Nother: an indie souls-like

Dollar game, works, fun, Im not very good at it. try it

the pun in the trailer was tacky but the game is really fun

Good little game, short but sweet. A few improvements that could be made but considering it was all made by a single person I would say it is very impressive. Combat is frantic & honestly terrifying at times lol. Bosses provide a decent enough challenge, some more then others but over all none of them feel overpowered or unfair once you work out there patterns, if I could make 1 critique it would be to increase the size of the boss arenas. The music is pleasant in some zones, but the audio levels can feel inconsistent at times. Overall I would say well worth picking up especially at the ridiculously cheap price tag.

If you spam space and left click your character gets locked but other than that I plan on playing the game still

Well played it for a little bit and so far so good. An old game but i do believe it deserves a chance.
I may update this as i play more but my first impressions are as such:

Quick version; A charming art style and a decent attempt at converting souls like combat to 2D.
Combat seems relatively straight forward and while you may die quickly re-spawning and trying again is very quick
Progression is simple and while grinding is easily available i have yet to find it necessary.
Rolling seems relatively useless against regular enemies due to unclear wind-up animations.
Some minor bugs with movement making me get stuck on certain tiles (quite annoying in combat)
Over all a fun and interesting game for anyone with a souls itch, though with a few small problems and minor bugs.

A charming game which imitates the souls styles quite nicely if not flawlessly.
To start with as advertised there is little in way of tutorial and it allows you to get right into the game so you can explore. Whether or not you think this is a positive or negative is up to you but i found that with relatively little to learn, as the systems are fairly basic, that this was not an issue.
Speaking of getting straight into it, re spawning is actually rather quick. I was quite grateful for this as i found myself dying quite frequently to begin with.

The game however is not without fault. There are certain minor bugs, such as getting stuck on some tiles or entrances not working that can be slightly annoying but nothing major so far.
The audio can be a bit buggy when switching between areas and is quite a suddenly cut off, simply annoying but not much more to it.
The game seems rather small, which is to be expected but with about 5 bosses and an estimated ( my own estimation) completion time of about 6 hours you can decide if it is worth it.

The bosses are simple and fun and as i said before decently telegraph their attacks.

Overall 6.5/10 not bad at all but far from perfect. For anyone with a souls itch this may scratch it for a short time.

Edit: It seems they lowered the price, I wrote this review a while ago so I don't even remember the original price.

For the current price there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't buy the game, the game has more than enough content to justify such a small pricetag, the replayability is good as well :)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nother is not too bad of a game I really enjoyed it

Pros
________________

+Simple and fun combat

+Good soundtrack (This varies a lot, as some areas have really bad music, while others really good music, but the amount of good soundtracks in the game outweigh the few, so ill list this in pros)

+Some boss fights are fun

+Everything in the game way made by one guy, very genuine experience
________________

Cons
________________


-NPC's are rather boring to fight/repetitive

-Attack patterns can be confusing and non-repeating in janky ways (For example, there are enemies in the forest that swing extremely fast, so the only way to counter them is to parry before they attack, the only problem with this is that sometimes they will stab instead, landing the hit after your parry is done, there is no way to tell if they will stab or swing, so you are stuck with a 50/50 of blocking. And even after you block, you will need to guess once again if they will follow up on that attack or not, There is not much skill involved, and it makes the forest quite tedious and boring to go through.)

-Some boss fights are dreadfully boring (Boss moves super slowly, and fires out lasers that miss 90% of the time. Whole boss fight is just 5 min of walking around power attacking it, as it has no way to close in on you, or stop you from healing if it manages to land one of its hard hitting lasers)

-Weapons all feel the same (Greatsword does 1 damage more than a dagger)

-Game seems to push the player towards a very "Knight" like playstyle, with a lot of the strength being better then the other weapons.

-Only seems to be one armor type for a warrior type character.

-Armor is bland and makes no difference in battle to my experience (Ive tried all the different armors, only a few give actual advantages, like the iron/steel armour giving health, or some armor giving mana regen)

-Game is very grindy, unless you only use one weapon the whole game your not going to upgrade it fully at all

-No "Final" boss so to say. I was all pumped for the ending, after defeating what I though were the "Minor" bosses, then the game just kinda ended. No final boss, just deleted my save and brought me back to the start.

-The story is delivered in a very indirect way (In item descriptions, through small talks, small details you might not notice, trying to get the player to piece it together themselves) but the creator ) is vague on a lot of .
________________

All in all it has its flaws but I did still enjoy this game a bit. Its really up to you to decide.

