u/Stumbleine44

Wow, Stonemachia, what a gem of a game that succeeds in everything it attempts to do, from its mechanics, to its level design, to its dark, dream-like locations and atmosphere. Developers Crossfall Games just simply understand what souls fans are looking for, and have crafted not only one of the best indie sous-likes out there, but one of my favourite games of 2026.

You play as a chess piece, a pawn called Zefiro, who reawakens after an event known as the plague of Angels, a sort of divine disease that has transformed most of the populace into stone statues and other objects. Your goal is to guide Zefiro through the ruined city of Medhelan to reach a spiral tower that presumably leads to heaven itself.

As in many souls games, this rather thin premise is expanded upon with documents found in the environments, item descriptions, and beautifully illustrated cards that you gain upon defeating enemies and that serve as the game’s main collectible.

Things start off fairly simple: as a pawn you have your traditional dodge and parry, with the added bonus that perfect parries refill your healing flask, giving you the added incentive to stand your ground and repel enemy attacks rather than dodging away. I’ll admit I didn’t find the early hours especially interesting. There are no different weapons or armour to equip, and levelling is a simple button-press without any stat allocation, so you’re more or less just going through the motions without any control over the evolution of your character.

This all changes once you start to unlock other chess pieces. The bishop is a glass canon: fast and fragile. The horsey … I mean knight, has a supporting role; able to create health globes on successful parries or with its special abilities. And lastly, the rook is the heavy-hitter: slow and ponderous but with the capacity to absorb and reflect damage.

Once you unlock all the classes (well, nearly all the classes, there’s a fifth class I won’t spoil here), everything changes and the combat becomes much more satisfying as you’ll be constantly switching between forms to reap the benefits of each chess piece. For example, I would often start off with the knight and lay down a healing circle, then get some heavy hits in with the rook before switching to the pawn to use his parry to refill my flask. Everything is fluid and responsive, with the only caveat being you really need to turn off the camera shake in the options to get those parries down correctly.

There’s also a class upgrade system that allows you to unlock synergies between different chess pieces, so parrying the pawn’s special ability with another chess piece will summon an ally, for example, or releasing the knight’s drill attack while switching pieces will create an AoE wave of drills. To be honest, these are pretty tricky to pull off, and often happened more by accident than through a well-thought-out strategy, but it was always cool to see them activate.

It’s lucky you have all these options because I found Stonemachia to be a rather difficult game, especially for someone who’s not great at parrying like me. I’d say its comparable to Sekiro in terms of parrying skill, so if you got through that game without any issues you’ll be fine here. There are over 40 bosses in Stonemachia, and they range from massive pushovers to deadly opponents that take more than a few tries. Most of them I found to be challenging but fair, except for Mikhaim which for some reason took be a good dozen tries, and a late game fight where the game falls into the unfortunate trope of taking all your powers and abilities from you, forcing me to play only as the pawn.

The environments are another spectacular stand out, large, beautiful, and a real joy to explore. Unfortunately Stonemachia doesn’t start off well by having you explore a small, corridor-ridden castle followed by an equally corridor-ridden village, but once you actually get outside you’ll be presented with a sprawling windmill-strewn plain complete with ruined towers, rivers, and a castle under siege. It was a moment that reminded me of Elden Ring and elicited that same sense of wonder at everywhere I could go.

It’s not just the size, though. Every area is brimming with side quests, secrets, hidden collectibles, optional bosses, and often paths to entirely new locations. In fact, the amount of optional and missable content in this game is staggering. I like to take my time exploring, but after finishing up the game I scoured the message boards and found out I had completely missed two massive optional areas; one that had me travelling by boat away from the mainland and diving into an underground city, and another that sent me through a labyrinthine maze to a painting that transported me back into the past. Stonemachia is not an incredibly long game if you barrel down the main path, but if you seek out all the optional content you’ll be looking at twenty-five to thirty hours.

There’s really not much I can find wrong with Stonemachia. It has the occasional camera issues, and I think I got stuck on the environment once, but it’s still incredibly well polished for an indie title. Its combat is fun and strategic, its environments beautiful and otherworldly, and its exploration incredibly rewarding with tons of hidden bosses and areas to discover.

Stonemachia  is a true work of art and unless you’re averse to faster, more parry-focussed soulslikes you should absolutely give this game a try. As for me, I’ll be placing it just below Lies of P on the S-Tier.

Most people tend to talk about Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Nioh in the same breath, which is a shame because despite some similarities they are most definitely each their own thing, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The story is my opinion pretty lacklustre, another retelling of the Han Dynasty and the yellow turban rebellion that we have seen a hundred times before, with a host of historical characters entering and exiting the story seemingly at random without having any memorable impact. This unfortunately seems to be a staple of most Team Ninja games, where it feels that the plot is sort of mashed together around the main character almost as an afterthought.

It’s not really an issue, however, as I’m not sure most of us Team Ninja fans are buying their games for the story. We’re looking for fast-paced, stylish combat with a host of mechanics and customisation, and luckily Wo Long delivers on all of these things and more besides.

Gone are the ki-pulses and stamina management of the Nioh games. Wo Long’s combat rewards aggressivity and counters. Much like in AI Limit, attacks and deflects build up your spirit meter and lower that of your opponent’s, especially if you manage to parry certain unlockable glowing red attacks. The spirit you gain passively increases your damage input, but more importantly can be spent to block or use power weapon and martial art abilities. Not only that, but if you manage to reduce your enemy’s spirit to zero, you can perform an execution technique that will kill most regular enemies and take a huge chunk of health off bosses.

Parry windows are generous, and enemies are relentless aggressive, so there’s no reason to not attempt to deflect everything, although some opponent can deflect attacks of their own, which leads to some Sekiro-like back-and-forth.

