Recent reviews by CURSE YOU, BAYLE!

You're forgiven for thinking that the title was generated by AI.

In seriousness it's a decent Metroidvania if you're feeling in the mood for one. About 6 hours of gameplay.

With the amount of fun my friends and I had this would be an easy recommend at $10, but it's free.

Performance isn't the best and there are some bugs, but that doesn't change my recommendation, especially a month after Early Access.

EDIT: Developer has responded, previously it was impossible to finish the tutorial due to a game-crashing bug. Review amended to remove mention of it and changed to positive for the speedy action by the developer. I'll play some more when I have time.
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The game seems to lock the method of control once you start a run, so you cannot swap between KB/M and controller at your convenience. And this is a problem particularly because the options with sliders are from 1-100 and seemingly can only be moved 1 increment at a time on controller. I want to use my mouse to quickly change things but I can't.

Cannot progress dialogue with the mouse buttons even when KB/M is the control method.

I didn't like the dog's barking so I lowered "voice" volume significantly. Except nothing happened, because he's not a "voice", he's an "effect"?

No option for borderless fullscreen so on my 21:9 monitor I cannot play in 16:9 fullscreen if I want to.

Summary: As usual Steam desperately needs a 'neutral' review option. I enjoy these games and I want them to improve. I don't feel that a simple 'positive/negative' rating will cover the nuance of the discussion here. If you simply want 40 hours of 'more Elden Ring' (good and bad) than I would genuinely recommend this for you. But if you're expecting it to be particularly better than the base game, then I would probably skip this or wait for a discount. There is a lot to discuss.

For context I've experienced every boss in the DLC and most of the quests. I've finished nearly every piece of 'Souls' content that FromSoft has put out since 2009. I did a NG playthrough (rather than NG+, etc.).

In 2017 Matthew Matosis made a video called 'The Lost Soul Arts of Demon's Souls' where he goes into detail about why Demon's Souls was truly special and he noticed that in all of the following games it was clear that FromSoft was shifting away from various elements of what made that game special and instead trying to focus more on being an action-game where the combat across each subsequent game is largely similar. For Elden Ring specifically it is now the length of 3 typical Souls games, and yet it has less boss variety than Demon's Souls. Insane. Unfortunately Matthew Matosis is strongly vindicated.

And with that, the difficulty discussion in the community is sort of missing the point. How many of the bosses are truly memorable? With Demon's Souls even when I beat a boss in 1-2 attempts I still typically walked away and thought "Wow that was unique". In this DLC my experience with most of them is that their visual design was a lot more memorable than the fight itself.

In the DLC a lot of the 'difficulty' is strongly linked to what your Scadutree Blessing is. And this gets to my biggest annoyance. If you explore enough you will find the blessings and some talisman upgrades, but spending literal hours through mostly-empty areas is simply not appealing to me. On occasion the scenery can be striking, but very often they're a lot more bland than the other parts of the game and you can easily miss something. As I said at the start if you simply want 40 hours of 'more Elden Ring' this is great for you, but it could have easily cut out 10 hours of mediocre content. I desperately miss the design of the other Souls games where most areas felt intentionally designed, rather than "We need to put an empty field here to fill up space to justify having a horse". Also while there are certainly a few noteworthy things you can find here, there are also a ton of completely mediocre upgrade materials that will make you feel that you wasted your time, with tons of player messages aptly saying "dung". Why even bother?

Artorias of the Abyss, The Old Hunters, The Ringed City. They each had their issues but they were some good DLC that didn't have large stretches of emptiness.

A complaint people have had in the past with the Souls games is that they've been more linear than the players prefer so there are times where they feel they have to finish a particular area or boss rather than exploring and coming back later. That's great, but we didn't need these massive empty areas to solve that problem. As usual for FromSoft, there is a tremendous *quantity* of effort on display here. I just wish that they focused on the enjoyment from moment-to-moment, cutting down on the bland areas.

As a fun anecdote I think some of the difficulty complaints would be reduced if the game embraced cosmetic armor (so more people use heavy armor). Maybe after they make 5 of these games they'll finally...oh. Well at least Monster Hunter got it right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The 'Kindred of Rot' enemies are back and worse than ever. One at a time they're fine, but they do a lot of damage in the DLC and when you find them here they'll often be in groups and it's extremely difficult to dodge their missiles even when you're galloping on Torrent.

