Iconoclasts

Fantastic. I'm blown away that this was created by one person!

+ Some of the best pixel art and animations I've seen
+ Excellent level design
+ Interesting story/themes
+ Unique bosses that aren't too punishing

Looks great, plays not so great.

I don't recommend this game not because it's bad but because it's only good and had the potential to be so much more.

The game is gorgeous and has an undeniable charm. The animations, characters, bosses, backgrounds, everything is really, really good and it's a visual masterpiece in my opinion.

The story and universe are very interesting. However, for much of the game, I was left very confused on the lore because the game never takes time to establish new concepts and expand upon ones already introduced. It's a constant barrage of information without a moment to let it simmer in.

The dialogues are a big part of the reason the story feels so weird. Characters are constantly talking yet saying absolutely nothing of substance, to a point where I'm not even sure about their motivations since the core of their message is drowned out by useless ramblings.

The themes of the story are also very much skimmed over. There are many interesting topics the game bring up but also drop in the blink of an eye. Indoctrination, religion, casts, classes, culture, etc. It doesn't flesh the lore out as much as it just makes me disappointed that these themes are barebones.

Gameplay wise, it's where I think the game really dropped the ball. You don't find upgrades to your character, per se. You have to find a recipe for "tweaks", the materials for it, craft it and then equip it. It functions in a similar way to Hollow Knight's charms. However, every hit received breaks a tweak. The problem stems from the fact that during fights, it's near impossible to regenerate the tweaks. This makes them pretty much useless and is also compounded by the other problem during fights:

Trial and error. The game has one way to beat the majority of enemies and most of them have no real indication on what should be used.

Its a very good plataformer game, nothing much to say. It delivers perfectly its premise

this is one of my all time favorite games, and after finishing my 3rd playthrough i think it's about time i contribute to the ratings!

first things first with this game: i'd definitely recommend buying it on sale. while i love it, i think the $25 price tag is a bit much. i think it'd be more worth about $15, so snag it when it's low!
also, while the game is tagged as a metroidvania, definitely don't expect a standard metroidvania experience from this. it does have a metroidvania-like layout, and there are couple parts of the game that let you freely explore, but the game is far too linear to really be called a metroidvania imo.

ok, onto the good stuff:

first, the story. this seems to be an issue for a lot of people, and i can understand some complaints, but i personally love it to bits. it can be a bit hard to follow some times, but it's very much one of those "religious trauma in video game form" kind of projects which i always dig. it's about cultures and their beliefs, icons, and outcasts, and how they clash. it focuses on a world run by a religious government called the One Concern, ruled by a divine medium known as Mother who communicates the will of "Him", the Concern's enigmatic god. there's also the Isi, simply called "pirates" to others, who are a race of people whose culture holds procreation as the pinnacle of their being, and are targeted by the concern for independent fuel mining.
the story has the player assume the role of Robin, who illegally works as a mechanic without the blessing of the One Concern. she uses her skills to help people in her settlement, which soon leads to her getting arrested by the Concern, quickly roping her into a grand conspiracy involving the true nature of the Concern, Him, and the planet itself.
along the way Robin befriends Mina, a queer Isi woman who is alienated from her culture and family for loving another woman, and Royal, the clueless future successor to Mother who believes he can use his power to make things change. the story focuses on the three of them fighting against their cultures simply to lead a happy existence, and against the oppressive control of the One Concern.
i don't know if this does the story any amount of justice, but it's a very unique story and one of the few to consistently make me emotional.

second, gameplay. there isn't a whole lot to say, but this is a highlight for me, mostly cus i just fuckin love puzzle oriented games. the game has pretty standard platformer combat, equipping you with a gun and a comically large wrench that you can swing at enemies. you also use your tools for puzzles, twisting bolts to open doors and using electrical charges to power lifts and all sorts things. it's nothing too special, but the puzzles are creative and plenty of fun, if only a bit slow at times. there are also a number of very fun boss fights, each with a unique mechanic that utilizes your puzzling skills. the game isn't too long, my last playthrough took me ~8 hours, and that's with both secret bosses completed.

third, art. this is, for me, the best part. the art style is super charming and, as far as i know, the whole game was made by one guy, which is absolutely bonkers for the level of artistic quality at play. the pixel art, the animations, the music, the sound design, there's genuinely not a single element of it i dislike. it's all so creative and high quality that it feels criminal that this game is as underappreciated as it is.

please, get this game on sale, give it some love, i love it so much and want as many people as possible to experience it!

