Gestalt: Steam & Cinder review

written 2024-07-19

Gestalt: Steam & Cinder is an action platformer RPG I played in 2024/07. Having been playing mostly real-time strategy games for the last few months, I was missing the action platformer experience, and this game delivered well. It's a bit short though; my playthrough was only about 8 hours, and I explored most of the world.

Mechanics

It is an action platformer with primarily melee attacks and special ranged attacks that cost energy which you charge with melee attacks. You have an invulnerable dodge roll, some movement abilities you unlock later such as a double jump, and a supply of healing items that refills at save points. Healing locks you into an interruptible animation, so you have to think about when it's safe.

The invulnerable dodge roll is a bit disappointing because it means you don't have to think about positioning much, just pressing the dodge button when an enemy attacks.

I like how your attacks don't hitstun enemies and don't interrupt aerial movement (and some movements double as attacks), so attacking, dodging and moving are interleaved fairly well.

Enemy design

Most of the normal enemy designs are poor: they only have 1 behavior that hits a specific spot, so you just move out of that spot (or use invulnerable dodge) whenever they attack, and repeat until they're dead. Some you can even beat by just crouching in front of them and attacking them while their attacks go over your head.

The boss designs are better. They have fairly interesting attack patterns, though they could do with a few more of them - most only have 3 or 4, and feel a bit repetitive. They also have some unclear telegraphs requiring trial and error to figure out, but it's far from the worst case of that problem.

Exploration

The level design is overall good, with lots of nonlinearity and unlocking shortcuts to help with backtracking. Platforming is mixed with enemies nicely. Platforming challenges themselves are very lenient with failure, as hitting a platforming hazard only does a negligible amount of damage, not like being hit with an actual attack.

It unfortunately has invisible passages, as many of these games do.

Structure

It's got metroidvania-style, ability-based area unlocks, with the need to revisit old areas to get items you couldn't reach before, but it has a linear story. I feel like this doesn't synergize well because revisiting old areas never serves a dual purpose. The main story never takes you back somewhere. But the map can be upgraded to show the locations of missed items, which streamlines the process of going back for them.

There are a bunch of side quests, but most are just "kill N of X type of enemy", so not interesting.

As is typical for RPGs, there's grindable money and experience, which sucks. But money isn't very useful. I bought almost nothing throughout the game.

Stop doing experience

There's also consumables, but they aren't very powerful or necessary. I literally never used one.

There's an equippable upgrade system like Hollow Knight's charms, which I appreciate, although its equipment isn't nearly as diverse and impactful on your playstyle. Most of them are things like "+5% resistance" or "+5% damage".

The upgrade system mostly consists of spending points on a tree where some nodes are stat increases and some are new moves. It's a nice system, bounding the amount of stat increase you can get, but some of the nodes aren't very well balanaced: the critical hit upgrades make a very small difference compared to the flat damage upgrades.

The save system is like most metroidvanias: when you die you go back to a respawn point, but everything you did since then is kept. This sucks for consumables since it means they're only good for one try at a challenge, but that didn't affect me personally since I never used them. Thankfully, there's no bloodstain system.

The Dark Souls bloodstain system SUCKS

Difficulty

Sadly it's too easy and there are no difficulty settings. I killed almost all bosses on my first try. In exploration, I barely even tried to avoid enemy attacks; I'd tank one from almost every enemy I ran past cause it didn't matter cause I could take dozens. You just have too much health. Plus there are infinite health dispensers in the field (not rest points).

Difficulty settings are good!

While I died plenty of times in exploration just being careless because of the lack of consequences, I feel like I could totally do a deathless playthrough on my first try.

Story

Mild spoilers in this section.

The story is hard to enjoy because of the deluge of unexplained proper nouns throughout the entire game. Even in the endgame they're throwing around names of people, places and events I don't know. There's no codex or anything. Some characters have multiple names, which makes it extra confusing.

As for what I do understand of the story, it has an idea I like: there's a forbidden power ("The Abyss / Cinder") that corrupts its users and will supposedly destroy the world if humans try to harness it, and nearly did in the past. But at the same time humans need it, because their safe power source ("Steam") is running out. I think the idea is underexplored though. There's not much discussion about how exactly the Abyss's corruption works, whether it's possible to use it without being corrupted, and characters act like they have to make a decision - to open the Abyss or destroy it forever - immediately. No one suggests just waiting until the current power sitaution becomes more desperate (most people aren't even aware that the Steam is getting weaker) before making such a drastic and dangerous decision.

I like the lack of moral black and white. There are several factions, betrayals, and yet no faction, or even any individual character, is portrayed as unambiguously good or evil.

I don't like that the story is largely told through cutscenes where the protagonist isn't present, and with characters the protagonist almost never interacts with. There's 2 groups of characters: the protagonist and the people she interacts with, and the people in power, and their plot threads don't really intersect until the very end.

There's a diabolus ex machina that causes the protagonist to die, but it doesn't really matter cause she has a companion that completes the decision she was going to make.

Finally I don't like that it ends with no closure, as it's not shown what actually happens to the world after the ending.