Ultra minimalist roguelite that I'm torn on for my score. It deserves a thumbs up b/c it's is definitely an interesting experience. But it also definitely lacking and frustrating in a lot of areas.

Pros
- Incredible music.
- Minimalist style of presentation makes the game more mysterious and intriguing to discover. Afaik, there are literally no words in menus or tooltips in this game. It is all icons. Low-pixel icons at that.
- Pretty unique aesthetic regarding the world, monsters, etc. I really want to know more about this world.
- There are only a few pros, but they are all top-notch. I really can't praise the music, aesthetic, and mystery behind the game enough.

Cons
- No custom controls. Generally this is an auto-thumbs down for me, but I'm only letting it "influence" this review, since I feel this game has a lot worth discussing.
- The real challenge is platforming, but not in a mechanical sense - it's not a precision platformer. In a simply "this ♥♥♥♥ is unfair" sense. Poor designed & balanced enemy pathing, FALL DAMAGE, shooting knocks you back, pseudo-bullet hell rooms, etc just gets a bit tedious sometimes. Compounded by no custom controls to maybe make things more efficient for some ppl.
- Given the lack of custom controls, a faster hold-to-shoot w/ the default gun (there are other guns, thankfully) would have been nice. Forearm starts to hurt after mashing RB button so much on XB1 controller.
- No jumping downwards through platforms (i.e. down+jump does nothing while on a platform you can jump through).
- Minimalist style of presentation means you have no idea what anything means. I actually want to give some more info on the game here (like what acts as currency... okay it's the amount of bullets you shoot), but I feel that's sorta spoilerish to the fun of discovering it. However, it's also frustrating to not know wtf anything means.
- I truly can appreciate the minimalist presentation. For game mechanics. But basic video game functions (i.e. the pause menu, how to exit game, etc) even require "figuring out". It gets to the point of absurdity.
- Menu navigation is...confusing? Abstruse? Since nothing has words in the game, you kinda just play around in the menu to figure out what you are doing. This includes just trying to discover how to QUIT the game (this one I will spoil go to bed when you're in the "meta" part of the game).
- Central hub screen distortion. Why?
- One of those "rewards also punish you" philosophies. All chests that give you buffs also do damage to you. *eye roll* But hey, spoiler below for the "balance" (it doesn't quite make up for it).
- Scorpions are broken. Perhaps the poorest designed trash mob I've come across in a game in a long time.

Neutral / gameplay spoilers
- I was on the first boss and a couple attempts he kept hitting me while I had 1% HP left, but I kept not taking damage. One time his hit actually healed me (last stand?). Other attempts, he'd actually just kill me if I was down to my last bit of HP. I have no idea why, not sure if it's bugged or some weird mechanic that - again - you have no idea what is.
- Back to the "nothing is explained" fun. Sometimes you just enter a room or kill something and get like 3000 currency. Even if you have 0 equipment that would possibly explain why.
- Even the prompts to do things are their own in-game iconography are not reflective of a button on a keyboard or controller. At least not for me. It shows a square, but there is no square on my keyboard or XB1 controller. I watched another streamer who's interact prompt was Y, which is what fits for my XB1 controller. So...not sure what the issue is w/ my game.
- In order to heal mid-run, you have to destroy the buffs you get in the menu.
- On gamepad, right stick lets you pan the level you are on.
- On gamepad, L1/LB uses a helmet's ability.

Definitely worth playing if you like "figuring out" a game for yourself. The overall style is great and deaths make me want to actually go back and play more. It's a fun, if even abstruse, game. But the more I played it, the more I realized just how tedious it is. If it just...you know...explained SOME things, to maybe make it a bit more accessible to know what exactly is affecting what and what to try to build for, etc, then maybe I'd like it more. Also the literal pain and eye aches...ugh.

edit: I had to think a lot about this game. It is a good game. I have a ton of gripes about it, and originally gave it a thumbs down. But the artistic and creative aspect of it really saves it for me (as does the correction of there actually being custom controls). Another game I wish Steam allowed a side-thumb for. I really don't feel it deserves a thumbs up or thumbs down from me personally, tbh.

I like all the stuff that I liked about the original and I like the new stuff they added. (As a side note, the reason for the "new" version is the Developer got screwed over by a seedy Publisher.)

Awesome looking platformer, but just too hard for me.

The soundtrack is fantastic.

Everything else is a hot mess of interesting to great ideas, implemented really, really badly.

I keep watching the videos and reading some of the reviews and thinking - should I give this another chance. Sometimes you have to play into a game.
And then I spend five seconds with the horrible controls, the complete lack of explanation of anything. The inability to even quit the game, let alone find the control redefinition.