The second new mechanic Wo Long introduces is the morale system. You begin each main level with zero morale which you can then raise by killing enemies and locating various flagpoles scattered around the map. Morale affects both damage dealt and received, so attempting to attack a level 20 enemy when you have a morale of 1, for example, would be borderline suicidal, forcing you to find enough flags or kill enough enemies to stand a fighting chance.

It’s an interesting idea in theory, though for me it was partly let-down by the bland environments and enemy variety. The morale system forces players to explore, but that only works if the exploration is interesting, and I just didn’t find the levels well-designed enough. Enemy variety is even worse, with only a dozen or so different types that you’ll discover over the first three hours or so, then proceed to fight again and again until you reach the end credits. This is not helped by the introduction of sub-missions, that have you visiting the exact same environments a second or even a third time.

I also found the weapon system to be a chore. The loot bloat problem from other Team Ninja games is in full effect here, with hundreds of items dropping every mission. What’s missing is a level-based system, which means all the weapons you find of a certain type are exactly the same, differentiated only by minor passive buffs and their upgrade level, both of which you can change yourself at the smithy for a handful of resources.

It’s a confounding design choice, because, unless I’ve missed something, once you settle on your favourite weapon and armour, its far more viable just to keep upgrading them, rendering the entire loot system useless. Now it is still worth sifting through the pile of stuff for qi crystals that give you experience or dragon veins that increase the number of uses of your flask, but the rest can just be sold or dismantled without a second thought.

This dichotomy between fun gameplay and frustrating mechanics can be found throughout Wo Long, which makes it a complicated game to score. On the one hand, its fast-paced, parry-based combat is incredibly satisfying and different enough from other Team Ninja games to feel new and refreshing. On the other hand, the lack of enemy variety, botched loot system, and uninteresting story led to several moments of boredom or frustration.

I think your enjoyment will ultimately boil down with how much you want to engage with these systems. If you’re ok with sidelining some of the side missions and button-mashing your way through the cutscenes, you’ll find that the gameplay, while not quite as deep or challenging as Nioh, can still conjure up a lot of fun.

As for me, I’ll be placing Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty just below The Surge on the B-Tier. 

Valor Mortis is probably near the top of the list for me, but Halocline looks really cool too. Third pick would probably either be La Divina Commedia (as I enjoyed Entoria quite a bit) or Wo Long 2. The first wasn't my favorite Team Ninja game, but had plenty of good ideas that could be improved upon in the sequel.

1.       July 23^(rd) 2026 Dinoblade (this one's out now!)

2.       July 31^(st) 2026 The Relic: First Guardian

3.       August 13^(th) 2026 Memoirium

4.       August 20^(th) 2026 Mortal Shell 2

5.       Q3 2026 Vapor World

6.       Oct 13^(th) 2026 Valor Mortis

7.       Q4 2026 False Hero

8.       Q4 2026 Decrepit

9.       Q4 2026 Moonlight Shadows

10.  Q1 2027 Lords of the Fallen 2

11.  Q1 2027 Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember

12.  Q4 2027 Anhedonia: Sanctuary of Ash

13.  Q4 2027 Terrorstorm

14.  TBA 2027 La Divina Commedia

15.  TBA Dithered 

16.  TBA Blackblade Revenant

17.  TBA Blood of the Lead Moon

18.  TBA Guns of Eschaton

19.  TBA Crowned in Steel

20.  TBA Halocline

21.  TBA Unleash the Avatar

22.  TBA Black Myth: Zhong Kui

23.  TBA Skelemental: Monk’s Fury

24.  TBA Project Rabbit

25.  TBA V.E.D.A

26.  TBA Bloodfang

27.  TBA Riven Crown

28.  TBA Codex Lost 2

29.  TBA Covenant

30.  TBA Dark Craft

31.  TBA Vanran

32.  TBA V.A. Proxy

33.  TBA Moulder

34.  The Duskbloods

The easiest way to sum up Stranger of Paradise is that it’s a bit like Nioh, but worse. It takes some of the things I liked from the best-selling soulslike series like the plethora of skills and customisable combos, but also brings over the bloated loot system, repetitive side missions, and questionable story.

I suppose to be fair, the story isn’t all bad, especially the last couple of hours where a great plot twist I won’t spoil here really turns the entire game on its head. It’s just that you have to slog through a whole lot of anime gobbledegook to get there, and while some people may enjoy interminable cutscenes of fashionably-dressed one-dimensional NPCs waving their hands around and clenching their fists, I ended up wishing I could advance some of the dialogue to get to the good stuff.

I mean, all you really need to know is that amnesic protagonist Jack is here to destroy Chaos, and that’s exactly what he’s going to do, over and over again, using an interesting and addictive combat system that’s just deep enough to be enjoyable, even if by the end of the game it starts to overstay its welcome.

Nioh’s weapon skill system has been replaced by jobs, something Final Fantasy fans will instantly recognise, and you can equip any two at one time, switching between them on the fly as the touch of a button. You never level-up your stats directly, your strength is determined by the weapons you find and the jobs level up, both directly by killing enemies and indirectly by wearing pieces of specific gear. As you progress through each job’s skill tree, you’ll be unlocking two types of abilities : those that can be used only if that specific job is equipped and others that are permanently added to your character’s weapon or command skills and are kept even if you change jobs.

It’s a cool idea, and fun to plan out the fastest way to unlock some of the more powerful jobs such as the Sage or the Marauder. The problem is once you actually get your favourite jobs to level 30, there’s no real point of earning any more xp as it does nothing further than offer a tiny increase in job affinity. I mean, you could switch to another job you don’t really like and level that one up, but where’s the fun in that? Once I’d settled down into a good groove with my Berserker and Sage combo, I didn’t see why I’d swap them out for anything else.

