Shalnor Legends: Sacred Lands

Honestly I would only recommend it in a bundle deal on sale. I feel like this game has a lot of love but all puzzle/trap rooms feel the same (due to looks and reused timings even though layout is different), combat isn't exciting (bosses feel same except ghost boss), heroic mode should be available from the start and story isn't well build as a game story. And don't get me started at the grind...

Like on paper this game should be good, bosses have different attacks, puzzles and traps have different layout, exploration with a day/night cycle, good story concept etc.

The game is easy to understand, gives a goal to push forward to and a reason why you need to do it.. yet it still allows for exploration and freedom of discovery. The puzzles are fun and challenging enough that it pushes to think and take a minute. The graphics remind of many games I grew up playing with a slight darkside feeling to them.. Overall I highly recommend it to others who would like to take on a challenge similar to ALLTP or the Original zelda while having merits of its own that makes it fun and unique.

Shalnor Legends is a simple labour of love with classic Zelda-esque gameplay. It's got its ups, it's got its downs; it FEELS like an indie game. It took me years to finish it because I put it down and picked it up again much, much later.

I like simplicity. When you pick up the game after not playing it for eight months, you don't have to redo everything just to remember what's going on. The game doesn't hold much surprise in terms of story, but it did well within its own limitations.
Simplicity also suggests that a lot of excess weight was cut from the game, which may or may not be true.

Upgrading everything (if everything is your goal) is an awful grind, but otherwise it can be a challenge. The hit detection is a bit janky. The game is a bit dated (and was retro when it launched, so still dated). Heroic Mode is for the crazies; base game grind for 100% was bad enough; I'm not going there.

But I had fun. For ~$10, I think it's worth it. Part of that is indie support, but part of it is "$10 isn't unreasonable". While I won't be 100%ing the game, having fun was the goal and I definitely did that.

Shalnor Legends: Sacred Lands asks the question: "what if we removed all semblance of level design from The Legend of Zelda". Gone is the massive bag of tools to allow you to solve puzzles with a multitude of options. Instead the only upgrade you get is a bow, and a couple of various elemental arrows that have virtually no real difference between them from a gameplay standpoint.

Puzzles in this game consist of extremely tediously designed trap filled hallways where like 75% of the floor consists of spikes, or you have roughly 20 (not a comical exaggeration for effect) sliding spike traps next to each other where you simply stutter step through a hallway over, and over again. More often than not, without an exit at the end of the task so you get to take your meager reward and stutter step your way back though the way you came for a double dose of tedium. The game even decides to make these traps do double damage halfway through the game for reasons beyond my comprehension.

You are tasked with entering four dungeons and fighting a boss in each to claim the sacred emblem of mild importance so that all four can be combined to open an entrance to the final boss. Each dungeon has little story to it, and no boss stands out over others as being significant either from a gameplay or storytelling standpoint. Even the last boss is essentially treated as an afterthought. The dungeons themselves are all very small and essentially just consist of the same collection of the same traps you've been encountering since the beginning of the first cave but in mildly different locations. You will literally feel the apathy as you slog your way through each dungeon waiting hopefully for something to get better.

The worst part, however, isn't even what I've already mentioned. The worst part, by far, is the grinding. In this Zelda-like there is no finding a stronger sword, or better armor in a chest in a dungeon. You upgrade in this game via a crafting system in which you pay X amount of gold, and a set of components. There's around ten or so upgrades to your armor, your sword, and your bracers. On top of that you also have to hunt down special merchants that only appear at night. On paper not a big deal. What makes it bad is everything is so expensive. You are CONSTANTLY running around simply to grind money. And even when you later unlock a method of getting money faster you still have to go hunt down components as at best you'll only be able to carry enough to maybe get two upgrades tops in one run before you have to fully resupply yourself.

Nothing says puzzly fast paced Zelda action quite like entering and exiting the same cave 30 times in a row on the off chance the barrels in the room are going to give you the pittance of a single shard of beast pelt. I went from trying my best to do everything possible in the game, to just kinda wanting to rush through it to be done with it, to eventually just not caring anymore at all.

I know the dev has a sequel planned, and I'm not naive enough to think my review is gonna matter at all to them in the grand scheme of things. But, if they are listening the one thing you must MUST do is make the world feel more alive. Make dungeons interesting. Make us want to see what the next dungeon is gonna be like. Have NPCs that talk about the lore of the various bosses. Give as a reason to care. About anything. Anything at all.

There's potential here. As to if we'll ever realise it? Who knows.

