Recent reviews by arccun

Having played Little Goody Two Shoes before, I was very familiar with AstralShift's presentation they brought towards their games. Thankfully, it seems that that same level of polish and presentation has been given to their newest game, Hell Maiden, even if this is currently just a demo. The cutscenes, the design of Limbo and the hubworld, the character designs and music, all of it hits out of the park with me. I did see some parts where the HUD during card choosing would go bonkers (i.e. text spitting out a string of letters/numbers before fixing itself), but nothing that actually broke the game outright.

I'll admit, I haven't played too many games of this style, mainly just Holocure (not even Vampire Survivors), but even with that limited knowledge, I think the game is very easy to get into, and has a layer of complexity with the deck-building aspect of the game, allowing for positional concepts with some cards boosting adjacent weapons. While I did like the options given during the demo, I do hope that this is expanded on in the full game, because right now it IS a tad bit bare-bones in execution. Speaking on that, I would hope for the future full release, that stuff like damage indicators and the HUD are more easily legible during later stages of gameplay, with enemies often outright masking damage numbers, and damage taken not being exactly clear to see at some points.

The second-to-second gameplay present runs pretty smoothly, but I did run into numerous moments where the game's framerate slows to a crawl during certain conditions, such as activating Dante's Inferno/Star Sign Pleiades, and when you're trapped in the circle of fire during Level 1. Even with the recent hotfix the devs had put out within the past couple days (and with me having a pretty upper mid-range PC, a 6750XT and a Ryzen 5 5600X w/ 32 GB of RAM, well above the recommended specs listed on the Steam page), I still ran into these moments where the game would move at a glacial pace upon activating these Spells.

Overall, I'm excited to see how the devs will take this initial reaction to their demo and, and hope they will incorporate these fixes as they move towards Early Access and, later on, the full retail release of the game.

Overall: 4.25/5, just need to work out these kinks, I love Virgil very much.