Both enemies and bosses have a health and break gauge, with the latter being way more important as once you stagger them you can execute them, sekiro-style, with the touch of a button. You can customize your own combos so it’s fairly easy to plan your build around stagger-breaking abilities, which makes the game a tad too easy, but allow to smash even the strongest enemies in the face with you chaos-destroying fist in just a couple of well-placed hits.

Everything around the combat seems to have been added as a bit of an afterthought. Missions are chosen from a boring mini-map. The smith is selected from a menu and allows you to upgrade or modify weapons, though there’s no real point as you’ll be changing your equipment every few minutes. The amount of loot in Strange of Paradise is ridiculous. I though Nioh went overboard on loot drops, but this game dials it up to eleven. Almost every single monster exploded in a rainbow of colour-coded boots, swords, and bandanas, to the extent that you’ll be maxing out your 600 item limit on most missions. Thank Chaos there’s an auto-optimizing option or the game would have taken twice as long to finish.

One last little niggle. At one point the game asks you to choose between two different paths, both at more or less the same level. The problem is that when you complete the first one, you’re sent down the second one anyway, and end up being vastly vastly overlevelled. As one of the only ways to get stronger is to pick up better equipment, being forced to play through nearly an hour of content where the drops are ten levels lower that what you’re wearing is a waste of time.

I’m struggling a bit to decide if I really enjoyed my twenty or so hours with Strange of Paradise. I think I did, but barely. The addictive fast-paced combat made me want to keep playing, but a lot of the surrounding design choices just didn’t work for me, from the lacklustre repetitive environments, to the jobs that max out too early, and overflowing loot system that makes weapon upgrades superfluous. A higher difficulty level is unlocked upon completing the game and maybe this changes the experience somewhat, but as it stands I’m not sure I can recommend this to anyone but the most die-hard of Final Fantasy fans, or those looking for a new drinking game when you take a shot every time you hear the word ‘Chaos’.

Asterigos: Curse of the Stars is a strange mix-up of genres. Much like Kenya : Bridge of Spirits it attempts to blend challenging soulslike bosses with cartoony pixaresque visuals and unfortunately ends up excelling at neither.

The soulslike elements are definitely there, but all the rough edges have been sanded down to make the experience much more manageable. Most enemies aren’t that aggressive and can be weakened from afar with ranged attacks while they ponderously approach. The dodge has a generous set of i-frames and as for the block, well as far as I could tell, it mitigates 100% of damage, even against the last boss, with only a minor drain on stamina.

You can carry a whopping 23 health potions with you at one time, and you also regain all your health on gaining a level, which happens every few minutes. Some of the optional bosses can be a bit difficult, but I think most souls veterans will probably want to bump the difficulty level up a bit to get the challenge they crave.

Now, you will die occasionally, however, as the camera will spin you around or an enemy will appear from above or below you and knock you off a ledge to your death. Jumping, like in most souls games, is imprecise and finicky, too, and you’ll miss a few jumps you’ll be sure you can make.

Apart from that, the combat is pretty fun, though nowhere near as tactical or methodical as other souslikes. Levelling is incredibly simple with only three different stats. Additionally, there are only six weapons, all unlocked from the get-go, with no armour and only a handful of trinkets. The game’s flexibly lies in its massive skill tree which allows you to customise your playstyle either by unlocking more augmentations for your weapons, or by purchasing perks and skills.

An augmentation, for example, would be adding a shield bash to your sword and shield combo, or increasing your poise when wielding your hammer. Perks have both a positive and negative effect, so you could choose to alter you charged sword attack to knock down enemies, but do less damage, or to increase your flask-drinking speed at the cost of carrying less potions.

Finally, skills are powerful offensive and defensive spells that cost AP points, and these are gained either through potions or by simple damaging enemies with regular attacks. One last thing you can change is the elemental power attached to your weapon, as each enemy you meet is susceptible to one of four different elements.

Weapons and elemental powers can be upgraded by the resident blacksmith, who somewhat inexplicably is a fox-lady. I mean, its probably explained somewhere deep within the game’s literal hundreds upon hundreds of research notes, journals, missives, and maps, but I’ll admit that after reading through the first hundred or so, I kind of gave up.

To be honest, these strange design choices permeate the game. Asterigos tries to deal with some heavy and tragic themes, but wraps them in a colourful Disney aesthetic complete with janky animations and badly-written dialogue. It’s hard to care about the loss and possible slaughter of my entire family when an NPC is gesticulating its blocky hands at me frantically like he’s a leftover character from an early Final Fantasy game.

It’s a shame because games like Immortals: Fenix Rising have proven that mythological games can actually work well with a more cartoonish aesthetic, but in my opinion attempting to add a souslike twist to the combat was a mistake.

If you enjoyed Kenya: Bridge of Sprits and are looking for a fairly light and breezy soulslike to scratch that same itch, then you might want to give Asterigos a try. For the rest of you, there are plenty more better designed and more challenging soulslikes out there that deserve your time. As for me, I’ll be placing Asterigos: Curse of the Stars just below Mortal Shell on the C-Tier.

I didn’t really expect Crimson Oath to be good. Developed by an incredibly small team on a shoestring budget with no professional voiceovers, a handful of cutscenes and no real story to speak of, nothing in the poorly translated store page description made it sound like the game would be anything more than mediocre.

So you can imagine my surprise when, against all odds, it turned out that Crimson Oath is not only a competent soulslike, it’s actually pretty damn fun, too.

