This is one of the best games I have ever played.. but not everything is perfect. The spoiler section below will go into this further.

It has amazing character and level design, the soundtrack bumps, as well as having some of the best boss designs I have ever come across. This game will force you to git gud; some bosses took me an embarrassing amount of tries. I absolutely loved the platforming challenges in the game- getting the double jump and escaping the abyss were easily some of my favorite moments. The sheer amount of content you get for $20 is also insane, it took me about 90 hours to 100% the game.

I would give this game a 10/10 but in my opinion once you get to act 3 the difficulty curve reaches a natural peak which is only really surpassed by adding in extremely frustrating things that do not feel fair. I would say this starts at the High Halls gauntlet which has a ridiculous 11 waves of enemies, and it keeps progressing through the end of the game and into act 3. In act 3, normal enemies can turn into an absolute chore if they get affected by the abyss.

Groal the Great alone drops the game's quality by a whole point. It is quite possibly the worst runback in the game and has a terrible gauntlet of enemies you must face every time you attempt the boss. It is a shame that Act 3 is gated behind this intentionally terrible boss. It does feel like Karmelita more than makes up for this, because that is one of my favorite fights in the game which I did immediately after act 3 started.

Unfortunately, the other two main bosses of act 3 are gimmick bosses who were fun in their own right but not very challenging. I loved the Clover Dancers as the Cogwork Dancers were easily my favorite fight in the game, but it was wayyyyy too short. The final boss Lost Lace was a nice challenge and was visually stunning, but not as tough as I was expecting unfortunately.

If you can get past the few sour moments this game has, you will find an absolute gem. 8.5/10

Absolutely phenomenal experience. Visuals are amazing, soundtrack is fantastic, gameplay is smooth and satisfying. There are some performance hitches in certain areas which are really only because the game engine is 20 years old, but that's my only complaint.

Nubby's Dopamine Factory