Story/Writing: 9/10
Gameplay/Mechanics: 6.7/10

Overall: 8.3

Controls well and looks good but the game-play is tedious and can't really commit to doing a few things well and instead does many different genres poorly

Very welldone game with great story, bossfights and exploration

This is a good, but not quite great Metroidvania action game. I really liked the characters and the story, but I had some issues with the gameplay. It slipped into frustrating rather than challenging a few times, but not so much that I seriously considered giving up. On the other hand, right now I have zero desire to go back and collect all of the schematics and materials, even though I am a completionist.

If you're like me then I can't recommend the game to you. One of the early boss fights is very frustrating because the character's gun controls abysmally. I wanted a challenge so I started my first playthrough on hard, but the difficulty isn't supposed to come from stiff "controls" (quotation marks because it didn't even feel like I was in control at that moment). I don't have high tolerance for frustrating gaming features so this was the point I uninstalled the game.

If you like fighting the game while fighting bosses, then I think I can recommend the game from what I've seen until this point. Fun and creative puzzles and terrain traversal, interesting story and characters. Very cold open to the story compared to some other games, feels like there's a lot to learn throughout the journey.

With how often I talk about this game, it baffles me that I haven't written a revieew for it yet. probably because I played this game years agao way before I really started writing reviews. This game is phenomenal, the gameplay's fun, the lore and story are captivating, the music is catchy, the characters are charming, the dialogue is incredible. The art, while being pixel graphics, is still incredibly good. Bossfights are clever, puzzles are interesting, and I know I've already mentioned the story, but my god, the story. It's an incredibly interesting world, the story's well done, and the characters are where the story really shines. General Chrome is super charismatic, and I don't want to spoil too much, but in one of the final bossfights of the game, the story, character, dialogue and music all come together to make one of the most incredibly tragic bossfights I've ever experienced, to the point where the song that plays in that fight still makes me tear up when I hear it. Buy this game. It's worth your time.

This is the best example of a game made with passion and love. The character are an absolute delight, the story may appear simple and generic at first but it gets very interesting as it goes on. It has heartaching and emotive moments that i don't wanna ever forget. Everything and everyone is so frail, thanks man.

Iconoclasts? i barely even know asts!

I wish there was a neutral or mixed option, because there's plenty I liked and disliked here. There's great visuals and music, the platforming and puzzling is solid, and the story, while somewhat confusing and escalating in stakes very rapidly, is at least rousing you with it as it unfolds.

But the game forgets halfway through that it's supposed to be a metroidvania and stops giving any new abilities, the combat ranges from meh to bad, and most of the bosses have annoying gimmicks and poor telegraphs.

Despite this I still think it's worth playing, just maybe lower your expectations a bit and wait for a sale.

Great game.
Great story
Long gameplay.

This game is meh. I found myself rushing through the levels and really enjoying the design of the various characters but I find the meat of the game to be lacking some serious luster. The characters doesn't get enough development and despite her reactions and emotes she does Robin feels flat and uninteresting. The humor is descent at best and the bosses are fine. But my main problem is finding interest and motivation to keep going. To find the flow and the gameplay just feels jerky and unresponsive and the puzzles slow down the game to the point where it just crawls.
Just play hollow knight, Metroid or Celeste. This feels like a bad re-skin of a mesh-mash of those three and it's boring.

And also, I tried to finish this game twice but I just cant do it while Celeste pushed me to the point of insanity with the B-sides. Actually GOOD games does that to you.