For my sins I have 7,000 games on steam. Accessibility is a thing. I'm gonna go play Risk of Rain or Hades or Dark Souls or literally anything else that respects my time.

The soundtrack is fantastic.
Go listen to it on youtube.

It's creative and visually surprisingly interesting. But just like the original edition it feels exactly as unpleasant and obnoxious to play. I shouldn't have to look up what everything does, but here we are, a game without any text...it's obnoxious to the extreme.

An absolute lack of mechanics conveyance to the point that I don't want them to have 5 dollars. Bonkers to see a neat concept completely hamstrung by an unintelligible design philosophy that I had to look up how to quit out without alt+f4. Any amount of attention paid to making the game fun to play would have gone a long way: doors will literally spit you out onto enemies that you cannot avoid for free damage, shooting upward forces you to move sideways so vertical enemies can only be hit by a bullet or two per slide, and your dodge forces you the full distance every time so it shunts you off platforms and freezes you in place for a full second at the end which lets any enemy that just moves forward hit you anyway. On top of not being able to drop through platforms in a platforming game because it "makes level design more interesting." I can understand the limitation on keyboard, since jump is up arrow and slide is down arrow, so they can't really work together, but there's no reason you can't just hit down + A on a controller.

Between all the miserable gameplay decisions there's also the menus and card mechanics that are arcane to the point that even most guides have trouble explaining them accurately. Their worth is unknowable because you cannot understand what your stats are. Are they active while in your inventory? Who knows! Do you have to equip them? Maybe! You can delete them for health, and since they disappear when you die, you might as well since the game does nothing to explain if/why they're beneficial. And getting any of them from chests requires you to spend a percentage of your health to open them, which feels awful when that health can be lost just from entering getting unlucky entering a new room.

I'm even fine with the idle mechanics, that's a fun idea that could be incorporated well into this style game, except that you have to REALLY grind to get them started or they barely give you anything, and if you die in a run all those banked points are lost and you start from 0 again. From what I could figure out, all the points go into an altar that gives you different guns and heads, but those are also temporary! I found a head in a dungeon and it simply removed itself from my character within 15 seconds of trying to figure out how it worked. Might have been a finite amount of juice in it, or a timer, or I hit an obtuse combination of keys that threw it down onto spikes I couldn't avoid, but it seemed necessary to finish the room I got it in, so none of those feel right.

From top to bottom this game feels like it struggles to be playable through the immense pile of poorly or completely unexplained mechanics, and even then, it's not particularly fun? You can only shoot in three directions and most of the time you're just hammering on the mouse to clear a hallway of enemies with no nuance beyond hoping the bullets reach far enough and that enemy attack patterns don't overlap weirdly so you're forced to take a hit. Because your aerial dodge lasts for almost no time at all and your ground dodge will throw you into their hurtboxes. Shops eat the points you amassed to make progress to get items that have no description; there's no reason to want to try them if they potentially halt your progress outside the dungeon. Guns and heads having finite meters feels especially strange since some of them are just "pistol but looks slightly different" and some of the heads are just "sprint or a short range dash". Based on the store page's screenshots, the game never really evolves past the "spam fire as quickly as possible" stage, and that enemies and level design stays relatively the same and kind of boring.

A shame that a cool visual style is wasted on what feels like a dev's attempt at masking a generic platform shooter by being "mysterious".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuQZiBV3AM0

A mix between the binding of isaac and a cookie clicker, it's a shooting action platformer with roguelike elements as you go from room to room defeating enemies that standing in your way to survive. As you shoot more and kill more, the number counter goes up which you then can spend on upgrades. Is a pretty fun game with nice mechanics like shifting and tumbling while shooting. The visuals looks cool too with its minimalist mainly black and white with a touch touch of orange colour.

Never before a game make me feel so discouraged, lost and helpless and yet want to go through this pain to continue playing. The game is like finding a jigsaw from and ancient civilization that needs to be understood to be solved, and the experience is amazing and completely new for me. Became totally addicted to the previous version for a month, and is great to go for another run with the new content of the doppelganger. A real hidden gem!

TL;DR - Interesting retro art (if you're into it), cool soundtrack, clunky controls, and obtuse game design makes it a chore to play (at least for me).

It's a shame because I liked the concept and the looks but not the gameplay.

-Button mashing heavily incentived because you can fire like 20x faster than if you just hold the fire button. This is honestly the #1 issue I have with the game, I despise button mashing especially when there is basically no fire cap or restriction.

- Player control and movement feels a little clunky

- Exploration and enemy design while having a cool visual aesthetic, is kind of bland mechanically.

-The game is WAY too abstract, you pretty much need to use a guide to understand even the basics.

Game is kind of interesting and has a great visual style, but the cons out weight the pros and I would strongly recommend many other "roguelites" over this, you will have a much better time IMO.