Last note about the difficulty is the final boss. Even on NG it's legitimately tough without extreme cheesing, partially because it's hard to see what's going on during the 2nd phase. If you're on NG+ or missed a good chunk of the Scadutree blessings the damage will annihilate most players. Bizarrely, even though you're strongly encouraged to use NPC summons it makes that fight harder overall. You're best just sticking to your Spirit Ash.

The color-filter in some areas can be shockingly harsh. You can be inside a *cave* and the lighting is fairly normal, and then sometimes you WALK OUTSIDE and the game literally throws on a color filter similar to Blighttown. Feels like the opposite of what it should be.

THE MAP...THE MAP IS AWFUL. The DLC is more vertically-designed than the base-game so this problem is highlighted even more. It's been over 20 years since Metroid Prime and over 30 years since Link to the Past, and yet FromSoft really thinks that it's completely fine to have a gigantic world with multiple vertical layers, and then give you a map with a single-layer. There are many times that it is completely useless and it can make the checkpoint locations on the map laughable; you'll have 2 checkpoints that are right next to each other on the map but a mile apart in their actual distance. Also even when you set textures to maximum, it is still noticeably low-resolution just like the map in the base-game.

Being able to set waypoints or leave other markers on the map is always appreciated, but yeah the map needs more layers since there is so much verticality to these gigantic zones. Whoever the cartographer is in this world needs to be fired.

Quests are mostly the same mess they've always been, oh my goodness. How many people completed Moore's quest, Thiollier's quest, or the Dragon Communion Priestess's quest *without* a guide? Virtually no one. It's insane, they can be non-intrusive without being *this* obscure. At least Igon's was pretty straight-forward and fun, although I have no idea how he moved around so much in the first half of his quest.

The DLC did virtually nothing to help viable weapon experimentation. You still have to grind to get enough materials (and runes) to upgrade anything new. Since the DLC is meant for late-game, they absolutely could have just made the DLC items either already upgraded or simply they can't be upgraded but they're roughly equivalent to the standard +25 and +10 equipment.

There are 8 Furnace Golems in the DLC, and they are a mess. At the time of this review they feel unfinished at best or poorly-designed at worst. Most importantly they are not enjoyable to fight unless you cheese them, and they will harass you for a country mile if you caught their attention and won't allow you to even check your map. LEAVE ME ALONE, LOL. At one point the game tells you very directly that they have a specific item-weakness. Well, not only does that item require a very limited ingredient that you cannot farm, it also takes 3 or more to kill a single golem, AND in the most glaring detail of all *when the golem is knocked down* and their weakpoint is easily accessible, as of this review the item does absolutely nothing, inexplicably. Over 2 years of development on this DLC and they somehow let that oversight get through, insanity. There's more to say about these but I'll move on.

Just like all of FromSoft's DLCs, it abruptly ends after a boss fight / very-short cutscene. When the boss dies they say nothing (even though they talk during the fight) and the very interesting thing right in front of you can't be accessed. All you get is some very brief dialogue in a flashback. Disappointing.

Some people have mentioned bad performance and I can only speak personally when I say that I experienced very few issues. I'm using a 5800X CPU, 6700XT GPU, and 32GB RAM.

Conclusion: As I said at the beginning if you're simply wanting 'more Elden Ring' then the DLC is great, but for myself it didn't address many of the issues I had with the base-game.

Really strong foundation here. If they keep building on this for awhile this will be something truly special.

At $20 no, at $10 or less maybe. I beat the whole game in less than 5 hours and some of that was particularly frustrating. This seems to be an extremely faithful remake, which means that any parts of the platforming or combat that feel janky or unfair is still here.

Sometimes you will get stunlocked, sometimes the enemy is glued to you and you will get hit multiple times. Blocking or dodging some attacks can be really awkward; like the mouse, because his shield isn't big enough to guard his body you can be facing an enemy and their projectile will still hit you. Some equipment is only good on specific characters, so you will switch to another character and suddenly you lose half your health (usually without any convenient way to get it back). And there's no visual indicator for the equipment you're using, it all looks the same. Despite having a lot of health when I fought the final boss, on my first attempt I could only hit him once because the margin of error is very harsh in that fight because of the particular character they force you to use. And if you struggle with any part of the game tough luck because you're going all the way back to town if you die.

