Great little hidden gem, hard as a mf.

Atrocious manoeuvrability to a point it ruins the game, the description says "over 100 weapons, armor, etc" but when looking at a full map of the game I played around half of it and had 3 weapons, the basic armor and 1 magic, I have no idea how it could have over 100. Pretty sad because bosses were cool and exploration could have been enjoyable if it wasn't for how not it actually is (and there is no ingame map lol).

This game rocks, its a rogue like
NES Dark souls
Great package
Astalon Tears of the Earth got me interested and that also rocks harder

Reading the positive reviews of this game feels like being gaslighted. I feel like I'm playing a different game than everyone else is describing. I'll quote what my discord friend said when I showed them what I experienced:

"This is an amazing game. I think college game design classes need to study this."

He of course meant this in the sense that it's full of examples of what NOT to do.

I'm going to just recount my experience. Right off the bat when I started the game, I went to the options and noticed the languages option is greyed out and only has english as an option. What is the point of having a language option if there's only one option? Then I went to the controls and noticed that jump and shoot have no bindings on them. Imagine if I had started the game without a way to jump or shoot. So I set those and then tried to configure the joystick. Every time I did this, it would switch to joystick mode for one frame and then immediately switch back to keyboard mode. The game claims to support a joystick but it really doesn't. Steam input lets you make custom mappings, but after fighting with it for a while, I decided to just play with WASD/J/K as I had configured it.

Game starts, I enter a house and press F and the game immediately crashes. Full lockup, frozen, wouldn't respond to anything. ALL I DID WAS PRESS F.

I restart the game and go to the save statue and notice it's telling me to press down to access the equipment screen. I try a bunch of buttons on the keyboard away from the statue to see if I have any kind of map or pause menu or status screen. I don't. No map in a metroidvania. Not even a pause button. I mention this on discord and notice that the game paused itself when I unfocused the window. Press P to unpause. I do so and press P again to see it it'll pause the game. It doesn't. I go to the statue and press down to get to a status screen with equipment, items and relics. So the only way I can access my inventory is by going to a statue and pressing down. Presumably the items submenu would have health potions. But then said potions would be useless because if I go to a statue to use a potion, I will have already been healed by touching the save statue. Save, fight the first boss, being careful not to accidentally hit the F key now that I know it's the "crash game" button. I jump past the girl and block her path but she just runs through me while I get stuck in the room. Fight an easy boss, save, fight a mini boss I guess? Get the key, low on health, I backtrack to the save statue forgetting just how close the spike pit is and slip right into it even though I knew it was there and was preparing to jump from the screen before. Spikes insta-kill you by the way. This was my third death, but the game claimed it was my 13th. No idea where those extra 10 deaths came from.

Finally, there's the music, which succeeded in irritating me to the point of muting the game through the windows volume mixer, because it is a minute-and-a-half-long generic rock loop using chiptune voices with a VERY noticeable loop point. Don't believe me? Take a listen for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijksK6OQJIc

This gets very irritating to listen to after 10 minutes let alone over an hour.

Reviews also mention the NES throwbacks and some nostalgia factor, but this game doesn't feel like an NES game. It feels like a game thrown together in Game Maker Studio for a 24-hour game jam.

This game fights you on every step. It is barely playable, and the positive reviews completely baffle me because reading them makes me feel like I got the cheap chinese Ratatoing knock off of the game rather than the game I paid 10 dollars for. The screenshots look cool and are part of what drew me in, but playing this game feels like playing a bad flash game. IDK if it gets better later on despite being a metroidvania without a map and with only two buttons leaving not much room for interesting abilities, but to start it is such a buggy and unplayable mess that I don't think I'll have the patience to actually get there.

If you're Looking for a Short Game with REALLY Good Bitmusic, and somewhat enjoyable Platforming, this Game is definitely for you!

But for Around 9.99 this game goes for, even when 100%ing the game, you only get around 12h max out of it, so better get this off of a Sale if you can. ( i got it for 1.99 which is a Superb Price for it! )

Be advised however, this Game gets really Difficult, which i consider a Bad thing, it gets “ I Wanna Be The Guy “ Difficult with some areas, and it can get really Frustrating because savespots can be quite far away sometimes.