This game goes from investigate the funny sound to overthrow the government by killing god real quick and I'm all here for it. It's especially funny when you realize that you don't really sleep during your antics so it's likely everything happens in about a single day, it's super

Iconoclasts was an incredible journey, one that I believe will stick with me for a long while. A mixed one, but with the right attitude, the good outweigh the bad.

Let’s start with the weakest part of Iconoclasts: The gameplay. This game is listed as a 2D Metroidvania. It’s not. Levels are fairly linear, every collectible is entirely optional/become useless the moment you take damage 3 times, and you get 4 permanent power ups in the entire game. There’s backtracking, but only for the semi-useless collectibles and endgame secret stuff…which I needed a guide to locate most of. I didn’t mind the bosses, as they were semi-competent puzzles to fight. Nothing properly challenging (for most of them), but hard enough to make you memorize a few patterns before you can beat them.

The pixel art is rather pretty, and at times compelling. I’m not in love with the soundtrack, as it’s not…teeerribly memorable? There were a few gems, but those were mostly in the climax.

I know that sounds pretty middling, but it’s a short enough game where it was only annoying, not offensive, and that’s if you’re trying to 100% all the optional stuff. Where I believe this game shines is its characters and their stories.

For the first area or so, I wasn’t really sold. I think that’s mainly because they just drop you right in with no preamble, having characters speak as if everyone already knows what’s going on, which was a little disorienting. Just a bit, though.

I’d had this on my list for a good while, and I wanted to stick with it and put in the effort to take in the lore. And man am I glad I did.

The main cast of named characters characters are some of the most compelling I’ve seen for a long while. This game’s story and world appear colorful, but it has some beautifully somber and dark moments that all feel very grounded and personal. I leaned back in my chair dazed from several occasions from how powerful certain scenes were.

This game may not be for everyone. It’s environment/feel could be more engaging, and it ought to be classified as an adventure more than a Metroidvania, but I will remember Iconoclasts’ portrayal of grief and pain for a long time. Without question.

This game is messed up in a beautiful, tragic way, and I have come to respect it way more than I thought I would when I first booted it up.

So let's start of by saying this is a really solid game and it isn't bad per se, it's just not for me and I want to share why so other people can make a better choice whether this game is for them.

What I did like:

- The movements of the character feel great and natural. I especially liked using the wrench to get to places, had some fun with that. I would've liked more platforming challenges but I realise that's not what this game is about, it's just that I loved to movement so much I wanted to use it more
- The puzzles were fun and sometimes it took me awhile to not only realize what I had to do but also being able to do it (because I needed precision or be quick)
- The visuals are pretty and the music is amazing, especially when you realize it's all done by one person.
- It did make me laugh at times

What I didn't like:

- This game is really story focussed. I didn't really care about the story or the people involved. I didn't always get what was being said (but that me be telling on myself, dunno if I'm the only one who doesn't really understand what's going on) and I disliked almost all characters. I'm not really a story focussed gamer but it can work for me if I really like the story. Sadly this wasn't the case here. I feel it's about 50/50 in terms of gameplay vs story so keep that in mind if that's not your thing, if I'd known that beforehand I don't think I'd have bought it.
- This game is advertised as a metroidvenia but it is not. It is as linear as it gets with a few things you can backtrack for, but imho these things are not worth it to go to all the trouble for.
I never mind getting lost in a metroidvenia because that's part of the fun and mostly it doesn't really matter which way you go. However in this game there was clearly an intended path so losing my way was not enjoyable. It also wasn't always very clear what I had to do next to progress (talk to a certain character or go to a certain area etc) Also the fast travel got introduced way later than I would've liked.
- Last but definitely not least for me, while it was fun having different guns doing different things, especially in boss fights it was not always clear which one I should use. Like you have 3 guns and a wrench and most of the time with bosses only one of these (or a special way to use them) deals damage. That makes 8 moves that are a possibility, with most of the time only 1 of those doing any damage at all. I didn't feel the game made it clear what to use most of the time, so with quite a few bosses it took me a while to figure it out. This resulted in me not being able to pay much attention to what attacks the boss was doing and therefore made me die a few times. I don't mind having to try things again and/or dying but this just feels unfair. For me this took away a lot of freedom and creativity to create my own preferred attacking style, something I really love doing.
For some of the bosses I even had to Google how to kill them because again, it was just not clear to me sometimes how to progress. For me this took me completely out of the game and just makes it frustrating to play.

