I'm inclined to believe that almost no one on the dev team even tried to get someone to playtest this game. There's just so much...WRONG with this game. Frustrating controls and combat that'll make you want to snap your controller in half, tedious level design that feels like it was deliberately made just to piss you off, annoying enemies that just make levels even more of a slog to get through, I could go on. I normally try to finish games I own because after all, I did pay for it, but I'm not even sure if I even want to try to finish this game at this point.

It's hard but not in a good way. Many of these sorts of platformer combat games are hard, many are hard but good. This is just rife with terrible decisions for the controls. how to attack? move and press attack button. How to kick? don't move and press attack button, how to hi-kick? don't move and press attack button, but for longer. how to dash? move and press attack button, but not in the same way the regular attack is.
And of course my least favorite: how to save? don't move, it'll save whether you want it to or not.
In the tutorial I was like "oh that's a bad choice for controls"
When I played, it was as bad as I expected.
A shame because the art is really cool.

This game doesn't deserve for me to spend the energy to do a full write up on everything that is absolutely atrocious about it so i will just say of the hundreds of games i've cleared on steam so far this was the least enjoyable one.

So, if you're wondering, like I was in the first few levels of the game "just how this game is so obscure or "underrated?"" Well, I figured it out: it is badly designed. There are some brilliant ideas on display in this game, yes, but it doesn't handle them well enough.

Killing enemies and picking up blood thingies fills up a bar that allows you to plop a checkpoint down in any safe place of your choosing. Nice idea. Healing when you plop down the checkpoint is nice too. Going back to a checkpoint resets you back to it as if you didn't die/progress at all - except your corpse is still sitting there -> also a good idea. No cheese for the collectibles IS a good idea.
Then there are entire sections where you cannot plop a checkpoint down. Period. This is actually fine overall and I appreciate how the game gives you a checkpoint ready by the time you're done with it.

Buttons on a controller: 4. Buttons used by this game: 2, attack and jump. Why only 2? Jump is perfectly fine.
Attacking has a weirdness in how it is set up:
1) Pressing the attack button when crouched on the ground does a low stab with your stabby hands
2) Attack in the air does a stabs
3) Holding downwards in the air and attacking does a straight downward dive stab thing
4) On the ground and standing still, attacking does a kick that punts enemies (into spikes hopefully)
5) On the ground and standing still, holding down the attack button does another kick - with longer startup - that launches the enemy up (nice for air combo or into spikes)
5.5 ) Not-so-fun fact: The game penalizes you for half-committing to the upper kick -> as if you let go too early, you'll do the normal kick instead but with the longer start up of the launching kick
6) On the ground and holding upwards, attacking does a slash above you (juggling and anti-air)
7) On the ground and holding forward, attacking button does a normal stab (like numbers 1 and 2)
and 8) On non-slippery ground, pressing forward + attack at the SAME TIME does a dash forward stab attack. This is good for closing in distance between you and an enemy and it does more damage if the distance is just right.

Did you see the weirdness of my number ordering? I went out of my way to put the grounded normal stab down at number 7 while you'd think "shouldn't that be number 1? or 2?" There is a mishmash of how all this works in order to fit in move number 8. If it didn't exist, then move 7 would be done just hitting attack as you're standing there, which makes perfect sense. Then the game would make forward+attack into move 4's input, etc etc.
I have a solution that goes back to the buttons: use another button. One button for your claw hands and the other button for kicks and other special moves. This will easily open up the way to let you add more things into the game.

I guess you'll eventually get used to it but I'mma stick by this complaint.

Also, arguably more important than all that came before it: use the fourth button as a "back to checkpoint right NOW." The spectacle of dying and seeing bloody pixels flying all over the place gets old, so it would be nice skipping that and saving around 2 seconds - or around 5 seconds if you're in a stage where you faaaaaalll dooooooooooooown to your death.
Remember: if dying for trial and error gameplay is intended, then restarting as quick as possible should also be intended. "It's just 2 seconds" fails in the face of "it took me 100 tries" because that's 200 seconds now which is over 3 minutes.

Levels come with sections that are "tough." If some of these sections of the game would be deleted, entirely, then the quality of the game would improve. Why? They're slow and you spend time waiting, just waiting, for a chance to progress. If you plopped a checkpoint before you realize you have to wait 5 second to even attempt going, that sure kills the pacing where every death is almost 10 seconds of waiting.
It's not a skill issue thing as I beat all the C-Sides in Celeste on my Switch. I could probably beat this game and get most of the achievements to silence retort on this "skill issue" matter, but like... after 2 hours, I decided that I just don't want to put myself through any more of this; so I stopped. Feel free to dismiss all this

Importantly: the game has built-in "gotcha" moments where you're just gonna die to them the first time you go through it. These moments suck. Period. I have 2 hours into the game and I found three separate instances of them so I can only imagine how many are gonna pop up if I continued.

I don't hate this game nor do I feel any sort of resentment, or I would've beaten it and gone off on a rant on how this game sucks - I sometimes thrive off of such stubbornness and malice to get through games that I'm not having fun in - but nope.
I still don't recommend it though.
Honestly, go play Celeste. This game wishes it was Celeste despite coming out MANY years prior.
I know this game's age can excuse things for other people, and I get that; but I care not as no one is playing this game in 2012 anymore. It's 2024 and the idea of using its age to defend it exemplifies how this game does NOT hold up.