Besides, from 100%ing this Game, i somehow feel that the thought of BackTracking ( which this Game has a lot ) was just added as an Afterthought, since many spots have instant Death Traps right after switching Screens, which makes Deaths aplenty, and Restarts at a Far away Savespot aplenty too…

Other than that, Exploration is also a very big “Hit and Miss” in this Game, since there are things to find (Like Zelda 1’s Grumble Grumble Monster or even a Specific Boss from Cave Story, ofc they just resemble them… haha…) There are VERY MANY Troll Spots that make you Question if you should Explore and Find neat things, or just get Trolled by the Developer and get Hardstuck in specific Locations.

Some hidden Items due to this made me think that i'm not Supposed to collect them (since many of them have the “Secret Item!” Tag on them) and almost all besides 3 are actually Trolls that you cannot obtain and if you do, you are Softlocked, which takes out the Fun of Exploring and finding hidden Items.

If you do look for something to do, and like the Music / The Atmosphere / The Artwork (Especially the Intro) or the Castlevania esque Playstyle, i Recommend it, but if you want to 100% this, or arent as versatile with very Difficult Platformers in this Style, i would advise to look for something else and just enjoy the Soundtrack on Youtube!

Awesome game. It was made for those of us who grew up with an NES. Lots of references to old games and a fair but familiar level of difficulty.

The game is tough in some parts, but it knows that it's tough and give an appropriate number of save points to compensate.

Castle In The Darkness is a decent retro Metroidvania and while it is not the best the genre has to offer, it is still pretty fun. I enjoyed the numerous items and in general they all make you more powerful. There are a few items that act more as keys rather than being that useful (e.g. the mermaid fins), that I wished got more use. Overall I enjoyed finding all the power-ups even if they were not all super useful, it is nice to have a reward for exploration.

On the topic of exploration, the map is very linearly designed and areas do not interconnect. The linear design caused a lot of slow down when backtracking for items, even with the teleport statues it was still sometimes tedious to re-walk a large portion of the map. I think a simply fix for this would have been to either have more teleport statues or to allow teleportation to save points, though the developer would have had to make a map for that last one.

Yes, Castle In The Darkness just like the NES games it is meant to emulate, does not feature a map whatsoever. I can see this being a big problem for some players but in all honesty I enjoyed the lack of a map. It was a game of it's own charting out every area with pen and paper, a game I quite enjoyed. Map making is definitely an acquired taste, so if you don't like it you probably will have a bad time with this game

Despite Castle In the Darkness' flaws I still enjoyed my time with it and can recommend it to retro game fans and Metroidvania fans alike.

A hard but fun Metroidvania

for 10€ no way
no I frames or knockback on hit makes it more frustrating than challenging

Simple and entertaining.

It's a mishmash of other NES games and metroidvanias that typically works well - it looks neat (although inconsistent, some enemies look like they were taken from other games), it sounds great (the soundtrack is just full of bangers), it controls fine (I found the platforming and the combat intuitive and simple).

The main issue, I'd say, is the map, or rather lack thereof. This makes 100%-ing the game a chore because it is rather easy to forget about a branch of a location you've been to hours ago. Because this isn't a very popular game finding guides on the internet is a bit challenging which further extends the magnitude of this issue.

There is a lot of bosses and most of them go down incredibly easily which is not necessarily a bad thing - I was afraid they would be NES-difficult, which is to say I expected cheap and irritating fights. They are, unfortunately, still present, but mostly during some of the late-game fights. They suck, obviously, screw the crab and screw the witch (they are just tedious, also you cannot skip the latter's intro which seems to be a bug.)

The exploration itself is alright - I found basically all (like 98%) of the secrets myself and they were typically rewarding enough to make the whole process enjoyable. Too bad the backtracking sucks because of the atmospheric-but-still-annoying fast travel system (I feel like there should've been like twice the amount of the warp points.)

The difficulty? I died a bit over 250 times during the whole game and most of these deaths were due to spikes which are an instakill. Are they cheap? Sometimes, but I wasn't really frustrated during the playthrough (this may be due to my experience with the so-called 'rage platformers'.) As I said before, most of the bosses were easy and the platforming was never overwhelming (even during the page rooms which were probably the hardest ones.)

Also, I have to mention, screw the "die 500 times" achievement. I had to basically krill myself for like half an hour while watching some videos. Terrible stuff.

Is the game worth it? I'd say yes, although expect some jank (the camera movement during screen transitions, for instance) and frustration (again, screw the crab.) It's a neat little game (took me about 10 hours to 100% it which isn't a terribly long time) and also, possibly, someone could find the game cool enough to finish the damn guides.