There’s a blink-and-you-miss-it story premise that’s thinner than a piece of paper, but that’s not what this game is about. Nor should you come to Crimson Oath expecting amazing graphics or a completely bug-free experience. No, this a soulslike which is carried by the strength of its combat alone, a fascinating mix of Sekiro, Bloodborne, Thymesia, and The First Berserker: Khazan.

Parries and deflects are key to victory here, with a fairly generous window even someone like me could manage. Certain enemy attacks can be interrupted with your trusty pistol, others have to be dodged through, side-stepped, or avoided altogether.

Additionally, parrying or charged heavy attacks reduce an opponent’s stagger gauge, and when it reaches zero it opens them up for a devastating execution that takes off a massive chunk of health.

I should also mention that Crimson Oath uses Thymesia’s dual health-bar system, with a primary yellow “guard” bar that needs to be lowered by longsword attacks to expose the red “health” bar underneath that can only be reduced by your massive greatsword. The guard bar regenerates quickly, forcing you to keep up the pressure or risk having to do it all over again.

You can customize your build to some extent, using skills and equipments. Skills are powerful special moves that can do anything from inflicting massive stagger damage to extending your parry window or adding a counter attack. Equipments are incredibly useful passive buffs that do things like give you health back on kill, a shield after a perfect dodge, or an increase in damage after a gun parry.

I love using greatswords in my souls games, so I made a build based around the weapon’s charged staggering attack, using active skills that inflicted stagger and equipments that massively increased execution damage and healed me on each successful execution. It was great fun to wail on enemies until I staggered them, and impaling the poor paralysed creatures on my greatsword never got old.

So, does all of this sound familiar? Well, it’s because it is, but despite wearing its inspiration clearly on its sleeve, Crimson Oath blends it’s various mechanics together in a satisfying way. Bosses are plentiful and fair, but challenging. Enemy variety stays fresh with a completely different set to discover in each of the game’s five biomes. Exploration is generally well done, too, with enough branching paths and shortcuts to scratch that soulslike itch.

There are a few places where Crimson Oath stumbles. Levelling is a bit of an afterthought, with three stats that don’t change much. There are no new weapons or armour, only a handful of cosmetic skins to play around with. And by far the most egregious misstep is the stealth system, which is broken to the point of being ludicrous. I’d say over half the enemies in the game have their backs to you, just waiting to be cut down. Even worse, enemy awareness is downright laughable and you can chain together a half-dozen executions among enemies standing right next to each other without any of them batting an eyelid.

None of this stopped me having fun throughout the eight or so hours it took me to get through the game, and while Crimson Oath never reached the heights of the better games it took its inspiration from, it’s still one of the better indie soulslike’s I’ve played.

If you value your combat more than your graphics and story, and are willing to put up with a bit of jank, then you should absolutely give Crimson Oath a try. As for me, I’ll be placing it just under Blasphemous 2 on the B-Tier.

Souls games don’t all have to be grim dark fantasy melancholic guilt-trips. White Lavender is a short, surprising challenging trip through a critter infested garden with simple graphics and an absolute beast of a soundtrack that is so good I’ve been listening to it ever since.

Don’t expect to be saving the realm or banishing gods here. Your only goal is to find three ingredients to brew a tea that can cure your sick sister. To accomplish this you’ll be exploring old tin cans, a frog pond, a watering can and more all while helping out the inhabitants of the aptly-named pot village along the way.

Much like in Another Crab’s Treasure, a similar whimsical soulslike, you’ll be wielding spoons, twigs, and pins, and clothing yourself with leaves, a split pistachio, or, my personal favourite, an entire mug so enormous it covers up most of you little bug’s body. Combat is simple but satisfying, with familiar dodging, blocking, and stamina management, although I found that the dodge roll was the way to go, with its generous i-frames and long distance that allowed me to dodge an attack, retaliate, then roll away without fear of repercussions.

Speaking of combat, despite its cutesy setting and characters, White Lavender is by no means and easy game. Even normal enemies can kill you in a couple of hits, and while as far as I can tell you don’t lose any pollen (souls) or progression, you still have to approach each encounter methodically to avoid getting splattered.

Bosses are equally challenging, with a good variety of both larger animals like birds or snails, mixed in with some more bug-sized opponents, including King Louis and his royal subjects. The hardest by far was a bouncing frog with a whopping three thousand health points – three times more than the final boss - something that I found out later was … a bug (pun intended).

I found levelling to be fairly generous, although I’m not sure all the stats are really useful. There are only a handful of spells in the game which, along with the plethora of strength-based weapons, is obviously trying to steer players towards melee builds, for better or worse.

White Lavender is a short, fun soulslike that’s actually quite a bit harder than its lets on, and one that I would recommend to souls fans looking for a change of pace between longer, gloomier games that are suffocating the genre.

As for me, I’ll be placing White Lavender just below Kena: Bridge of Spirits on the C-Tier. 

Many many times through my playthough of Last Hero of Nostalgaia I found myself thinking that if only the combat was better, then this would be a pretty great game. The building blocks are most definitely there, and it manages, for the most part, to be both funny and referential in its throwbacks to other games in the genre, but the wonky combat and enemy gank are incredibly frustrating.

The concept is, in my opinion, the best thing about the game. The world of Nostalgaia is collapsing: literally, with both its environments and its inhabitants losing pixels and memories as they slowly degrade from a 3d to a 2d state before disappearing entirely. As the titular stick-man hero, your job is to return memories to the world by defeating the Great Ones, relighting beacons along the way.

It’s a fun idea, and one that really works thanks to some clever visual tricks and level design. Each time you activate a beacon (your bonfire equivalent), the low-rez surroundings morph into fully textured 3d. Every single weapon and piece of armour you pick up can be “remembered” by taking it to a certain spot in the world (or paying some cash) which ups its polygon count as well as its stats. The shortcuts between levels are staging rooms and maintenance corridors the now-hostile NPCS used to use for a quick rest or a coffee break, complete with motivational posters.

