on the side content I am trying to finish right now because I keep on making mistakes due to those one second freezes. I don't think I will continue playing until Team Cherry updates the game.
I wrote this in another thread, but a word of caution for anyone planning to buy this is that you may have to deal with some annoying technical issues. There are also a few bugs I have encountered. Like when you collect enough pieces to get a new mask there is an effect of a shining light, and it covers the whole screen and then freezes, so you cannot see anything. And the only way to get rid of it is to try and kill yourself or try and get to a screen transfer.

I really enjoyed 2D Dark Souls in the way of Salt and Sanctuary, so this looks great to me. I'm glad it's getting some positive attention.