The game looks ok in pitures but playing it is another story. There is no depth perseption with the areas and you get caught on everything. Contoller is almost none existent with very few options to change your key bindings. No video settings to adjust brightness or contrast. Combat is clunky, it's trying to be a 2D Dark Souls but with even less satisfaction.

I would love to play the game. The setting is really cool. Sadly the game doesnt work with my steam controller on my system, so i had to refund... on top i had kind of stuttering and the controls are a bit delayed sometimes... If there would be a fix i would buy again!!!!

Note: Please review the edit below!

I really want to like Nother.

It's difficult to compare it to other Souls-likes because the similarities are so few and the game seems to willingly omit some of the finer features that were present in the developers previous work, Epoch.

For example, one of the defining assets of a "Souls" game is a world that speaks for itself. Lore is present but delivered through subtle exposition, as in item descriptions or the environment, to allow the player to draw their own conclusions.

Nother has no exposition, but it seems to have zero lore as well. There's not much of a driving force behind *why* we're waking up in a foggy twilight forest and why everyone & everything seems to be out to kill us. I figured that I'd get some exposition as I progressed but unfortunately, 2 "bosses" in and there seems to be next to zero plot.

The game suffers from some technical failures as well.

Items can be picked up and thrown but the game won't let you pick anything up if there are more than 1 valid targets nearby. This is a problem, as there are often rocks and traps nearby that you may need to immediately interact with and you'll often find this will get you killed. In particular, there is one enemy who is guaranteed to dodge and riposte melee attacks but he surrounds himself with items you can use to kill him. The problem? They're so close together that you have to fight the boss as well as the game in order to pick the darn things up.

Gaining a level requires you to gather 4 shards (or defeat a boss, gaining a level immediately). Once you've acquired these you can level up a stat by pressing the assigned key (?). These are Space, R and F. Interestingly, while in the inventory these keys are still bound to their actual purpose: Space is dodge-roll and F is consume potion. You will level up your Intelligence, which upgrades your potion effectiveness, then promptly chug one. These are not restored until you save or die, so this seems like it was either intentional or otherwise leveling up is such a major portion of the game that I have a hard time seeing how this went unnoticed in play testing.

The game touts controller support, but it is abysmal. Rest assured that it is just as bad for keyboard and mouse users - if your cursor is outside of a walkable space and you attempt to attack, it will fail. This is bizarre as your mouse position has no influence on where your attack lands (where you are facing does). This has gotten me killed more times than I care to count. I'm not sure if this is related to the recent patch which added an option for mouse aiming or not.

Bumping into an object causes you to snag on it. If a moveable object has a physical space, there's no way for you to "slide" past it - in fact, running near rocks or puzzle pieces is an exercise in frustration as you will bump into them and become physically stuck until you move away. There is an area that requires you to quickly carry an orb while evading enemies. This area is full of these rocks which seem to serve no other purpose than to demonstrate the game's failure in this regard.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this is the best description of Nother: It does so few things well, and they're spaced so far apart, that the rest of the game feels like it was set up to demonstrate the game's failures rather than to provide any sort of enjoyment for the player.

Edit: Leaving the original review here for posterity's sake, but the developer has been quick to find and resolve issues and the game has improved considerably since launch.

Edit: After a few more hours I have to say this game is really good. I have killed my first boss and I think I am level four now, I have a ton of weapons and armors. I figured out that you can warp around. I figured out you can throw weapons. I am really on a roll.

There are a few bugs and I had to quit and reload the game a couple of times.

I am getting used to the controls still but as you figure out more and more things you can and more and more weapons and abilities the controls require even more testing and getting used to.

I am definitely recommending this game to my friends and if you like Souls and you like retro-style games this game is awesome.



Original Review:

Just like in Dark Souls you will be saying "I swear I hit the roll button!" Controls are a little Janky but I am getting them.

I tried to throw a boulder a giant's head, it seemed like the game wanted me to, but it would't let me... hmm.

I have encountered 2 bosses that I can't beat, but I'm getting close. Have my sword upgraded and found some sweet blood armor, but only wearing the helmet ATM cause I need fast roll for this current boss.

Game is pretty good so far! I streamed it for about an hour you can probably check out noshots00 on twitch on the recent streams. I'm super tired so I'm going to bed but I'll probably play some more tomorrow morning and edit/revise this review when I do.