Grime is so disappointing. Even many of the positive reviews echo my sentiments and honestly, a lot of them should be negative reviews. The game has core design problems that were solved years ago. It feels like they didn't have any metroidvania fans or soulslike fans play the game from an outside perspective, because the initial reactions almost unanimously called this shit out.
Checkpoints are incredibly far apart - they've added some before I started playing and there are probably less than half of what I would consider "time consuming but OK". Fast travel may as well not exist even after they added more nodes. Dying isn't super costly but you have to redo so, so, so many rooms almost every time, including, on multiple occasions, redoing auto-scrolling segments or timed platforming cycles, including one time before a boss - no enemies, no actual danger, but over a minute of just walking and waiting each time, in a game designed to kill you while you learn.
I tried to push through and did get farther in it, almost 6 hours now. I would say 60-90 minutes of that is straight up just walking back to where I died, much of it without any challenge or legitimate reason for making you walk that far, and I honestly have not died that much.
I'll keep an eye on the patch notes but despite their early attempts to fix the complaints there's a ton of work they'd have to do and I don't know that they want to. If they doubled (or more) the number of checkpoints I'd consider at least completing the main story, if they let you fast travel using them then I might consider exploring it more. And then I could even live without the same dumb lack-of-map-until-you-find-it system that Hollow Knight had (which again, was one of the most common complaints and yet it is copied here). I could use cheat engine as a respec tool if they never add it to the game, it depends if they want to be more metroidvania-esque or souls-esque I guess.
Checkpoints are incredibly far apart - they've added some before I started playing and there are probably less than half of what I would consider "time consuming but OK". Fast travel may as well not exist even after they added more nodes. Dying isn't super costly but you have to redo so, so, so many rooms almost every time, including, on multiple occasions, redoing auto-scrolling segments or timed platforming cycles, including one time before a boss - no enemies, no actual danger, but over a minute of just walking and waiting each time, in a game designed to kill you while you learn.
I tried to push through and did get farther in it, almost 6 hours now. I would say 60-90 minutes of that is straight up just walking back to where I died, much of it without any challenge or legitimate reason for making you walk that far, and I honestly have not died that much.
I'll keep an eye on the patch notes but despite their early attempts to fix the complaints there's a ton of work they'd have to do and I don't know that they want to. If they doubled (or more) the number of checkpoints I'd consider at least completing the main story, if they let you fast travel using them then I might consider exploring it more. And then I could even live without the same dumb lack-of-map-until-you-find-it system that Hollow Knight had (which again, was one of the most common complaints and yet it is copied here). I could use cheat engine as a respec tool if they never add it to the game, it depends if they want to be more metroidvania-esque or souls-esque I guess.
