Demon Peak (2017)

The first time I played this game, I got about 10 minutes in before feeling unenthused and saying I'd get it back to it "later", which lasted a couple years. But I gave it another chance and found that it's better than the first impression it makes, though it ultimately still feels lacking in polish and has various issues.

It's way shorter than I expected, the whole game took about 2 or 3 hours I believe.

What I liked most about it was the non-linearity of it. The game is short and only has a few areas, sure, but you can access any of the areas from the start, and the areas on the right side of the map all loop around into each other, so you have a bunch of ways to explore.

I was surprised at how quickly you got all the upgrades for progression though, so it doesn't take long before you have enough to access the whole map.

The combat was alright but I felt the archer enemies were sort of unfair, you'd always just start getting hit by arrows from offscreen without having time to react. I didn't understand how to hit the most basic mob type without getting hit back since they're fast and have no patterns.

The bosses were badly designed in my opinion. The serpent and centaur attack so fast and I couldn't figure out a pattern or strategy at all, and they do so much damage. But they also both have massive downtime periods where you can take out most of their health in one cycle. It wasn't satisfying to beat these, it just felt cheap. The mage boss was a bit more fair though still overwhelming, but easy to just hit it until it dies. The final boss was the best design since it had clear patterns and I felt I was actually learning and interacting with it.

I used a guide to get the last health/mana upgrades I missed, but I have no idea how you're supposed to know the code for the looping room, and there are clearly still secrets I didn't get because I can see them, but there's no guide or steam discussion that says how to get them, and I'm not interested enough to dig more.

Ultimately the areas are pretty fun to explore, and the game's style grew on me. Not a bad game, but it feels like it's lacking a certain polish or charm, and it never made me feel anything stronger than "yeah, this is alright".

beat the final boss. this game was shorter than i imagined it would be.

but i clearly missed a bunch of hidden stuff? i'm missing a few health upgrades, a ton of mana upgrades, and there were just some places i could not get to, stuff behind barriers on the ceiling (there's no up attack to break them?), a large gap in the final area with no way to cross, one of those looping rooms over in the monastery, and some item underground in the first room with seemingly no way to get to it

i'm pretty lost about it considering there's no more abilities so i'm not sure what i'm missing.

i'd like to get 100% but i'll probably just have to check a guide

the first boss (or at least the first i fought), the serpent boss, is horribly designed... i can't even tell if it's glitched or not. sometimes the body hurts you (for like 50% of your health, because it's not balanced at all), and then other times the body just passes through you?

i won by just standing inside the snake's body and hitting it over and over while it did its water beam attack, which is super unsatisfying and cheap because you can take out like 75% of its health in one cycle of that

but even without that, the boss kills you in 2-3 hits and it moves so fast i don't see any way to even react to it

also ran into a glitch where i died at the same time as the boss once, leading to the fight ending but me just being a corpse afterwards and not being able to do anything - and then if i reloaded my save file i stayed at a corpse at the most recent save point. had to restart the game.