Young Souls

The developers have abandoned this game. There's a nasty bug really early on in the game that was reported 3 years ago by several players and it still hasn't been fixed. I played maybe 10% of this game and now I can't progress because I'm stuck at a black loading screen. I can't even refund this game since I bought it and didn't play it until this week. Do yourself a favor and avoid this game.

Paused the game just to leave this review, after my nth time fighting a specific boss where everything is a one-hit kill and you can't use any of your kit. Maybe it wouldn't annoy me so much if I hadn't spent all my fitness tickets boosting defense. Pretty big oversight. I started with a thumbs-down, but there were some things I enjoyed so this is a very tentative thumbs up. Combat was varied enough but wide swinging weapons have a clear advantage by allowing you to stay vertically safe and still hit enemies. I love parry/riposte combat but daggers never really came into their own; it felt like the reward never outweighed the risk. Sword and shield was safer and still did just fine parrying, plus swords have overall better benefits. I usually felt that when I died, it was my own fault, or it was learning enemy patterns, for the most part. Except being forced to use two specific weapons for the previously mentioned one-hit kill boss, which is itself just a slog. I challenge you to find someone who thought that fight was fun or had interesting mechanics. The idea behind cosmetics is great! But you can only see them in town, because armor overrides all cosmetic stuff. And you spend the overwhelming majority of your time in dungeons, only exiting for minor story advancements, upgrades, and sleep (level-up.) I am so curious as to why the sleep-to-level-up system was implemented. The dialogue was fun, especially with the receptionist and mayor. So yeah, I did enjoy the game but with some major caveats and QoL oddities.