Even the side quests and vendors are tied to the theme of remembrance, with the blacksmith growing more skilled as you bring him to anvils, and the sole merchant increases his stock when you give him back his keys. The few lucid NPCs you meet along the way are all in various states of degradation, missing eyes, textures, or equipment, and its often worth trying to see their quests through to the end as it you’ll get a reward that upgrades your estus flask equivalent, and you can call upon them to help out in boss fights.

Speaking of bosses, there’s a good variety here, with a mix or human-sized and larger monsters. None of them were particularly difficult, and to be honest I was more frustrated fighting the wonky camera and lock-on than I was actually fighting them. This is where The Last Hero of Nostalgaia stumbles. The lock-on worked fine on single enemies but went wild as soon as I was ganged up on, making it impossible to select the enemy I wanted to focus on. And even when I did, the hit-box detection is so egregious I think about half my overhead strikes went completely through my opponent without doing any damage.

This might not seem so bad if you’re more of a dex-build kind of guy, but when you’re wielding a massive greatsword every hit counts. Even worse, my strength build relied on staggering the enemy so I could finish him off before he countered so every time the game arbitrarily decided I’d missed I took a bucketload of damage.

My second gripe is with the remembrance system. In theory it’s a really cool idea, as “remembered” weapons and armour look better, have better stats, and unlock a slew of useful passive bonuses. The thing is, to find out where to activate them you have to either solve a riddle or open up your inventory in a certain spot and check if they are “vibrating”. This leads to a lot of unnecessary time spent in menus. The other problem is that you’ll be finding weapons in the last few levels of the game that need to be remembered somewhere near the start, so you’ll be constantly backtracking which can be a chore, even with the shortcuts. You’ll end up unlocking a fast travel system a couple of hours before the end, but in my opinion that’s a bit too late.

So is Last Hero of Nostalgaia for you? I’d say it depends on how much jank you’re willing to put up with to be able to  walk around in a fake Master Chief armour and wield Dante’s sword from Devil May Cry, the pogo stick from Duck Tales, or the plastic guitar from Guitar Hero. If that sounds like fun, and you don’t mind some backtracking and occasionally frustrating combat, then you might want to give this one a try.

I, on the other hand, came away intrigued by the concept but disappointed in the mechanics weren’t quite there to flesh it out. Lost Hero of Nostalgaia will be going just below Flintlock on the C-Tier. 

Have you ever wanted to play a game where you’re a sentient black hole? Well, that’s what GRIME is all about, absorbing and growing as you parry your way through a stark, barren world filled with places to explore and challenging enemies to encounter.

The story is probably the game’s weakest point, so nebulous and cryptic it borders on unintelligible, but suffice to say you are inside some enormous celestial being and searching for a way to reach the sky. The higher you get, the more human those around you become, from simple, chiselled rocks, to fully-formed statues.

Now don’t expect to go zipping around the environments like Ori or Hollow Knight. Grime is a slow-paced, methodical 2d-souslike more akin to Blasphemous, where combat needs to be approached with thought and patience as even the weakest of enemies can kill you with a couple of hits, especially early on in the game when you are weaker than a lightly-brewed German beer.

In fact, its during these first few hours that Grime is at its most challenging. Brutally challenging, even, with only a single heal and a limited set of abilities. This punishing difficulty will almost definitely make some people stop playing, which is a shame as the game gets progressively easier as it goes on, all thanks to its best feature: absorption.

You see, if you parry and enemy that’s low on health you’ll drag it into the swirling mind-crushing black hole that is your head, effectively absorbing its soul into yours. This has two advantages. The first is that every kill charges up your “breath gage” or healing energy, with five kills giving you a free heal. The second is that absorbing enough of each enemy type will unlock a unique upgradeable trait that can completely change the way you play the game.

There’s a trait that widens the parry window, for example, for slow middle-aged players like me. Others allow your dodge to damage energies, drop healing orbs when you get hit, get an attack boost or stamina regen after parrying … there are a score of different traits to unlock, all of them useful, but my favourite by far was the one that gave health back on ever absorb or parry.

Suddenly the game became more manageable, as while I was still soft and squishy, I could always keep my health topped up by parrying everything that moved which had the double effect of healing me instantly and charging my breath gage that I could rely on if I got in a pickle.

Traits are unlocked by absorbing regular enemies, but upgraded by killing elite versions, and it’s well worth seeking those little blighters out until you have your two or three favourite traits fully upgraded. Additionally, there six mini bosses that drop breath shards to upgrade your healing juice, and glowing little spiders to chase that give you Fetal Pearls, Grime’s estus flask equivalent that refills at every save point.

Even with all these healing options at your disposal, the game is by no means a walk in the park. Enemies still hit hard, and bosses hit even harder: massive multiphase monstrosities that seem almost impossible to beat when you first encounter them, until you study their attacks and learn which can be parried to give you those all-important health and damage boosts. My favourite was ‘The Performer’, half boss-fight, half dance-off that plays out over several phases involving dancers and acrobats, all taking place on an elevator.

When these bosses do finally fall, they drop incredibly useful upgrades, from traversal mechanics such as the double jump or air dash, to quality-of-life improvements including the ability to warp between save points, something I believe was absent from the game at launch, which must have been very frustrating. This is probably a good time to mention I played through the definitive edition of the game, and it’s the version I would absolutely recommend as much like Hollow Knight it adds a massive amount of content, from the aforementioned fast travel to new NPCs and even a whole new armour system, with sets that offer various bonuses to your stats and traits.

