I wish so badly that I could recommend this game because its presentation is really quite striking: the pixel art is gorgeous and I love the way the art design makes use of color, light, shadow, foreground and background. The soundtrack is also incredible, it's lush and atmospheric, and the production values are super high. The story setup contains a lot of promise: you're a warrior caught in a struggle between two warring gods, with each offering you power and dominion if you pledge your allegiance to them. There's a skill tree with branching paths, and who you choose to ally yourself with will grant you unique abilities and unlock certain paths in the game world. I love the inclusion of RPG elements like this, and I think the potential replay value for this title is quite high.

This game is a joy to look at, a joy to listen to, and it's clear that there is a lot of creativity on offer here, but ultimately I cannot recommend it for the simple reason that it is just no fun to *play*. Movement is clunky, it's a beautiful world but it feels like a chore to traverse. Combat...hoo boy...combat is *borderline non-functional*. There is no block, no dodge, and your sword has an absolutely pathetic reach. The first boss, Crawley, clings to walls and jumps all over the arena. Because you have no ranged attack and your sword's reach is so short, your only hope of defeating him is to just get in close and swing wildly, but it's nearly impossible to do that without taking damage yourself because touching the boss hurts you. Oh and did I mention, the boss has no visible health bar, so you can try the fight over and over again without knowing if you've made any meaningful progress whatsoever. That's what this fight boils down to: run in, mash the X button, and just HOPE that you kill the boss before it kills you, 3 hits and you're dead. That is just absolutely inexcusable, and when the rest of the game is as strong as it is, it is just such a shame that the combat completely sinks the experience.

Don't get me wrong, I love difficult games! Blasphemous I and II are two of my favorite games of all time, and those games are absolutely *white-knuckle* difficult, the difference is that those games have such rock-solid fundamentals that the challenge always feels fair, even if it can be extremely brutal. In this game, I feel like I'm getting my ass kicked over and over again, not because the game is offering any kind of legitimate challenge, but because I keep falling victim to this clunky combat system and bad game design. This game has so much going for it, but unless the combat receives a complete overhaul before release, I can't recommend it.

I'm incredibly torn as to whether to recommend this game. My first 10-15 or so hours with Noreya were an absolute joy, it felt like a really solid little metroidvania, with some really delightful pixel art, a clear visual style throughout. The level designs were nice, the unlocks and expansion of traversal all felt good, and I was having a great time exploring the world. I especially enjoyed the mechanics requiring switching the world between states, and would've loved to see it featured a bit more prominently, and for the switching to be less clunky (teleporting around to find the statue I needed to alternate was a bit tedious).

The story was light, but present, and the writing, although not exceptional, was perfectly serviceable. The controls and combat felt fairly snappy and enjoyable. I thoroughly enjoyed the forgiving nature of the game, with saves per room, nigh-infinite healing using a meagre amount of currency (even if it is a little _too_ slow), and quick resets at either the current room or the last hub.

Unfortunately, the deeper I got, the more the rough edges started to grate away at me. It started with the odd little quirk, a lack of polish here and there. Random use of soft particle effects, in an otherwise beautiful pixel art setting (the moths and hit effects). The annoying pulsing shadows when left on one health. The repetitive sound design of the enemies (I ruthlessly murder the bats ASAP just to stop the damn flapping). An angry worm moving in unpredictable ways. A bugged room transition that consistently placed me inside the floor. Pixelated text rendering and a myriad of fonts. Odd bugs, like things not spawning occasionally, or things happening out of sync. Confusing menu behaviour (just let me press B to close the dang thing).

These weren't really enough to sway my feelings though. I was still having fun, and I can forgive a recent release from a small team a lot of issues. The bigger problems really started showing as I progressed deeper into the game, and it's with the enemy behaviour design.

Some of this is apparent earlier in the game, although it's not very problematic. Little things, like enemies that will endless walk towards the nearest edge of a platform attempting to reach you, making it almost impossible to safely jump to the platform without defeating them first. This is exacerbated by enemy attack patterns, which often have very little telegraphing before the attack occurs, and can have deceptively long range.

This became more egregious the deeper I got.

There's a moth type enemy that will attempt to float above you, maintaining a fixed distance, and drop projectiles in a fixed pattern. This can make it almost impossible to deal with them by regular means, unless you can very quickly scale something faster than they will float, or before they aggro.

There's a reaper style of enemy, with scissors and a blade you encounter mid gameish. They have an incredibly repetitive attack pattern, that offers little room for rebuttal, and absolutely zero opportunity for using your combo attacks without tanking some damage.

