Paradox Soul

Eh...
for some reason didn't like it.

If i try and alt tab out of the game it will continue playing the music that is terribly repetitive. Only way to stop the game from running is going to the steam quit button and closing it that way. I can't even alt tab back in.

Controls being unexplained but also something that isn't intuitive is really bad design. Patch the game with some new QOL changes and you may have a great game. Unfortunately the frustration coming from the lack of seeming experience is too much for anyone to drag their feet through.

In good faith I don't feel I can recommend purchasing this game other than when on sale at 90% off. Simply put I didn't feel this met any sense of a Metroidvania in genre or style, there's only one weapon (a rifle) and one upgrade to it - that simply increases damage and shooting speed, there are two other skills/upgrades other than a suit upgrade that you obtain in the game and that simply feels lacklustre or too minimal in regards to game-play in my view.

This isn't a bad game in any way, it's a cover-shooter styled game with some very decent bosses but feels minimal in terms of traversal and exploration. There's also aspects of concern regarding the true-ending and how it is obtained (noted by other reviewers). All in all I enjoyed my time with this game but certainly want to note it is considerably linear and upgrades/skills are very limited. This game ties itself to it's style of combat being a cover shooter, so tactically being methodical is to your benefit rather than run and gun, again there are nuances to this such as an enemies initial viewing direction being able to be taken advantage of and using bombs and/or other skills to attack them without them knowing - which I don't feel any other review has noted - please correct me if I'm wrong.

Either way this game doesn't have much depth in terms of story (there is basically no story whatsoever) and many that have played the game have had issues in one regard or another, whether it be the combat/lack of depth in enemy or area design.

This is a hard one for me to recommend generally, but if it's on sale at 90% off I would recommend, with the caveats listed above.

Simple, fun, and worth the price.

The game is neither excruciatingly difficult, nor is it so easy it's boring. As you progress through the facility, you learn more about it from observing the setting of the stage, rather than the text, which makes the game feel more exploratory. As you play the game, you feel in control going through the path you take, making it feel decently nonlinear upon first play-through, yet you will have use for every room you explore. Deaths do not feel like painful resets, enemies evolve through the floors, as do your abilities, and clear progress checkpoint rooms keep the game interesting. Additionally, the game can be played in one sit-through and does not feel like a long grueling journey to complete. Overall, the nearly 4 hours and few bucks I spent on the game were worth it, and I had a good time

Ludicrously boring

It's like technically a metroidvania but you essentially just run in one direction, do some menial task for an upgrade, turn back around and come back the way you came, complete some menial task for an upgrade, and then turn back around to go back the way you first went. You'll end up just spending what feels like ages backtracking through a progressively longer hallway to the point of mental exhaustion and boredom.

I genuinely can't believe I only spent half an hour with this, it genuinely felt so much longer.

Its actually really fun little game! Once you figure out how to hide behind the crates, so you don't get hit.

I cannot recommend Paradox Soul although even if I did have fun trying to beat it as fast as I could. I beat the game in two hours and it was genuinely fun to explore the map. Unfortunately, the game play is really rinse and repeat throughout the whole game: duck and cover, shoot, and one enemy the player has to bomb. Only worth the two hours I took to beat and that is just because it was cheap and I wanted to review it. I would suggest you save your pennies rather than play Paradox Soul, but I did have fun with it so if you decide to try it anyways I also suggest allocating some time to be able to complete it in one sitting.
The bosses were all super easy and nothing worth critiquing. The player dies in one hit and therefore the bosses could not be difficult without being horribly frustrating. Definitely do not buy Paradox Soul for boss fights because the element I did enjoy was the exploration and nothing to do with the gimmicky combat.

This game is a steam version of a flash game with better resolution. Game is still good but could be better if we got the same things as xbox/ps player like achivments and difficulty settings.

