While Voidwrought might not be ground-breaking nor redefine the wheel, it is a solid title that takes clear inspiration from Hollow Knight. If you need a metroidvania to ease your Silksong craving, this will definitely to the trick.

The "inspiration" part goes hard here, staying dangerously close between "inspired by" and "ripping off" in some instances. Still, you can clearly see a lot of effort put onto this game, and if you think about it it's better to get inspired by the best of the best rather than some other games, right?

Visually the game totally does the trick. While not as polished as other titles, I personally was pleased by the looks all the way through. Environments, NPCs, skills and lights are all eye-candy enough.

The soundtrack is surprisingly good too, with some tracks going hard.

The storyline was very mediocre to me and I didn't click into it. It was also written in a very convoluted way, which is a tendency in these dark fantasy games that I'm okay with unless they cross the line a bit too much.

As for the game's length, it took me around 12-13h to 100% the whole map on my first playthrough. While areas are pretty interesting and immersive, sometimes they made backtracking a bit too lazy, i.e. adding unremarkable collectibles on all areas dependant on all sorts of skills that you need to acquire first. That being said, the game has a generous range of equippable skills (the equivalent of charms in HK) to use, probably too much variety for a game this short.

Difficulty-wise, the game starts a bit too harsh compared to how it feels from mid-game until the end. Enemies and bosses will go from being a bit too tanky to be completely trivialized. It will provide for an interesting action experience regardless.

Lastly, achievements are a bit annoying, considering it includes missable achievements for sidequests with different outcomes, one achievement for each, making them mutually exclusive. I personally dislike this way of designing them so I prefer to warn you too.

Overall, even if Voidwrought doesn't really excell on any aspect in particular, I feel like it clearly tried to become a competitive game on an extremely competitive genre, and it succeeds to some regard. Heart and effort has been put into this and you will enjoy it a lot if you simply look into a metroidvania to dump some hours into.

Overall, a solid indie metroidvania with a Lovecraftian atmosphere, and an interesting, if sometimes hazy storyline. Gameplay is a bit linear until the second boss is defeated, but then it opens up into a proper metroidvania - because of this, more casual players might find the first two bosses difficult, but most other bosses can be made pretty easy with enough powerups.

When it comes to the story, a casual reading of the in-game texts and descriptions will give you a basic idea of what's going on, but a lot of the story is ambiguous, with some parts needing you to read in between the lines and connect the dots between disparate pieces of information given in very different places/contexts. Even then, some plot points remain ambiguous. If you're a lorehound whose not okay with puzzling through hints and subtext and still having some open questions, the game's story might not be for you.

Gameplay is generally good, with a couple of caveats. The linear nature of the game until the second boss makes those two bosses relatively challenging, afterward, the difficulty of the bosses varies drastically based on how many and what powerups you gather before facing them. In what's possibly the most dramatic case the Fermented/Water Boss is near trivial if you have the spurs power up and are decent at bounce attacks, but if you go in without that powerup, you might find it an extremely challenging boss.

Boss fights generally have only a few different attacks, and the key to defeating them is generally learning the pattern or telegraphs to those attacks and how to counter them. That said, the game does suffer from not displaying boss health, making it impossible to tell how close you are to victory until the boss is defeated, and obscuring whether you're making progress on failed attempts. This was probably the most frustrating part of the game for me, and seems to be a fairly common complaint.

The only other flaw is that the game does not have a lot of replayability. You'll need at least two playthroughs to get all achievements, but after that, you may find little reason to play again.

That said, as mentioned in the beginning of this review, I generally consider the game a fun and worthwhile experience despite the flaws mentioned above. (Though I do hope the devs add a boss health bar and maybe a dlc that clarifies some of the storyline points in a future patch.)

not perfect but still lots of entertainment exploring, upgrading, & battles. Bosses require many many hits but with varied attacks this didnt bother me too much. seems like the updates have addressed many of the older comments.