Playtime: ~30 hours
Experience Level: Completed the game, planning more playthroughs with different classes
Rating: 8.6/10

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After completing Mandragora with around 30 hours of playtime—and planning to try more classes—I’ve gathered my thoughts. I won't comment on the EULA, as while it's important to some, it doesn't factor into my personal evaluation. This review focuses solely on the gameplay experience.

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1. Genre Execution: While Mandragora doesn’t introduce revolutionary changes to the Soulslike or Metroidvania genres, it blends them really well.
   
2. Story & Progression: The story isn’t groundbreaking but serves as a solid backbone for the gameplay. It kept me engaged and made progression enjoyable.
   
3. Build Variety: There’s a wide array of classes, weapons, and gear, allowing for deep customization. After level 20 or 25, you can reallocate your points, making experimentation with different builds easy and rewarding.
   
4. Boss Fights: There are many boss encounters. Some mini-bosses are reused, but I never felt it was excessive. The main bosses are unique, with well-designed, challenging movesets across all classes. That said, the "Fire Caster" class felt a bit overpowered against most of them.
   
5. Visuals & Design: The art direction is stunning, and enemy designs are top-tier. It’s one of the most visually beautiful games I’ve played recently.
   
6. Stability: I only encountered two minor visual bugs throughout my entire playthrough—nothing game-breaking or disruptive.
   
7. Side Content: The game is packed with side quests, bounty hunting, treasure hunts, and crafting. The importance of gathering blueprints and materials adds a lot of depth and replay value. Easily enough content for two or three full playthroughs.

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1. Runbacks: Some boss runbacks are extremely long. While the level designers did a good job implementing shortcuts, there were still at least three instances where dying meant a frustratingly long run back to the boss arena.
   
2. Platforming: Platforming sections in the Entropy areas felt forced—though the rift segments were optional, they didn’t quite fit the rest of the game’s flow.
   
3. Lack of New Game+: There’s no New Game+ at the moment. I’ve heard it’s planned for release in the summer, which would be a welcome addition.

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Mandragora is an awesome game. I had a ton of fun, and even after finishing it, I’m still hooked. It has a few minor flaws, but they’re easily outweighed by its strengths. With a rich gameplay loop, excellent design, and high replayability, I highly recommend it.

Mandragora insert pretentious subtitle is a game that prizes frustration over enjoyment.

I backed this on Kickstarter because metroidvania. Even a bad metroidvania can be fun. Where Madragora certainly has its moments, it weighs itself down with enough poor design choices the that shiny veneer wears this quickly.

Starting a new game, you get to customize your gorilla armed toon. Do not worry about how Torchlight had comparable faces 15 years ago, as you will not be looking at it much, and once the boffer armor and weapons get slapped on, everything almost looks normal, if you are into that aesthetic. The real let down when it comes to customization is the voices. I have heard these voice actors in other games, so I know they have chops, but here your character is remarkably flat, sometimes sarcastic. That not only seems at odds with the whole inquisitor vibe you are supposedly rocking, but it does not endear them to the player either.

Speaking of inquisitor, that title carries the weight of dread due to its historic use. When you go out of your way to use that term, you are tapping into that. The story starts strong, leaning into that for almost everyone except you... and seemingly you meet once out of the starter city. Instead, they treat you just like any other adventurer in any other game. That is just lost potential (and possibly lazy writing).

The music vacillates wildly. There are some great, haunting pieces, and then there is this common piano piece that feels like its straight out of an adventure game, like Cognition.

Now, a lot of those things are forgivable sins, but then you run into the mechanics. At first blush, it’s pretty cool. You pick a class, and you have a big ol' talent map, whose benefits are generally miniscule. Do not expect to go from killing a foe in 5 hits to 4 hits in 1 or even 11 level ups. Early on you pause and wonder why. The level gains are so incrementally infinitesimal they'd have been better off doubling the level up effects and halving the total levels you can earn. That way the level up would feel rewarding and not simply feed the frustration. Where I can respect a desire for starting enemies to still be able to challenge the player twenty levels in, it makes leveling up seem pointless, and that is where another frustrating mechanic kicks in.

When you die you lose all your unspent XP. It’s in a glowing ball that you can go fetch to get it all back... unless you die again. Given that the game still has bugs that can get you killed and controls are not always as responsive as you might like, particularly with respect to grabbing ladders, meaningly death is all too easy. When that happens, you will feel like you just lost minutes to hours of progress, because you did; not that said progress necessarily meant much.

The flip side to a character's stats is their gear, which is disjointed at best, which you could have suspected as soon as you were offered the choice of six different characters. From Neverwinter to Diablo good games with classes that are gear reliant have a solid gear disbursement. Its made available so you can feel like you are properly geared. In Mandragora, if you are capable of heavy armor, you seem set. If not, because your weight allowance is too low and your class doesn't give you vigor, then you will be undergeared, as recipes for what you use are few and far between.

A final word on your character stats, there's a lot. Like 8 or 10 primary stats, of which you can raise one by one in a restricted fashion each level up, and dozens of derived stats, but there aren't tool tips. There is a glossary of sorts built in, but that is not the same as being able to swing your controller's cursor over something and get an immediate explanation. The closest you'll come is zipping around the trait menu to see what modifies what.

Lest I forget, the quests. It is common for Metroidvania games to require powerups to reach certain areas. Madragora gives you a bit of a bait and switch by giving you quest markers to go to a certain place and then saying “nope, can’t get in yet.” The kicker is that in a proper Metroid or Castlevania, you would look at your map and discern where to go and where secrets might be without any markers because those games understand level design. In contrast, Mandragora is shockingly linear, so it doesn’t even reward you with the feel of “aha! I just figured out where to go.” Instead, you’re just pulled along like a suffer puppet.

I really wanted to like this game. Liked the aesthetic, animation, combat vibe etc, but but when push comes to shove I've really stopped enjoying it. Perhaps I'm burned out when it comes to corpse runs or maybe I'm just not interested in hard core tests of skill anymore, but as the game has progressed I have found myself enjoying it less and less and getting frustrated more and more.
At this point, I'm doubtful I will actually finish the game, and at $40 I just don't see it being worth it.