Weapons are varied and plentiful, and can be upgraded with shards and chunks just like most soulslikes. I was pleasantly surprised to find that on top of the traditional strength and dexterity scaling weapons, developer Clover Bite had the good idea to introduce several that scaled with health or stamina, and as someone who always pumps a lot of points into vitality, this was the build I ended gravitating towards (pun intended).

Levelling is done by earning mass from items and enemies, and much like Blasphemous, you don’t lose this currency when you die. What you do lose is ardor, a meter that increases as you kill enemies and decreases every time you get hit. Ardor multiplies the amount of mass you earn and with the right traits can increase your damage, but as I never really leaned towards an ardor-based build I never got frustrated once during my many, many deaths over the course of the game.

I ended up liking GRIME far more than I thought I would. Pulling off a successful parry is incredibly satisfying, and its steady drip-feed of new traits, levels, and abilities kept me hooked throughout its fifteen-hour runtime. The story is a bit hit-and-miss, but the combat and exploration more than make up for it. GRIME is my second favourite 2d soulslike I’ve played so far, and I’ll be placing it just above Blasphemous 2 on the B-Tier.

Let’s get this out of the way: the current iteration of Lords of the Fallen is far superior to its 2014 predecessor in every conceivable way. It admittedly had an incredibly rough launch, but over the last few years Hexworks have been diligently reworking everything from combat mechanics and movement (they even added a jump button!) to UI and character creation. The result is a fun dark fantasy soulslike that has not quite stepped out of Fromsoft’s imposing shadow, but is well on the way to crafting something truly unique.

Lords of the Fallen is theoretically a sequel, but you need no prior knowledge of the previous entry to understand it’s fairly simple premise : a thousand years ago the god Adyr was defeated and imprisoned by the order of the Hallowed Sentinels, followers of the god Orius. Five beacons were erected to prevent his resurrection, and now these have now been contaminated by his essence, heralding his return.

You are a Dark Crusader, a Sentinel tasked with preventing Adyr from returning to the land of the living by repurifying the beacons using an artefact called the Umbral Lamp, a nifty device that also allows you to travel between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.

I’m not sure Lords of the Fallen gives off a very good first impression. It’s very pretty to look at, but the opening hours are so similar to Darks Souls you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s nothing more than a clone, and an inferior one at that. Dodge-rolls, encumbrance, stamina management, parries, and backstabs … it’s all there right down to the obscure item descriptions.

Luckily, the game soon introduces an original mechanic that is truly unique. You see, you are not exploring one world, but two, with the second one, the Umbral Realm, layered on top of the other. Think Frodo when he puts on the ring or Silent Hill when the siren sounds : a ghostly facsimile of reality where everything is familiar but different.

The first obvious advantage to this dual realm system is that it effectively doubles the areas you can explore. A door that’s closed in one world may be open in the other. A bridge that’s collapsed becomes traversable. Ladders and floating platforms open up new paths. You’ll be able to navigate around tricky combat situations and get the drop on enemies waiting to ambush you, for example, or reach a seemingly inaccessible item.

What’s even better is that Hexworks didn’t stop there, changing far more than just the environment. There is now “wither” damage which, much like in Bloodborne, allows you regain part of your lost health when you retaliate. There’s the soulflay mechanic, which can be used to solve puzzles, stun enemies, or remove “parasites” that add shields or regenerate health. You’ll find memories or “stigmas” to interact with that drop a unique currency you can trade in to unlock boss armour and weapons.

Finally, there’s my favourite addition: Umbral Dread. The longer you stay in the ghostly realm, the harder and more numerous the enemies become, but the more the multiplier to your vigor (or souls) increases. It’s a really fun concept, especially as you can only return to the living world through specific effigies, leading to some truly nail-biting moments as I ran towards the closest exit weighed down by thousands of vigor.

The dual realm system really makes Lords of the Fallen stand out, and, more importantly, helps offset its weak story and uninteresting NPCs. The bosses are also a bit of a mixed bag, with some like the Lightreaper and the Sundered Monarch that I really enjoyed, while others were either reskinned enemies, humans with similar move sets, or gimmicks with long frustrating moments where they couldn’t be attacked at all. Speaking of gimmicks, the original final boss I fought when playing through the game in 2023 has seemingly been replaced by a completely different fight in this new version, one that I found a lot better.

Don’t go into Lords of the Fallen expecting a revolutionary soulslike. Despite it’s Umbral Realm mechanic, it’s still too safe and generic to challenge the tenors of the genre. It is, however, competently-made, with responsive combat, some interesting boss encounters, and fun exploration.

Lords of the Fallen will be going just above Thymesia on the B-Tier.

Even when I’m not enjoying a souls game I try to find one redeeming feature; something that the game does right despite not appealing to me personally. Unfortunately Pascal’s Wager doesn’t just need a bit more time in the oven, it needs to be put aside entirely and forgotten about.

I suppose the fact that it started off as a mobile game should have already sent some alarm bells ringing, but other titles have managed to transition quite well from smaller screens to big ones, and the store page promised entirely reworked controls along with the upgraded graphics.

In any case, I pressed start, met up with protagonist Terrance, and watched the opening cinematic which set the scene. My hopes were still high when I played through the tutorial area. Movement was fine, although the camera was incredibly jerky, as if I was dropping frames. After investigating online this is supposedly a feature rather than a bug, but it was an ominous omen of things to come.

Combat-wise, you have your typical light and heavy-attack, dodge roll and simple parry system, and unlock further skills that use you “rage” meter that you build up by either dealing or taking damage.

