Recent reviews by Some Rogue AI

It's passable, but in my opinion definitely not worth the full asking price. At the same price point, you could get much more polished and/or expansive isometric games (Hades, Hyper Light Drifter, Grim Dawn) or Metroidvanias with some similarities (Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy 2).

Delving deeper, the only thing I feel this game nailed is the atmosphere. I'm a sucker for dark fantasy, and Morbid's world is cool. The sprites and environments look nice, and they did a pretty good job with the world building, but the actual game part of the game is where it falls flat.

The combat seemed deliberately designed to be slow and deliberate at first, backed up by some of the dev posts in the forum; your combos are super slow, you get staggered by any damage you take, and enemies don't get staggered by your attacks, but you have a dodge roll and a parry that both give you i-frames. You then learn that you can stagger enemies with perfect parries that allows for a powerful counterattack. As soon as you realize that last fact and start using it, the combat becomes trivialized.

You deal puny damage with normal attacks on big enemies and bosses, but learn the perfect parry timing on an attack, and you can down even bosses in a handful of hits. You either do this, or get frustrated spending a ton of time slapping them with what feels like wet noodles while they two or three-shot you. There are a good number of weapons with different reach, attack speeds, elements and some drain effects. Sadly, the optimal, least frustrating, way to play defeats the purpose of having anything other than damage stats. Everything boils down to what weapon hits hardest in a single hit.

There are also a bunch of different usable items that you find a literal ton of, but the only ones I ever felt the need to use were the basic health/sanity recovery ones. You are also capped at holding 10 of any one item at a time, so all of the excess that you're guaranteed to find just go to waste. To pile onto this, a lot of the non-respawning loot drops in the world happen to be common usables instead of meaningful loot.

All said, a real disappointing gameplay experience given how good the aesthetic and world are.

TL;DR If you've got the money and haven't played all of the games I mentioned up top, I highly recommend you check those out before dropping it on this.

The aesthetic and music are amazing, but man does the actual GAME part of the game suck it all away for me. The only real "difficult" thing about this game is the plethora of reused 1-hit death traps and pits that litter the game. It hearkens back to the original Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. Long strings of mostly recycled enemies and traps leading to surprisingly unique bosses that are the one part of the gameplay I enjoyed. If you're someone who likes old school game design where enemies kill you in an average of 3 hits and almost every trap is an insta-death, this might be your game. Otherwise you might want to wait for a super sale or just give it a pass.

I personally love this game, and while I do recommend it, there are some small caveats. Starting with the good stuff, the gameplay is fun. The combat is great and it's satisfying mastering all the weapon timings and specials. Overall, the maps feel well designed, and the objectives are pretty fun to tackle. Be aware that party size is capped at 4, which feels insanely low given that games in the main playlists hold 40/64 people. If you want to party up with 4 or more of your friends, looks like you're SOL. More of a personal gripe, but I'm not the biggest fan of how some of the weapon cosmetics are locked to a faction in addition to already requiring a high weapon rank and a lot of currency. Seems like an attempt to push their premium currency to bypass the insane grind, but since it isn't functional and only cosmetic, I wouldn't call it a real issue. All considered, I feel that the gameplay is definitely fun enough to warrant picking it up if you're into this kind of game, and/or were a fan of Chiv 1, especially if you can catch it on sale.

EDIT (Patch 2.5.3): Updated my review since the patch addressed the Coxwell and Rudhelm issues.

Preface: I highly recommend this game if you can grab it on sale, otherwise it's down to whether or not you like the style.

I really enjoyed playing through Carrion. The mild body horror themes are interesting, and the aesthetics and sound design add a nice polish. I don't doubt that people into the style will like the game. While I do recommend Carrion, it is relatively short for the price of the game, and doesn't have much replay value. If you're on a budget and want something with more bang for your buck in the realm of Metroidvanias, go grab Hollow Knight or The Messenger.

Got this game as part of the last Humble Choice, and while even though I dig these kind of games, I would not recommend this game to anyone that doesn't specifically play games to get screwed over by them. The campaign, as far as I got in it, seems to be a string of really strict puzzle-solving segments, leaving very little room for error, and does a poor job of letting you explore the game mechanics because you get harshly punished for doing so. Even playing sandbox mode, which was specifically described as an easier experience in the tutorial manual, you still get screwed over quite often. I tried playing with the settings at 0 AI factions, easy faction AI, and with random events turned off, just to try to have some small bit of fun with the game. I REALLY hope it was a bug, but I STILL got random events with gang members raiding my place after I had to turn down their boss' unrealistic requests/demands where they consistently killed all of my employees even when I had fighters hired. Even at a discounted price, I would find this game hard to recommend.