The Vagrant is a side scrolling beat em up that serves as a love letter to Vanillaware classics such as Odin Sphere, though never quite reaching the same level of quality. You play as a mercenary for hire who comes across a witch looking for an artifact, when things quickly spiral with the stakes becoming higher and higher as you learn more about this witch and yourself.

Gameplay has you moving on a strictly 2D plane, either getting to the end of that scrolling screen, or finding different paths in the background that you push up on the controller to go to a new area. This is used pretty well in giving you a good sized map with layers despite only side scrolling movement. Battles are typical brawler style, focusing on combos with jumping and dodging. There are a few towns you come across along the journey that give you various shops to spend your hard earned gold, individuals that all have a few lines of dialog each that can provide more context to the world or just provide a quick laugh, and buildings you can go into to find more gold/items. There is a skill tree here to upgrade your character that is quite large and absolutely will take a new game plus run to fully complete unless you REALLY grind out supplies. Some of the skills within the tree have prerequisites of hidden items you need to find in the world before you can unlock that skill. I think in my single play through I completed maybe 60% of the skill tree.

The story isn't anything you haven't seen before and is pretty predictable. The combat feels pretty great and is the main reason to play this game. There are a few boss fights which are usually a pretty high difficulty spike compared to the rest of the encounters. The artwork here is pretty fantastic. Similar to Vanillaware games, the character models are pretty exaggerated, but don't go too crazy thankfully. Everything looks like it was hand drawn or painted, and the animations are smooth.

If you're looking for a new game in this style, this isn't the worst game to pick up and play. It doesn't do anything revolutionary or terrible but is a fun distraction for a good handful of hours. I finished my play through in just under 12 hours and for the most part enjoyed my time with the game. At full price it's only $4, and often times on sale for under $1 so you aren't missing out if you pick it up to play for a bit and it doesn't end up hooking you.