Not bad for Eastern Hollow Knight clone. Still mid grade that's not quite as good, though.

One needlessly contrived mechanic I fisliked is 'your thimble is full' crap when you reap the fugitive souls which is basically Grub.

I feel a bit mixed about this review. Short version: if you're really into 2D Metroidvania/souls-like games, here's one more for you to try, otherwise maybe skip. The game has a neat art style with pretty good animation. The controls are decent, if a bit less tight than I'd like. Part of the big frustration for me is an exceptionally poor English translation, with the dialogue and grammar feeling really awkward.

It's okayyyyyyyy-ish? Love the art and overall style of the game but it's just not that fun to play. It's gameplay is very simple and not really fun or rewarding at all. I didn't hate it though, a solid 6/10 kinda game.

I can't recommend this one. It's basically just a worse hollow Knight.

The combat sucks.

The game is not smooth due to the dev not implementing the necessary measures to syncronise the refresh rates of the various elements of the game and thereby make the sidescrolling run smoothly with the unity engine. Furthermore, the game has screen tearing that can't be removed, except by closing the game and manually forcing V-sync on in nvidia control panel.

The map has aged poorly and is now outdated, especially when compared to contemporary titles such as PoP the lost crown. There's no way to keep track of ability gated things you might want to check out later. This can be resolved by adding tags that players can add to the map, but until then this is a metroidvania that will sooner or later require you to use Demajen if you want to collect everything.

You will find yourself constantly falling down into hazards that you had no way of knowing might be there, overall, world design is good but level design is mediocre.

I just couldn't get into it.
It looks great visually.
But the beginning opening levels and the game play just felt super sluggish from the start and same with the movement. I just couldn't get into it.

I like the atmosphere and drawings, they're quite simple yet unique in their own way, but I just couldn't really enjoy the game. It's just not that fun nor satisfying and the map is super dispersive

I wish steam had a mixed option for reviews.
I don't think this is a bad game at all, i simply never had fun with it. I tried, i got very close to the end but stopped, planning to pick it up later. That was a few years ago, and every time i look at my library and see this game i think "i need to finish it". But why should i? I wasn't having fun. I started playing it back when i was in my "i need to finish every game i start" phase and forced myself to play most of it, and after dropping it i always had a feeling of dread when thinking about the day i have to come back to finish it, i really don't want to come back to a game that bored me to death but "i HAVE to because i'm dumb".

I stopped with that stupid "finish everything" phase a long time ago and this "review" is a way for me to "exorcise" it's remnants, now i can look at my library again and not feel like i have unfinished business.

Says Metroidvania...Bosses are Souls-like without health meters. Fun immediately evaporated.
Not for me.

8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This Nintendo Switch game is a metroidvania type platformer with okay-ish 2D "paper art" style cartoon illustrations instead of, you know, computer graphics you expect to see in a video game from 2021. I mean, 3D graphics were invented some time in the 1990's right? At least by 2015 they had invented 3D graphics. So what's going on here? Laziness I guess.

This is a Korean culture inspired story about a young girl who ventures into the afterlife so she can do 2D Nintendo Switch handheld console brawling and occasionally backtracking to unlock new areas etc etc... this ain't Hollow Knight, though, and platforming itself is a massively obsolete genre, so throwing one out in 2021 is a lot like making a black and white silent film in the 21st century... it's not impossible for something presented in such an obsolete manner to be successful but the quality of everything else in the production has to be godlike to overcome those self inflicted handicaps... and I can tell you right now, 8Doors does not have a godlike implementation.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure has the pathetically optimistic price of $20 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "Europa Universalis IV", "Monster Hunter World" or "Hearts of Iron IV". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

its just hollow knight