Generally fun, cute little game IF you really enjoy games like 16-bit Zelda, A Link to the Past. The art style and general gameplay is clearly taken from Zelda, but much less fluid and dumbed down. The game has that Zelda charm, and that's why I continued to play. However...there are issues. First off, you must love grinding. Half the game play is simply grinding for gold and material items to make potions to upgrade your equipment. Gold does come pretty fast and furious, but the items are quite expensive to buy. Movement is extremely sluggish and the music is pretty bland and uninspiring. Very little combat needed outside of boss fights, which feel uninspired as well.

It is a fun simply adventure/zelda style game. If it were not for the constant screen freezing i would say that it has a high replay value. Replay value is one of my main criteria of a good game.

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Nepiki's Stats

Summary

Game regulary crashes when playing. I am unable to find the reason it just seems like a timed crash. I am unable to play the game for any reasonable time, and has become quite frustrating. I do not recommend it.

Very good Zelda inspired game! I'm playing with an xbox controller and the controls are pretty good. The bow could have been without delay for arrow release though like in the game hammerwatch. There is a decent amount of content in this game and the bosses are fun. I love the implementation of day and night feature. Lots of exploration to do and many items to find. I did not expect much going into this game but I'm pleasantly surprised. A well made game overall. If you're a fan of zelda, you should buy this lovely game.

Can't take the clunky character control and the mentality of this game to pharm gold for upgrades does not help. Maybe for a dollar this game is worth it.

Overall a nice Zelda-like game, but it got a lot of potential for improvement:

-Introduction never tells you 'why' you are actually doing all this. You just hear about some sort of trial that you do and that many died before. Actually the only ingame hint for your motive is the item description of the, that I actually got to read a few minutes before the final boss while searching for something different.

-The puzzles itself are nice and good. But it is very often the same puzzle or the same challenge just placed with different walls/traps. Exspecially the last dungeon felt rushed without actually something new to work with.

-The final bow upgrade should not be placed inside a dull side-chest along the way.

+I like the idea of item upgrades, the drop rates of items and money felt fair, and allowed a visit after finishing a half dungeon, but the number of materials you can stock up should be more than 10.
-Though: The sword becomes pretty quick irrelevant because of the bow's strength, which leaves the sword upgrades except the dash cost reduction feel like a waste of money. I'd like to see more in the line of the sword beeing a life stealer and the bow a mana stealer *or* a destructive force with serious downsides. Not a destructive force with life and mana steal, plus range, fancy effects *and* special damage buff when health is low. Just give me a reason to actually use my sword at all.

+Having collectibles statuas and artifacts is nice. It would be better though, if you could place them already and see smaller progress. not only when you collected all 3 of a set or all 4 juwels.

A modern representation of a Zelda-clone, and actually a good one. As expected the game is Action/Puzzle/Exploration in 2D with descent graphics/audio and very fluid gameplay. Game builds its mechanics through discovering secrets, and player evolves in a rewarding pace.

Its areas are open to be explored as the player wants, and most upgrades require heavy grinding which can become repetitive. Other than that, the game offers a well presented world offering many good puzzles and bosses to treat the player. As it stands I recommend it for a full play-through as it connects with good memories and offers a solid RPG experience.

I really want to recommend this game, its a fun little Zelda clone with some interesting elements, but when I've played the game for less than an hour and already had the game freeze bug twice, causing me to lose all of my progress , it makes me not even want to continue. If this gets fixed I would totally recommend this game, but until that happens, its not even worth the .99c sadly.

Game has potential. But after farming gold for close to two hours for upgrading, I ended up encountering some form that acted as if the game was paused without a menu. I was not able to interact with anything or attempt to rectify the issue. I knew the game was not frozen because anything that has an animation continues to move despite the game being paused (blinking, spinning blades, fairies). I had upgraded my sword almost to max (short of two upgrades) before encountering this bug. I would say if you plan on buying this to save often as the game is riddled with bullshit like this. If I could refund, I would.

The only reason I'm writing a review, and a negative one at least, is because the dev cares about this game a lot, so getting this opinion voiced might actually change something. As of right now, I cannot recommend this game wholeheartedly, and that's in spite of playing both normal and 'heroic' mode all the way up to the 'completionist' reward. It took me 16 hours to accomplish this feat, but honestly it shouldn't have taken more than 8 (5 for the initial playthrough and 3 for the replay in heroic mode).

The gametime is inflated due to a SERIOUS issue with inventory and money management. It's perfectly natural in this sort of game to have your progress correlated with unlocks and upgrades to the amount of gold and stuff you can carry around with you, but in this case it's completely off balance. Instead of linear progression throughout the game, you spend the sheer majority of it hustling through with barely any upgrades, only 2 potions you can carry, and in heroic mode everything kills you in 2 hits (utterly terrible when going through a spike riddled maze without checkpoints). All of that is because you need 250+ coins for each upgrade or purchase (and there are A LOT), but enemies drop only one coin (if at all) and you don't get enough from barrels/plants either, even if you go in and out of rooms just to repeatedly smash the same chunk of barrels (you usually get between 10-20 coins for such an action).