Now all this is fine in theory, but as I got a bit deeper into the game I realised there is one major problem : it’s unbelievably clunky. All the attacks, even the faster ones, take too long to pull off, with a notable lag between the button input and the animation. Hitboxes are completely random, either oversized or undersized, meaning you can be standing right in front of your target and still miss completely. I think the absolute worst feature is that not only do your enemies not react to your attacks, but it doesn’t cancel their animations so after you hit them you don’t have time enough to parry or dodge their counterattack. Furthermore, your own animations are interrupted when you get hit while doing them and this, coupled with the excruciatingly slow windup time, made me want to throw my controller across the room.

I love hard games, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this tier list, but Pascal’s Wager isn’t particularly hard, it’s just incredibly frustrating. About halfway through the game I got so annoyed about the randomness of melee encounters that I ended up relying on hit-and-run tactics which boiled down to using two attacks : a lunging thrust and a spinning dodge. Both of these allowed me to deal damage from afar and carried me through to the final boss. But it wasn’t particularly fun.

So how does Pascal’s Wager attempt to innovate the genre? First up is the “sanity” mechanic that drains on every hit until it reaches “abnormal” and eventually “lunatic” status. Abnormal will buff some stats while debuffing others, whereas lunatic spawns a phantom clone for you to deal with. Bosses get harder in the lunatic phase, too, though your increased stats more than make up for it. I’ll admit I more or less ignored this mechanic all together.

The game also allows you to switch between your main character and a sub-character, with the change happening automatically if one of the two dies. There are three to choose from (four including the DLC), unlocked as you progress through the story. Which led to another issue, as while they all level-up equally, their skills still need to be unlocked individually, and they all share the same upgrade materials. I chose Norwood, a one-armed coffin-wielder, used up all of my materials to upgrade two-thirds of his skill tree, then unlocked two more characters. There was no way in hell I was going to grind for all those upgrade materials a second or even third time, so I just stuck with Norwood until the end.

To add to my list of grievances (we’re getting to the end, I promise), there are no weapons or armour to be found, only “trophies”, upgradeable accessories that can give passive bonuses to your stats. If you like tinkering with character builds like me, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Oh, and finally, I should mention the three-phase final boss boils down everything I disliked about the game into a single, frustrating slog that took me way too many attempts than I would care to admit. Even more annoying is that the first two phases are easy but incredibly long to get through, then the third phase doubles the difficulty and damage. What a pain.

I’ve been desperately trying to find out who this game is for and I think the answer is … no-one. It’s wonky camera and run animation, terribly laggy combat, uninspired levels, and frustrating final boss all add up to a game I simple cannot recommend, and has the dubious honour of being at the very very bottom of the D-Tier.

EDIT : It looks like the overwhelming opinion is that this doesn't qualify as a soulslike. Sorry everyone! I'll leave my review below as it's still a pretty cool game I think souls fans might enjoy.

How important to you is exploration and environmental lore in a souls game? If you are one of those people who loves interacting with NPCS, fulfilling every side quest, and reading every item description, then Hell is Us is made for you, a soulslike that does little to hold your hand, forcing you to interact with its characters and locations to get the most out of its semi-open world. It’s definitely not for everyone, and more combat-focussed souls fans will be turned off by its lack of enemy variety and melee mechanics, but I came away really impressed with what developers Rogue Factor has managed to pull off.

Hell is Us takes a page out of the Witcher 2’s book by starting you off in a prison, being interrogated by a flabby-jowled, chain-smoking man in black who orders you to explain the events of the last few days. Once the truth serum kicks in, you comply, beginning with your arrival in war-torn Hadea where you arrive in search of your parents.

You’ll soon discover that civil war is the least of your problems, as massive rotating spheres have appeared throughout the country, vomiting forth a horde of long-limbed slendermen called hollow walkers. Even worse, these spheres distort time, forcing anything inside to repeat itself again and again.

It’s a great premise and while you might think the juxtaposition between the cruelty of war and an extraterrestrial invasion wouldn’t work, Rogue Factor have struck the right balance between the two, making everything coherent and believable, thanks in no small part to some impressive graphics and a host of interesting characters that help flesh-out the story.

Speaking of the graphics, I was shocked by just how incredible the game looks, especially coming from a fairly small studio. Hell is Us is what I would call a semi-open world - much like Nioh 3 it’s composed of  large open areas that you can travel between with your trusty APC – and each of these areas is a wonder to behold, from the marshes, to the forests, grasslands and villages. The standout is a lake side temple hidden in a field of purple flowers that actually made me put down my controller for a moment to take it all in.

It's a short-lived moment of tranquillity, however, as most of Hell of Us’s environments are a showcase for the horrors of war. Rusted tanks and burnt-out cars litter the landscape. Bodies hang from trees or lie slumped against walls after being executed by firing squads. Those caught in the crossfire – often women and children – litter the streets. None of this is worse than in the first major village you come across, Jova, still under military occupation.

This is probably a good time to talk about the NPCs and their sidequests. You see, in Hell is Us you’re not trying to find ten carrots for a stew, or five boar hides to make a leather jacket. Everything you do here is to save someone’s life, and failure often has disastrous consequences. You’ll be trying to locate some milk for an orphaned baby, medicine for a women, or clothes to help a POW escape her aggressors. It’s a game that pulls no punches and can become just as grim and foreboding as a Darks Souls or a Bloodborne. And much like in those games there are no gleaming quest markers or journal. You have to listen to what people are telling you, ask for directions to where you want to go, and pay attention. Once again, this won’t be for everyone, but I loved every minute of it.

In fact, if the combat was as good as the story and level design, Hell is Us would rank among my favourite soulslikes. Unfortunately, this is where the game falls flat. It has two interesting mechanics, but in my opinion neither of them really work. The first takes its inspiration from Nioh’s ki-pulse mechanic but applies it to health instead of stamina. Basically this means that whenever you take damage, you can regain that lost by dealing damage yourself and then clicking a button at the right moment. Now, in Bloodborne, this worked because your enemies were intelligent and aggressive, but here they are way more lethargic with long pauses between combos, meaning its incredibly easy to gain your lost health back just by waiting until they finish a combo and wailing on them with reckless abandon. It ended up making the game too easy.

