I spent two hours creating and stacking coffins to avoid using the stairs. I only stopped because my computer could not handle over 10000 physics objects in one area. I did this because I did not want to use the elevator and stairs. It was worth it.

Also, this game is heavily inspired by King's Field and Shadow Tower, leaning into the aesthetic of the latter. The music and GUI is reminiscent of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, wrapping up the PSX aesthetic very nicely. This is very much like a modernized version of Shadow Tower (PSX), so it won't look as clean as King's Field IV or Shadow Tower Abyss, but speeds up the basic gameplay loop a fair bit.

The game is a first person dungeon crawler, so the fundamentals of combat don't get much deeper than Skyrim, but the challenge comes from managing your resources and enemy encounters. Learning what tools are best suited to fighting enemies is more important than your raw stats, and understanding how to avoid hits does more for surviving than packing a lot of healing. In one of the modern mercies this game provides, you can heal up at a save point, but as long as you don't enter a loading screen, enemies and objects will not respawn. This means less skilled players can still pick off every enemy in an area and move forward slowly in one session, whereas a skilled player can push forward in fewer trips back to the save point. In addition, the variety of weapons and magic at your disposal allow you to experiment with different ways of engaging enemies, and at this point, all weapons have a good level of balance, so there are no wrong weapons to use.

The overall aesthetic is reminiscent of PSX games, as mentioned earlier. This game appears to strive to replicate the environments of Shadow Tower (PSX), with a lot of very dark areas and shorter render distances. Along with this, a lot of the tunnels and halls recreate the claustrophobic confines of the Shadow Tower very well. Textures in the environment are intentionally pixelated, and only need the texture warping to capture the PSX experience perfectly. The only part of the aesthetic that does not line up are two of the female humanoid characters, who appear to be made in an art style different from the rest of the game. Fortunately, these characters are not in your face, so it's a minor issue.

Exploration and stats are tied into each other. Both your ground speed and jump height are tied to your core stats, which you can level up similarly to Dark Souls. Each level grants you varying number of stat points to assign. While you don't need to reach any particular stats to use weapons at this time, they do influence how effective you are using these tools. This ties into your ability to explore like it does in Dark Souls, where more stats mean more enemies can be dealt with faster (for most players). Since most of the areas are like mazes, with no maps to help, levels are critical for unaided players. Unfortunately, since the aesthetic aims to capture PSX graphics, the lack of landmarks becomes an issue, since most textures are too low resolution to help with navigation. This can be mitigated with movement speed, but this does feel a bit like a band-aid solution.

In general, I'd say the game is not for everyone, but definitely worth playing if you're curious. Hopefully future updates can address current problems that exist in early access, and I have high hopes for it!

But I already got to drop 10000 coffins in a library, so I think I got my money's worth.

I spent two hours creating and stacking coffins to avoid using the stairs. I only stopped because my computer could not handle over 10000 physics objects in one area. I did this because I did not want to use the elevator and stairs. It was worth it. Also, this game is heavily inspired by King's Field and Shadow Tower, leaning into the aesthetic of the latter. The music and GUI is reminiscent of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, wrapping up the PSX aesthetic very nicely. This is very much like a modernized version of Shadow Tower (PSX), so it won't look as clean as King's Field IV or Shadow Tower Abyss, but speeds up the basic gameplay loop a fair bit. The game is a first person dungeon crawler, so the fundamentals of combat don't get much deeper than Skyrim, but the challenge comes from managing your resources and enemy encounters. Learning what tools are best suited to fighting enemies is more important than your raw stats, and understanding how to avoid hits does more for surviving than packing a lot of healing. In one of the modern mercies this game provides, you can heal up at a save point, but as long as you don't enter a loading screen, enemies and objects will not respawn. This means less skilled players can still pick off every enemy in an area and move forward slowly in one session, whereas a skilled player can push forward in fewer trips back to the save point. In addition, the variety of weapons and magic at your disposal allow you to experiment with different ways of engaging enemies, and at this point, all weapons have a good level of balance, so there are no wrong weapons to use. The overall aesthetic is reminiscent of PSX games, as mentioned earlier. This game appears to strive to replicate the environments of Shadow Tower (PSX), with a lot of very dark areas and shorter render distances. Along with this, a lot of the tunnels and halls recreate the claustrophobic confines of the Shadow Tower very well. Textures in the environment are intentionally pixelated, and only need the texture warping to capture the PSX experience perfectly. The only part of the aesthetic that does not line up are two of the female humanoid characters, who appear to be made in an art style different from the rest of the game. Fortunately, these characters are not in your face, so it's a minor issue. Exploration and stats are tied into each other. Both your ground speed and jump height are tied to your core stats, which you can level up similarly to Dark Souls. Each level grants you varying number of stat points to assign. While you don't need to reach any particular stats to use weapons at this time, they do influence how effective you are using these tools. This ties into your ability to explore like it does in Dark Souls, where more stats mean more enemies can be dealt with faster (for most players). Since most of the areas are like mazes, with no maps to help, levels are critical for unaided players. Unfortunately, since the aesthetic aims to capture PSX graphics, the lack of landmarks becomes an issue, since most textures are too low resolution to help with navigation. This can be mitigated with movement speed, but this does feel a bit like a band-aid solution. In general, I'd say the game is not for everyone, but definitely worth playing if you're curious. Hopefully future updates can address current problems that exist in early access, and I have high hopes for it! But I already got to drop 10000 coffins in a library, so I think I got my money's worth.