I was very happy to receive this as a gift. I've been wanting to play this series since it came out.

First of all, I will say that this review will be from my personal preference and is not objective at all. I'm sure objectively and in general, this is a really fun and great game. For me, it just didn't work.

I tried playing it for a few hours, condemning it too hard and challenging for me, backlogging it, and after a month or so picked it up again. And so the cycle continued many times. I decided after many tries to shelve this game (for now) as I just couldn't make any decent progress on the game.

My history of roguelike games is... rocky. I usually don't enjoy being too challenged in the games I play, in such a way that I had to sit for hours just to learn the game. I have other, more fulfilling, and satisfying hobbies and activities for that kind of learning.

I play a lot of music and have a history of playing the drums. So I figured a rhythm game would be quite nice for me. Turns out so was not the case with this one! After many failed attempts to get the timing right, I switched over to the non-timed mode to try and make some progress. I was just as useless in this mode as well.

I often feel a lot of anxiety from many roguelikes as there's almost no hand-holding or direction about what to do to progress the story and the game. It also makes me utterly filled with grief to lose my progress and items after dying for the 100th time in the last 10 minutes.

So gameplay-wise this game didn't work for me on any level. But I will say that the visual and sound is absolutely fantastic. The pixel art style is on point to a modern take on the Zelda top-down. The remixes of old classic Zelda hits are really good and gets your head bobbing just like the bokoblins in the game!

If I would have been a different person with different preferences I'm sure I would have enjoyed playing this game! As it is now, I mostly enjoyed looking and listening to it. Which was still a great experience.

When Crypt of the Necrodancer (CotN) first came out, I just couldn't get into it. I loved the soundtrack (I still listen to it regularly), and I loved the idea, but I just struggled to remember the enemy attack patterns and keep up with the best movement strategies. When Cadence of Hyrule was announced, I was nervous but determined to give it a red hot try.

Like most Zelda games, it was hardest at the beginning with only three hearts. The learning curve was a steep one, but rewarding. Unlike CotN, I actually cared about the protagonists and was intimately familiar with the enemies so it was easy for me to memorise their movement patterns. It wasn't long before I was carving my way through screens, sometimes dancing delicately around my opponents as I cut them to ribbons, other times bulldozing straight through them knowing I had more hearts than all of them combined. Both strategies brought a sense of achievement and mastery from my ~10 hours of gameplay as I thoroughly scoured the map for every secret.

And what secrets there were. Reminiscent of the first LoZ game, the game didn't hold your hand and show you how you could use items to explore. Blowing open cracked walls was a given, but creating blocks and pushing them off ledges to stack on one another, melting ice with fire, pulling yourself to distant islands with the longshot... These things were barely alluded to in the game, and there was a great sense of achievement from figuring out how they worked and how they could be used to traverse the map more easily.

And similar to the first Zelda game, the entire overworld was available from the get start. If you had the skill to beat all of the high level enemies with your starting weapons, nowhere was off limits to you. The procedural generation was an interesting choice, and while I'm not usually fond of rogue-likes, I found this one to be quite satisfying. Early in my run I discovered a broadsword and was able to infuse it with titanium for +1 damage, which I used for almost the entire game (until I found legendary weapons that were slightly better).

And that's one of the few problems I had with the game: once I had my strategy, I didn't need to vary it. I rarely used the dozen items I picked up, forgetting entirely about magical (stamina-fuelled) abilities and just kept moving and swinging. I guess it's good that you can pass the entire game with just the starting items (indeed, there are achievements for doing so), but the extra gear didn't really add anything to my experience other than being cool things to collect.

Of course, one can't talk about this game without mentioning the music. In fact, I'm listening to it right now, and it's surprisingly hard not to type in time with the beat. The classic songs from Zelda history were remixed with a techno beat in a way that delighted my ears, and I couldn't get enough of them. My wife said that she woke up with different songs in her head every morning while I played it across a few days, and the opening title music brought tears to my eyes. (I have such a soft spot for Ocarina of Time's soundtrack.) This score is an absolute gift to the world.

So my overall impressions? Solid! I was grateful to see that this wasn't just a CotN skin, but actually had a classical Zelda story, and probably fits into the canon somehow. This was a delight to play, but I don't think I'd be willing to play through it again from the start. Even randomised, I know I'll find all of the same items and upgrades eventually, so the only surprise is the order in which I find them. I'm not really one for speedruns or passing the story with the minimum number of steps, so I'm happy playing it just the once. Worth the price!