This is the general issue that persists amongst the enemies in Noreya - they're overly aggressive, especially when confronted with many at once. Despite attempting to minimise the amount of hits I'd take, after a while I began to accept there were two options for dealing with most enemies. Either cheese them, by finding a location you could avoid their attacks, while still attacking them and get them stuck there until they died. Or, accept that in most encounters, you're probably going to lose some health.

This problem is exacerbated by the size of enemy hitboxes, and their desire to endlessly run at you. Many times I felt like I was taking damage when I hadn't made contact with the enemy.

For the most part, this is fine. By no means game breaking. A bit tiring and oft disappointing, but manageable. I'm still having fun.

And then you get to the bosses.

The bosses in Noreya are all so very close to being excellent. Most of them have a nicely designed arena to fight in, and a unique set of attack patterns and puzzles to solve. Unfortunately, they mostly suffer from the same problems as the enemies, only far worse.

- hitboxes on their attacks are often poorly represented, leading to regularly being hit when you feel you should've avoided damage
- hitboxes on the enemies themselves being hard to understand, again leading to regularly taking damage from contact with the boss
- bosses being very large, and arenas offering little space to manoeuvre around the bosses without taking damage. Combine this with their propensity to push you into corners, and you guaranteed to lose some health. (side note: dodges seemingly have no iframes, and many of the bosses are larger than your jump height, or float obnoxiously around head height, leaving you no room to get around them)
- poorly telegraphed attacks (this is particularly prevalent on the sword and mage bosses in the cathedral)
- randomised attack patterns (the lack of telegraphing could be manageable if you could learn the order of attacks. from my tests, you can't)
- incredibly dodgy homing behaviour. Lots of the bosses use attacks with some degree of tracking, which often leaves you with nowhere to go. Hyper aggressive tracking combined with oversized hitboxes and small arenas with limited mobility leads to frustration. (Sword guy and Worm both absolutely sucked for this)

In the end, I found the most effective way to handle most of the bosses was just... to stop trying to avoid attacks, and just absolutely wail on them, using my oversized health pool and the few seconds of invulnerability from taking damage to beat them into submission before I died. This was completely unsatisfying and let me feeling disappointed instead of victorious.

And now I've landed at finally fighting Greed. And I am not having any fun. Sadly, I fear this is where my journey ends. The combination of tight platforming combined with inconsistent, unpredictable attack patterns is just frustrating. Once again, I'm just crutching on my health pool instead of trying to do better, because it feels more like fluke than skill. And then you get to the actual fight, and once again, you're backed into a corner - this fight even introduces walls you can't wall jump off, completely pinning you into corners with the oversized boss and his infinite ads.

The thing that upsets me the most is I can see so clearly the vision for these encounters, and they're great. There is just so much potential packed into this, that is just falling short by lacklustre execution.

Despite all this, I really want to say give it a go. I still have 20 hours of mostly good times from this game. All the earlier content felt really solid, and really enjoyable. I cannot stress that enough. Even the earlier bosses felt good. And the developers are still actively patching and fixing things, so I'm sure it's going to get better. For that alone, I want to recommend it. But I recommend it with a big dose of caution. My problems could well just be a skill issue, you might have a great time.

EDIT: I left Greed alone, had dinner, and continued my exploration. 100%'d the map, found all the items, and basically did everything else I possibly could. Had a great time. Came back after getting beefy, wailed on Greed first try. Turns out bosses are hard when you're hangry. The game is good, although I still think the sword guy and mage guy were both kinda bad compared to everything else. The enemy behaviour and hitboxes are still a little rough, but nothing so severe as to tarnish the gold project. Certain enemy behaviours got easier to deal with after unlocking certain tools, but were ultimately still a bit of a pain. I'm going to rewrite this review tomorrow to sound a little less negative, because I really have enjoyed this game <3

Honestly, Noreya is a good metroidvania. It gets the game feel, graphics, music, sound, etc right. Not only that, Noreya KNOWS what it wants to be: a puzzle-heavy, expansive metroidvania that strikes a balance between combat, exploration, platforming, non-linearity, and puzzle pieces.

That said, this is a very opinionated game. The devs have a lot of ideas that aren't necessarily fun, but they place it in the game because they want the player to feel a certain way. Personally, this goes against my idea of what a game should be, where the designer is there to serve the player, not the other way around.