In the hellscape that is modern game industry, I believe the only reasonable thing to do - for both developers and gamers - is to take the unfamiliar step and go into the world of indie. Sometimes you can find truly amazing, life-changing experiences there. And sometimes you find games that are horrible misses.

This is a horrible miss.

It starts interesting enough, but quickly you realise you die in one hit, which makes you respawn at the beginning of the room. No biggie. You find a weapon. Cool! Enemies also die in one hit? Nope. That's alright though. They're melee and you're ranged, so you can just take them out from a distance.

And then you find an enemy who also has a gun.

At this point it's worth noting the game tells you NOTHING. Which is neat in its own way, it's cool to figure stuff out on your own. But every dev worth their salt know that in reality you have to design the circumstances which will nudge the player towards figuring it out, because not knowing what to do is frustrating.

The enemy with a gun would fire his weapon before I'd kill him. What am I supposed to do? Oh wait, there are stairs. I came up with a solution: fire a few hits, go up the staris, go back, etc. That worked.

Until I found an enemy with a weapon, and there were no stairs, just a door to another room. What now? I noticed there are some strange crates in front of the enemy. I thought, I can use them for cover? Nope, didn't work. I must be doing something wrong. I checked the controls and realised it says there that you can SLIDE (TO COVER). Oooh! So then I used the slide before the box, and voila, I'm in cover. Very unintuitive, but it was fun for a moment.

Every other enemy was the same. Slide into cover, pew pew, hide, pew pew, etc. And then I got to the boss.

There is a saying in indiedev community: "If you think the game's difficulty is just right, then it's way too hard. If you think it's too easy, then it's probably tricky: it should be way too easy for you." Many indie devs ignore this piece of wisdom, and I feel like this was the case here as well. The boss fight is too long, too complicated for no real reason. It just feels like it stretches out just because. I did beat the boss in the end, but it was an exercise in pure frustration. The repetitive, 5 second loop of music made it almost unbearable.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention the music. It's bad, very, very bad. And it loops way too soon. It doesn't set the mood, it doesn't sound good, it never stops. Maybe it gets better later, but I didn't have the patience to check it out. I stopped playing after the boss.

Dev(s), if you're reading this: I'm sorry. I know how hard it is to make a game. I liked your pixel art. But this is really, really bad work. I won't refund the game: keep my money and grow from this failure.

If you have a bad taste after this game and want something similar but actually amazing, check out Hempuli's (of Baba is You fame) Environmental Station Alpha.

A game with "no handholding" can be implemented well. That is not what has been done here.

Core game mechanics are not merely unexplained, they are not even hinted at. As if having to act randomly to discover game mechanics wasn't boring enough, you also have to repeatedly clear the same rooms of the same enemies in the exact same way anytime you want to go anywhere. That might sound standard for this genre, but unlike in other games of this sort, in this game there often is really only one way to approach and defeat a given enemy with given surroundings, and it cannot be done more quickly with experience. So while you're traveling around to determine where the next point you can progress from might be, you will enjoy waiting through the same rooms' and enemies' trivially-defeatable shoot-and-wait patterns again, and again, and again.

I wouldn't bother playing this game even if it were the last game in my library.

Really fun if not always challenging. Interesting level design and character progression. It's a great $5 action-shooter.

That's the ending? I spent 2 hours trying find two pieces arbitrary spark plugs for that ending? Save your money, don't buy this game.

Very short (less than two hours for the true ending), and poor controls. Since I like Metroidvanias I found it to be an OK game, but there are plenty of better ones out there...

Ok, so this is a pixel-art metroidvania game with only 1 HP and super annoying controls. On the bright side every room in the game has an autosave feature. Still the controls are extremely unresponsive and that makes the gameplay not pleasant.
The music is super repetative. Like... like... only one tune for the game so far.
Graphics are fine. Not too good, not bad.

It has a nice artwork and a good mood, but this game was poorly made.