One of the really bizarre design choices is that it seems that the only merchant you can buy potions from is very far away from town. Meanwhile the merchant in town stays completely useless after the beginning of the game. Why???

As for some positives, the art-style is charming and it is really cool that you can instantly change between the original art/sound and the new stuff. If you're willing to put up with some frustrations then consider purchasing it during a sale.

"Dark Souls with guns" is sort of a weird idea but it works reasonably well. While there are some issues that hold this back from being truly great, Remnant does a few things that make it quite fun (particularly with friends).

Most importantly, you never get 'de-summoned'. It was so natural that only after playing with a friend for hours did I realize we weren't having to constantly re-summon each other. It's particularly odd that the actual Souls games even have a password system to encourage co-op with friends, but then they de-summon after every single death or boss-victory. That amount of gameplay inconvenience with friends shouldn't happen, even if it side-steps some of the lore. Who cares, I'm trying to play with friends.

*Everything* you pickup (other than ammo) gets sent to the other players as well. No need to worry about constantly fighting over pickups or tediously having your friend come over and pick up an item. Money? Yes. Upgrade materials? Yes. Equipment? Yes! It's so convenient.

There's various things in the game that directly interact with the other players in your session, particularly for healing. They definitely make the game easier but you can mostly choose to avoid them if you really want to.

Another thing I GREATLY appreciate in this game is that sometimes when you find a new weapon it's already upgraded to a reasonable level. It has always annoyed me that these games will have tons of weapons (or armor) and almost always you have to start from scratch despite equipment-upgrades being essential to the game's design. I don't know how often the game provides upgraded equipment but I hope it keeps doing that. My preferred solution is still to "upgrade the blacksmith" so that all of your equipment is the same level and therefore you're free to experiment.

While it's not hugely significant, nearly every breakable object in the game can drop money or upgrade material. Especially early on it encourages to interact with the environment a bit more.

So far there's been enough enemy-variety to keep us engaged, and going from the standard handgun (which was decent) to an automatic fire-based boss-weapon handgun was a great moment.

--- Critiques ---

The level-design is usually bland. Very little to be noteworthy, both as individual areas and the fact that the game is extremely linear.

The story and the characters are mostly forgettable in my opinion. A few journal entries are decent but the characters mostly feel generic. The thing you realize with some fan-favorite characters like Solaire is that they often literally have less than 10 minutes of dialogue in the entire game they're from. Not even cutscenes usually, just dialogue and a few gameplay moments. And yet people talk about them for years and years. So far I haven't met anyone particularly memorable in Remnant.

Fall-damage is very harsh. There are many falls that would be fine even in real life and for some bizarre reason cause you damage here.

Some of the traits are either boring or just very worthless. Like increasing your vault speed by 1%, absolutely ridiculous. Even if it was 5% I wouldn't put any points into that lol.

4 years after release and many patches later, it's mind-boggling that you *can't* remap your controller. In a game with stamina why would you ever want to activate sprint with L3 of all things???

I haven't played the sequel yet but I've heard good things. Will check it out in the near future.

DMD has some cool stuff going for it, but the extreme focus on equipment is simply not my jam. The idea of certain equipment (that can normally be equipped to multiple characters) being permanently locked to a character simply because they wore it once, is just very un-fun to me. Also the optimal strategy is to scrutinize each item in the store between every run, which quickly gets tedious.

Instead of equipment being a bonus to your stats/abilities, it is about 90% of progression at the moment.

Normally I try to give games more time to feel them out, but the particular implementation of the grid-based inventory is very tedious. it kills a lot of the pacing and just feels like busy-work. Also, I find the art-style and sound/music to be more dull than I was expecting. Simply put Brotato is a much more enjoyable experience for me.

At $20 probably not recommended but at $10 or less, yes. Third-person perspective should be a free-update. DLC is okay; some parts are great, some dialogue is cringy, Rose isn't that interesting, and too many reused areas even if they are remixed in some interesting ways.