reviewed 9 Years of Shadows
Gorgeous art and beautiful music
It's a Metroidvania
The difficulty level of boss fights is frustrating even less than 3 hours into the game. The gameplay system where you have more "energy" than health, which powers your shields and also your gun (your strongest weapon), makes this game lean extremely hard into the high risk high reward playstyle. You literally have 2 HP besides your shields.
When your energy depletes, you have to do a weird QTE minigame to get half of it back, or fail that QTE and waste like 2 whole seconds standing still and probably getting destroyed by the boss. And when they interrupt you have to start completely over on getting your shield back.
The hydra boss has a "horizontal or vertical" attack you have to dodge in its 3rd phase and the timing is like maybe 0.5 seconds at best, leading to a lot of "unfair" hits due to it being hard to react quickly enough to dodge the appropriate direction.
I stumbled into another boss shortly after that, quite a ways away from a save point, and he jumps around the screen at lightning speed while also having twilring swords chase you around. Game just honestly needs to chill a bit more on the boss design especially around speed.
IDK this game is almost really cool but it's tuned way too hard for me and the shield/HP playstyle thing is too frustrating for me.