Pro:
- nice pixel art

Con:
- You can't change the controls. (I mean come on... How hard is do deliver a feature like this!?)
- You are only able to complete the game if you find two hidden locations with no hints at all regarding what to do. I think it is practically impossible without a walkthrough. What were they thinking!? It is not hard, it is not complicated, it is not tricky, it just doesn't makes any sense!!!
- If you change the sound settings they will reset at the next restart (also a complicated feature).
- Story component = 0. The game is short (it's ok), but some explanation of the events would have been nice. Just a few lines.
- I'm not a huge platform player, but I assume these levels are not chellenging for the lovers of the genre.

Paradox Soul is a very short game that somehow still manages to be very repetitive because it throws the same scenarious and enemies at you over and over and over again. It tries to be a metroidvania for a little while then seems to give that up half way through. The map is the most necissary item you get in the game though you will be completely lost without it because everything looks so samey. The bosses aren't really difficult just annoying. And the one hit kill combat makes it very difficult to understand what is going on in the beggining and I wouldn't blame anyone that gave it up after 20 minutes of that. There is no real story/plot, characters, or world building or it's done so subtley as to barely exist at all except in the imaginations of it maker(s).

Maybe get this if it's on sale and being one hit killed, having to check a map every room, and 80's BGM sound attached to a very short game sound attractive to you.

Good looking metroidvania with weird uncomfortable controls that cant be rebinded + "one hit death" and no invincibility frames, not even when you dash. Awful to play.

Old school platformer with nice graphics. Crisp controls. Worth the price!

Hi
I played the game and i would like to say that the game is worth the price. I would definitely recommend this game to friends and family.

A solid old school metroidvania platform game with survival features and a challenging game design that will entartain you for a good amount of hours.

I am an old school gamer and i loved titles like Metroid or Castlevania, these games were so famous to create the famous genre of the metroidvania games. As you know, this kind of games are nowadays much rare so i didn't wait too much to buy this one after i saw it on Steam. The premise is fully respected inthe gameplay. The design is what do you expect from a classic metroidvania game, many rooms and areas that can be accessible time by time after unlocking new features for your character and a good challenge to go on , especially in the boss rooms.
I must say the game is quite challenging, you will not have a hp bar, you don't have energy and you can just be oneshotted by only one hit of every kind. This can surely expand the challenge in the game but sometimes can be also frustrating, punishing you for every mistake so you need to be careful for every step you take. Luckily, you don't have also a life count, so if you die you just have to repeat the room until you manage to go on.

Graphic

Classic pixel based graphic, i think it's polished and the choosing of the colors fit well with the environment. Nothing too special but for an indie game i think it' good.

Sound

The music is just a retro synthwave track, i must say i love this genre so i enjoyed much. It is good with this kind og game and pretty audible, so i can say it's entartaining.

Gameplay

As i said before, the game is a metroidvania but really punishing for your mistakes, your character can easily die for every shot he takes so you will have sometimes to repeat some room, especially the boss rooms, until you figure out the right pattern to go on.
I don't know if the title is a coincidence, but the “soul” seems like an intention to give the game the same difficulty of the Dark Souls series. I must say it's not the same kind of difficulty. Just saying, in Dark Souls you have to focus on enemy patterns to find the weak spots when you can hit, in this game you are more focused on your own patterns until you find the right sequence of moves ti go on.
Often i have found myself just repeating the same room only to memorize the right sequences of monster or the right sequence of the boss pattern to find my correct set of moves to go one (the first spider-like boss, for example).
I think the game can be more challenging if it is more focused on the enemy pattern , but maybe it's just a personal point of view.

Suggestions

During my gameplay something didn't convince me too much, let me say these are just some suggestions for devs to improve a game that i find very good and with much potential.

• Lack of tutorial: in the game you can roll and hide behind some furniture to shoot some enemy equipped with rifle. The problem is i figured it out casually looking ate the controller options and nothing in the game didn't tell me i had this possibility and i tried and retried the first section of the first enemy equipped with rifle around 10-11 times before going one.
  