When you get to the final area of the map, right before the penultimate dungeon, if you've explored enough, you're very likely to unlock a (spoiler alert, I guess?) fishing mini-game that solves this problem by making it easy to get money from it. There's no 'selling' mechanism, so you literally just fish and get money from it, so problem solved, right? wrong! Now you want to upgrade everything to compensate for what you've been missing all along, but sadly you can only carry around 1000 coins (if you've upgraded your wallet, which you probably have by this point), and 10 of each crafting components required for the 30-something upgrades that you've been vying for all this time. Said components are ONLY dropped from barrels, plants and enemies, but not nearly as frequent as it should be (in heroic mode it's even worse). So you walk in and out of rooms to shoot barrels until you get enough for the next upgrade, then go to the fishing spot to get some cash for it, rinse and repeat.

When you've done with this ordeal it's a cakewalk to finish the 2 dungeons you've got left, you can walk on spikes without any care in the world and heal the hp you've lost through killing enemies. The bosses die within moments from the start of the battle, without any strategy or planning required. I think it's even supposed to be this way, since you get the item you need to proceed before you fight the boss, so there's no need to fight them unprepared and underpowered.

If you've made it this far, just know that you might disregard all I've just said, play the game 'the normal way', die a lot of frustrating deaths, acquire 5 or so upgrades, finish normal mode and go home. Still, there's a lot of potential within this game, and there's a lot of things it does absolutely right, but it's a few tweeks away from being there. It's a nice zelda clone overall, and I believe the dev really cares about it, so this review will probably change to a thumbs up in due time.

I've been on a 2D Zelda-style RPG binge recently, and this is one of the good ones. Plenty of well-designed puzzles, loads of hidden secrets and enjoyable combat. Upgrades are available to spend your gold on but the more tedious RPG extras, like crafting, are (thankfully) simplified and not too much of a focus. The first playthrough had a few tricky parts but is generally easier than average. Anyone wanting more of a challenge can play through a much harder 'heroic mode' (unlocked by completing the standard game). Thumbs-up!

Very nice game.. not sure why it isn't more popular.
The soundtrack is great.
The only gripe I have with it so far is slow movement speed.
I like the minimalistic approach.. the atmosphere is really intriguing.

I enjoyed this game, despite its roughness around the edges. It had enough of that Link to the Past-esque feel to be fun all the way through. Even mowing the lawn is fun, just like in ALttP!

I beat the game in about 7 hours. I completed every main quest but not all the side quests or grinding.

This game was good, but it had the potential to be GREAT. A few design flaws prevented that. Here are my suggestions to you, Johnny, so you can learn from this experience and create a totally awesome next game.

• Increase the difficulty, or allow the player to choose a harder mode from the start. I would have enjoyed playing Heroic Mode from the get-go. Shalnor Legends' difficulty is very low. This makes it great for someone's first Zeldalike, but limits the appeal to experienced players.
  
• Increasing the difficulty in a more interesting way would be more fun, e.g. more enemies and slightly faster traps instead of simply taking more damage.
  
• Money is broken. I can get 500 gold in 3 minutes by walking back and forth in a room with lots of barrels and shooting them with a fire arrow. This means I end up running past most enemies instead of fighting them, because what do I get as a reward for fighting them? 1 gold. This disincentivizes the player from fighting enemies, especially hard ones.
  
• Too grindy. Even with barrel grinding, I still didn't want to bother buying many upgrades, because the difficulty was already too easy for me and the upgrade wasn't worth 3 minutes of effort.
  
• Traps are too repetitive. If you're going to have that many traps in your dungeons, it would be more fun if you added more variety in some way.
  
[*]Bosses can end up on a trajectory of a compass point, in which case they just bounce back and forth instead of going diagonally. I presume this didn't come up during playtesting because there's only a 4 out of 360 chance of it happening, but it makes for an uninterestingly easy boss fight (:

This game really reminds me of the gameboy version of LOZ, like Oracle of Season and Oracle of Ages.
I only have one real issue with this game and one nitpick.
My issue with the game is with the grinding for upgrades. I would prefer having gameplay that involved completing a dungeon that rewards you with an upgrade rather than grinding gold and resources to get it (Sorry if that is too LOZ but it made it more enjoyable).
The nitpick deals with the sprite artwork for the pushing of the blocks. The arms just look kind of weird being straight when she pushes a block. I would say make the arms look more bent when she pushes something.
However, it is still enjoyable and I will definitely look forward to the sequel to this.

Fun little rpg. The dev is great and cares about the game. I had an issue and they worked with me to get it fixed. A lot of devs will not do that.