So I decided to not finish the game even though there were definitely things I liked. I got stuck again at a monster that was not clear for me how to kill them and I was done googling it.

So if you're someone who doesn't mind these things this very well could be your game!
But if you're not really storyfocussed, looking for a real metroidvenia and want to be free to create your own attacking style, then maybe look somewhere else (I'd advise Hollow Knight, Ori and the blind forest - Definitive edition, and/or Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, but I'm certain there are so many more out there that'll be better games for you than this one if that's the case)

I want to end this by saying I have so much respect for the dev for making this game all by themselves including soundtrack etc. That's a great feat and it is not a bad game, just not my cup of tea by no fault of the dev.

I'm still pretty new to metroidvanias and I'll watch some videos and read a bit more and update my review if necessary, but I don't think this game really lives up to the hype.

I feel like for a metroidvania the gameplay takes kinda second stage to a grand story they had to tell and while the setting is no doubt interesting the characters motivations and dialogue are hard to follow or don't make much sense making it hard to feel any attachment to the characters. This can be said most of all for the protagonist Robin who seemingly has no agency in the story and only really listens to what others tell her to do and kill whatever is in their way.
While there are plenty of puzzles and breaks from what ultimately felt like a pretty un-engaging combat system the puzzles felt either obvious or tedious sometimes both and generally your reward for interacting with these puzzles are crafting ingredients to make upgrades that hardly affect the way you interact with the game.

I feel like there certainly could be an interesting story with maybe not these characters but certainly this setting it feels like the developer may have gotten to grand in scope and certain elements kinda didn't get the refinement one would hope.
Still very impressed by the work of the developer and the art and setting are no doubt praise-worthy but it doesn't really feel like a game you need to play even if you're a fan of the genre.

This game seems to be setting up some really interesting story and worldbuilding, crafting a mysterious environment that asks a lot of questions. The hook of the game for me was learning more about the world, I was excited to learn how all the different elements would connect. Unfortunately, the end of the game is really disappointing and doesn't resolve anything. It seems like a lot of interesting ideas were introduced to keep the player invested, with no actual thought or intention behind them. The ending felt like a cheap joke. The gameplay is mid, and I wouldn't call this a metroidvania. If something about the gameplay or aesthetic appeals to you go ahead and try it out, but I can't recommend this game to anyone who is interested in a compelling story or interesting world.

A 2D Linear Metroidvainia with a emphasis on the worldbuilding and story. This game is a solo dev project that took a quite a long time to make and I don't think the dev plans on doing anything this big again.

I don't really have much more to say about it sadly. It's not anything outstanding gameplay-wise but it has story and characters I enjoy with a good artstyle and sometimes that's good enough to make it one of my favorite games of all time. As a Metroidvania you aren't really sequence breaking rather than you can back track to talk to people and get things at certain points in the story but not others.

So really the best tell for if you would like this isn't to read a review describing it but to just look at the screenshots and maybe a gameplay video of the first section. The game is pretty much exactly what it looks like other than the fact that it packs alot of dialouge and story in, more so than is usual for this genre.

very fun

A fine little metroidvania, a few frustrating moments, but very good if you consider it was made by one person.
A 7 out of 10 and a must-buy for the lover of the genre, especially on sales.

iconoclasts is, at first glance, a silly game about a mechanic helping her town. But it quickly becomes a game that criticizes religion, talks about eterniy, and brings up questions about mental problems. The controls are fine (I played on a controller), and the pixel art is beatiful. Overall, i think its worth it to buy it if you like games about more mature/sensitive content. 8/10 :)

very nice game