The second questionable design choice is to tie health to stamina. You heard me. Your stamina only regenerates as high as your current health. So if you’re close to death, you’re pretty much stuck as you’ll only have a sliver of stamina to work with : not enough for a combo, and therefore not enough to deal damage so you can regain health.

The two mechanics end up working against one another, as you can’t be aggressive if you don’t have the stamina to do so. It’s a pity because the combat actually feels pretty great, with a range of charge attacks, parries, and dodges that help compensate the relatively small selection of weapons available. These weapons can later on be upgraded into one of several emotion-based classes (Rage, Grief, Terror etc..) and slotted with special abilities to further enhance their strength. There’s also two armour slots, two perks (one active, one passive) and a drone companion with four customisable attacks, so you can really customise your character to suit your playstyle which is something I always appreciate, especially here where there is no stats to level up, everything is tied to the level and buffs of your gear.

The other big problem Hell is Us has is a lack of enemy variety. There are only five different enemy types in the entire game, and in the thirty or so hours it’ll take you to finish it you’ll end up fighting the exact same monster hundreds and hundreds of times. Rogue Factor have tried to pad things out by adding Haze variants; enemies that are linked to an emotion-based apparition that must be killed before you can attack the enemy itself, but even these long overstay their welcome. Oh, and to add salt into the wound, the boss encounters are ridiculously poor, there are only three in the whole game and they mostly consist of facing off against stronger versions of base game enemies with an added gimmick thrown in.

Now, none of these things are particularly bad, just frustrating as they stop Hell is Us from being an exceptional souslike. But they don’t stop is from being a good one, filled with excellent sidequests, impressive level design and graphics, and a harrowing depiction of war that might be among the best I’ve seen in a modern day videogame.

If you enjoy being thrust into the midst of a detailed world with no-one to hold your hand or tell you where to go; if you enjoy exploring off the beaten track to find an important item or piece of lore that may save someone’s life late on down the line, then this game is absolutely for you. Those looking for a more fleshed-out combat experience, however, may end up feeling disappointed.

I, for one, love exploration in my souls games, and was more than willing to look past some of the game’s shortcomings as I was so invested in the world and its beleaguered inhabitants. Hell is Us is going into the B-Tier, just below Nioh. 

Is exceptional art design enough to carry a game? That’s the question I asked myself over and over again while playing through Moonscars, an incredibly pretty 2d soulslike that is wonderful to look at but unfortunately doesn’t have much going on under the hood.

You are Grey Irma, part of a group of warrior simulacra called the pristine. This group was created by the Sculptor to help stop a rampaging army of clay automatons gone mad. Now, I did try to follow the story – promise! – but whereas games like Dark Souls and Blasphemous manage to walk a fine line between discovery and mystery, I never fully understood quite what was going on, even after ten hours of cryptic dialogue referencing vessels, kilns, moulding, and moon priestesses. But hey, at least there’s a cat that follows you through the game and who you can give milk to, so that’s pretty cool.

The different levels are undeniably beautiful. Moonscars uses a limited colour palate of reds, blacks, and greys, though somehow this works in its favour, creating a deliciously gothic atmosphere that never got old even as I neared the endgame. The gameplay is a more standard affair, with your typical parry and dodge. There’s no choice of class, armour, or weapon, the only thing you have any say over is your sub-weapon, and even there the harpoon is so much stronger than all the others I never really saw a reason to change it. Furthermore, you don’t really level up in the game, at least not in a traditional sense. Health and ichor are upgraded by finding power-ups in the world, and your hard-earned bone powder used to unlock new powerful spells (called witchery) and amulets, much like in Hollow Knight.

What’s strange is that some of these amulets are ridiculously overpowered, including the “Statue” amulet that lowers your movement speed but massively raises defence. This trade-off carried me through most of the game, You see, in Moonscars, both your spells and healing charges are governed by an ichor bar, and this fills up as you damage and parry enemies, meaning that as long as I was dealing out more damage than I was receiving, I was never in any trouble as I always had enough ichor to heal. Add in a couple more amulets that give you ichor when you get hit and when you parry, and you’ll become pretty much invincible.

There are two novel things Moonscars tries to do, neither of which really work. The first is a “Moonhunger” system that increases the difficulty of the game when you die. The second is the introduction of doppelgangers that spawn when you activate certain mirrors (Moonscars’s bonfire equivalent) and steal your temporary buffs and subweapon. I always found these mechanics to be more of a chore than anything else, especially towards the end of the game when your doppelganger copies your enormous health pool but is still fairly dumb, leading to a drawn-out battle of attrition.

The parry system is pretty much useless during exploration as you’ll often be attacked by five or six enemies at the same time, and from both sides (or three sides if you count the flying nuisances), leaving me to rely on the aforementioned harpoon that traverses the entire screen, and tanking damage knowing I could heal afterwards. The boss battles were way more fun, one-on-one slugfests with a good variety of mechanics, including the use of mirrors that tied everything together thematically rather well.

As the final credits rolled, however, I was still asking myself the same question. Is the art design enough to carry the game? And I think, unfortunately, the answer is no. I liked Moonscars enough to play all the way through to the end, but the story was too opaque to keep me interested, and the combat too lacklustre to elicit that pulse-pounding sensation all good soulslikes should create.

Unless you are an unabashed pixel-art 2d soulsvania aficionado I wouldn’t recommend Moonscars, and I’ll be placing it just below Steelrising on the D-Tier.