For instance, getting the true ending is perhaps the most convoluted experience ever. Not only do you need to solve 2 biome-wide puzzles (where you need to switch between the two worlds), you need to run around the map destroying what is essentially fast travel points. From a design standpoint, I can see the point. But boil it down, it's just tedium and forced backtracking wrapped up in a awkward justification of "because the player must earn it!' thingy.

Heck, the final true ending boss is worse. It's not hard to beat, but it violates everything the game had been building up to teach the player. Instead of a puzzle boss you get a bullet hell boss, Instead of your upgrades being useful, only those that improve your survivability matters, because you cannot damage the boss with normal means. Heck, if you never paid attention to the symbolism in the world, you'd probably never even know how you're supposed to deal damage to the boss.

All in all, Noreya feels like a bunch of ideas tossed into a bag and then the devs try to justify them afterwards. As a metroidvania, it's a solid B-tier game; and unlike most other indie games out there, where some of them are just plain outright lazy in their design (e.g. Faerie Afterlight), the devs have put a LOT of thought into creating a specific experience.

So take my non-endorsement as what it is: my personal disagreement to the dev's vision, instead of Noreya being a bad game in any way.

Full Walkthrough (Early Access): https://youtu.be/jAHaKlVnFM4

★★★☆☆
Gameplay: Good
Graphics: Retro
Music: Decent
Voice Lines: No
Story: Good
PC Requirements: Potato
Game Time: 3 - 5 hrs

I have a lot of little complaints about this game that I can excuse from a small studio. The one thing I can't forgive is how bad and unpolished the combat is. Enemies are far too mobile compared to the player, at least in the early stages of the game. Many attacks are also not telegraphed so you are best off avoiding anything but the most basic enemies or resort to tedious hit and run tactics. Game difficulty should come from complex mechanics not cheap tricks.

Also, the currency you use to purchase skills is also used to heal which is just strange and unrewarding. I shouldn't have to choose between healing and progressing my character.

The simplest change to make this game more tolerable would be adding basic knockback/stun to enemies from player attacks. Without that I consider this game simply unplayable.

beyond frustrating ... cant dodge enemy attacks to attack yourself...contact damage etc...also have to force reboot my steam deck anytime I exit the game shame was looking forward to this one

Will be refunding unfortunately for now and will come back if issues are resolved in the future

Still a reccomend I can see the potential here for sure and will be keeping my eye on it

Beautiful pixel art and music... solid level design and spot on with momentum for platforming no jankiness to be found there which is must for a platforming based metroidvania ... feel bad for having to refund but as of now it dont really mesh with me and hope it will in the future and I wish the devs all the best

A nice Metroidvania game.

I really enjoyed the snapy mouvements, progress on the sphere grid is really rewarding.

Also, music is absolutely gorgeous.

Early game is an utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The demo is super weak.
Later it becomes damn good.

A promising metroidvania with a potential to become great!
The art and music are amazing as it is.
The gameplay is fluid with the character becoming more versatile as more powers are unlocked as you progress, similar to classic metroidvanias, reminding me quite much Hollow Knight.
The skill tree is nice but in the balance between gold and light does not seem ideal at the early access. Similarly, the impact of the allegiance to the world is quite small and the map changes seem to buggy, unless it is voluntary for some rooms to not become visible, especially in the light allegiance. I would have hoped to see more impact from allegiances on the gameplay.
Looking forward to the final version of the game !

An amazing metroidvania!

**The good:**
- The story was very interesting, ignore the first 5 story messages that include the tutorial, the rest of the writing is pretty good
- Combat is simple but fast and if it's too hard, you can explore further to make it easier. The skills are way more helpful than I expected.
- The exploration in this game is top-notch! The map is enormous, possibly bigger than Hollow Knight. Full of secrets. There are a few harder platforming sections

**Neutral**
- The first 5 bosses were disappointing, while the last 2 were very entertaining and challenging.
- The soundtrack is small (in number of songs), given how big the map is, it gets repetitive unfortunately (even if it's a good fit for the game)

**Bad**
- The early game is poor and does this game a disservice by pushing people away. I'd argue wait until you get the first "story skill", that's when the game picks up. Also the writing looked bad early, but became really interesting later on

**8/10. I highly recommend it.** I was struggling to find something to play after DOOMBLADE and Nine Sols, I tried Deviator (huge disappointment), Biomorph which I tried hard to get into, but the combat, movement and plot just aren't there. Then somebody on reddit recommended this and I was hooked. Finished in 3 days (20 hours).