Oh yeah, the plot... uh... 2 hours in and it doesn't seem to exist.

P.S. If you ignore this and buy the game, which is fair enough -> go to the settings and turn off V-sync. Before turning it off, the game ran at 2x speed which was funny.

So many years ago when I bought this game, it was really fun, fast, and exciting! I remember the difficulty spiked like crazy and I didn't beat it then. Then in 2023 I tried to give it another go. Booting up the game gives me a black screen, but I hear code. Looking in the forums other people have this same problem with no fix. Also many people who play this game apparently have some sort of bug where the character is 10x too fast or something. Long story short, this game no longer has any developer support, and you may be playing for shovelware at this point. Buy with caution.

no

I can't recommend this game to people, at least not if you want to play on the standard difficulty. It's fun, but it's also one of the most aggravating games I've ever played. The main contributions to that are the controls not matching the level of precision required and the way the checkpoint system works.

On the controls: Your base movement is fairly slippery, not a huge issue on its own, but coupled with the constant hazards everywhere it becomes an exercise in frustration sometimes just stopping before you hit one. Coupled with sections with actual slippery floors and you might as well not have controls when you're touching the ground in those sections. Additionally, jumps are very float-y in a way that does not fit the speed at which you need to be moving in many sections and the precision with which you must make certain jumps that have minimal safe places to land.

Regarding the save system: On its face, the combo-meter based checkpoints are great. You can deploy your checkpoints basically whenever the meter fills and you can stand still for two seconds and there isn't an enemy or sawblade nearby. Sorry, that's not quite right. Your checkpoints *will* deploy when you stand still for two seconds and there isn't a sawblade or enemy nearby. But nearby is relative; more than once you will unwillingly set a checkpoint in a place that results in near immediate death every time you respawn because that sawblade or enemy was just outside the detection range of the checkpoint. Or maybe you stop to look at your surroundings so you don't jump blindly into nothingness and it saves for you in an inconvenient spot. Or maybe you get knocked back way earlier into the level and don't die, so your checkpoint just loses you a ton of progress.

Now, maybe this is all fixed on Novice. Normally I'm not the type to hold onto my pride and refuse easier difficulties, but Novice isn't just easier. It removes the final level from the game and the collectible pages. So if you want to play this game, maybe play Novice. Just know that you are barred from accessing all the content unless you play on the setting that will make you want to jump into the copious spike pits at the bottom of each level.

I really want to give this a positive review. The concept is good, the art and sound design is great, and the mechanics as a whole are good. Your attacks are cool, the combo system is pretty unique, it's fun to test what method of killing something will give you the most points, and the checkpoint system is unique, flavourful and well thought out.

But I have to give this a negative review. I think I've had this game nearly ten years now and every time I come back to it I'm reminded of why I often quickly quit out of frustration last time: It's just WAY too hard in the later levels. I finally beat it today, after spending a combined four hours on the final two levels.

This is a platformer that insists on precise wall grabs (with under half a second of leeway before you slide off the grabbable section) while having some of the most imprecise jump physics of any platformer I've played. You are FAR too floaty for platforming of this difficulty to be enjoyable, and taking a hit from anything, even stationary hazards, imparts enough knockback that there is rarely any chance of recovery. If you land on short spikes, you can't adequately jump away from them. If you touch a sawblade, good luck - the knockback can't be predicted so you'll either end up hitting the same saw again or be thrown across the room, usually into another sawblade. Often, small enemies, especially the squids, float around to harass you while you complete a jumping puzzle. Attempting to kill these enemies ruins your movement (so does bumping into them in general) and generally leads to your death, so your best bet is to try and get past them and hope the stage hazards kill them. When you do this, 8/10 times they will body block you, ruining your momentum anyway. Invincibility frames are barely a thing in this game, I'm pretty sure you can lose all three lives in around a second, which is pretty common when you just get bounced around saw blades with no control.

I legitimately did better at this game on an ancient computer that could only run the game at a lower frame rate, as that then made it possible to complete with the precise platforming asked of you with the floaty mechanics you are given. Maybe it's because I play on keyboard (it does recommend controller), but wall jumps just gave me no leeway in input. If I pressed Jump + Left at the same time, it was a 50/50 as to whether I'd jump off the wall, or fall off the wall and uselessly use my air jump, leading to a death. In the multiple sections where you need to chain several such jumps, this got frustrating quickly.


The base game difficulty is simply way too high if the developers wanted people to actually finish the game, and it shows. Going by Steam achievements, under 5% of people have actually completed this game. For contrast, over 13% have beat the B SIDE (hard mode) of the final main level (Summit) in Celeste. Hell, a greater % of people have gotten the Moon Berry 1UP in Celeste than have beaten They Bleed Pixels. That's insane

The game could be incredible, but the platforming and physics don't match, and I imagine this is primarily why people clearly gave up on it. The loose controls are, as another person pointed out, good for the combat of this game (when you're on the ground at least) but utterly woeful for platforming. You can either have tight platforming and tight physics (Celeste) or loose platforming and loose physics. You can't mix and match the two.

just not my thing. i love these style of side-scrolling games, but with this i played for 20mins and already drives me insane. i prefer a game hard from levels, but this is hard from the controls and game mechanics which frustrated me so fast that i couldn't keep playing. i'll farm cards and move on.

Bought this game 10 years ago and love it, great mechanics and thanks for the support.
But the game is too hard, I was still not able to finish it. For some reason not all levels are available for novice.