• Not sure about the hitbox of the roll/hide feature. Sometimes i felt like i have to roll from the exact distance from the furniture if want to hide behind it or you can't do it.
  
[*]Lore? I still haven't finished the game but until the point i reached i didn't find something that tells me what's happening, who i am or what i am doing there. From the screams when i am being hit i deduced that i am a woman but there isn't also a single note that explains me something. Some lore clue can't be bad in my opinion.

These are just suggestions for the devs by the way and i strongly reccomend this game for the price proposed if you are looking for a simple metroidvania-survival game.

The Metroidvania Review

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How Metroidvania is it?
Medium Fit - Weighty cover-based combat sets it apart from games more similar to the Genre's namesake, but exploration is still open and power-up based.

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Full Review

I really enjoyed Paradox Soul. There's some solid game design at work here, and it was a fun taste of a Cover-Shooter/Metroidvania. This puts it in sort of the same category as Shadow Complex, though it mandates its duck and hide mechanics by making your avatar die in one hit. As you learn to play, the instant death gives it a kind of Hotline Miami or Titan Souls vibe, though it's not nearly as adrenalyn pumping as either of those titles. The pacing is much slower, which is fine when you're moving forward, but it makes backtracking kind of tedious. Because of this the game was at its best as I made my way to the bottom of the Laboratory complex, but as soon as I got there the game sort of lost its appeal.

The game opens with your character walking into a test facility and... well it doesn't really tell you much about your goals until it's implied in the ending. You're left on your own to figure basically everything out, including every mechanic in the game. I kind of like this approach. It lends to a feeling of loneliness and discovery. This atmosphere could be improved upon though. While the graphics are very well done, with animations that perfectly compliment the gameplay, I found the music was a little grating after a while. It's a sort of "Stranger Things" style 80s synth beat, and while there are several tracks throughout the game they all have the same drone. I think it fits, I just didn't care for it.

But what I did like was the gradually escalating challenges. Nothing really changes with your character's abilities in terms of combat. You get some gun upgrades, a bomb ability that's fun to time, but other than that it's going to be pop-in and pop-out shooting mechanics the whole way. The game does a good job at mixing enemy types together to create a sort of "puzzle" situation for you to solve, but it only has so many resources mix together. It just about runs out of ideas by the time you reach the final boss, and that would have been a perfect place to end the game. However in order to get the "True" ending you have to backtrack the entire lab to its entrance, and then you're only allowed to leave if you also found the two bombable walls - which are in fact cracked but hard to see - which contain two keycards for your exit. I can sort of understand why they did this - a lot of players equate time spent to value. But to me it cheapens what could have been a really tight experience even if it was a little short.

Call it a nitpick if you like, the game does say "End" after you beat that boss; I could have quit just there. But to the game's credit it's good enough to leave me thirsty for more. I really like a lot of the game's level design. For instance, there was a collectable I didn't think I could reach with the Metroidvania tools I had already unlocked, but a situation that forced me to apply a move I already had in a new way taught me the power was within me the whole time. The three bosses are also a highlight. Because you die so easily, they're all very heavily telegraphed and satisfying to endure through.

Overall, I'd say that if you lumped Paradox Soul in with every other Metroidvania, it sinks lower on the totem pole just because of its relative simplicity. But categorizing it with games like Dungeon of Zolthan, Mini-Ghost, or other budget games like the Legends of the Universe games, I think Paradox Soul is my favorite of these "Mini-Metroidvanias" that I've played so far. Its only real weakness is that I wish that more was done with it.

3 out of 5

Good, short, puzzly.
Not my best $5, but certainly not my worst. Fine pixel art, reasonable feel to weapons and movement, with only a few difficult movement puzzles. Worst part was that it told me to get out after a boss fight and the entrance was locked. Don't like to reward that kind of behavior, but overall positive experience.