Recent reviews by VEGA, clip that

If quake is so good how come there isn't a quake 2?
Oh wait

Rock and Stone.

Looks like a bog-standard military shooter
But the slapstick goes harder than old school cartoons

It's not addictive, but my god is this game absurd.
I heard the dev in question had a background working with casinos and slot machines. Instead of feeding that horrible industry, made this game to bang on all our monkey brains in a good way.
Ultimate definition of chaotic good.

God tier pacing and mobility for a retro style FPS. Speedruns like a dream. Sets the benchmark for how mobility shoulders should ultimately feel and be paced in its level design.

More dev episodes when

Edit: Good heavens! the devs themselves responded and my goodness, and I absolutely respect the stars out that. They were professional and kind too! This made my day.
I'll be undoing the downvote on this upon posting this update.

Thank you so much Maddie!

I won't deny my own skill issues at this game but there was just something about the losses themselves that felt way worse than they should have been. The endboss luck on summons is at its most egregious coinciding Dorian only having 4 hearts as opposed to training's 6 which is where I thought it was most frustrating as I feel the lack of acency there where skill doesn't seem to mean everything.

I do appreciate the game's components though and plays nicely. If anyone's reading this modified review and pondering if they should get it remember you are signing up for a VERY difficult game and there's a sizable learning curve where the individual levels will grill you until you "git gud" so to speak. Good luck and happy necrodancing!

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initial review:
I really want to love this game, but with each death, no matter how prepped I was on level 4/all levels, it just left me feeling rotten and cheated each time something went wrong.

I was trying to think about what was going wrong, but I realize that the RNG is supremely dependent even for a roguelike, This is especially the case with the end boss on both bomb tiles and summons fighting the titular necrodancer. Worse still in phase 2, you can have moments where his first three summons are three red dragons followed by two ogres, on top of all gray skeletons with shields. When he map controls a half portion of the map on mid with freezing and explosions, all of this will option-select Dorian into the grave, who is woefully underkitted compared to Cadence.

I want to love it for the soundtrack and chess motifs, but the less agency I felt I had in this game and my inability to separate skill issue from RNG, I can only give this recommend to people who absolutely enjoys rhythm games as while, and are willing to hold myriad L's from circumstances out of their control.

Bosses are a deal breaker for me.

Don't do what I did and try to do the Sanngrior achieves.
They didn't playtest it, and the ones who put that in there need psychotherapy/mental correction.
Then the game should be renamed to BPM: Beginning Pistol Malding

Also, the artistic direction severely ruins the gameplay loop between this and flashing lights, these visual interferences can make the difference between life or death in a run,

Wouldn't have sunk 50 into it if I didn't challenge myself.

I'd say this rocks, but the reason they call it metal is because it's harder than rock

Hakita designed mind flayers with the intention of hurting people.
Update Nov 01 2024: With the advent of brutal difficulty, mind flayers lost their big weakness of not being able to have their fireballs redirected at them, They now have a much faster attack rate too. Yikes...