Gold Project

I'm incredibly torn as to whether to recommend this game. My first 10-15 or so hours with Noreya were an absolute joy, it felt like a really solid little metroidvania, with some really delightful pixel art, a clear visual style throughout. The level designs were nice, the unlocks and expansion of traversal all felt good, and I was having a great time exploring the world. I especially enjoyed the mechanics requiring switching the world between states, and would've loved to see it featured a bit more prominently, and for the switching to be less clunky (teleporting around to find the statue I needed to alternate was a bit tedious).
The story was light, but present, and the writing, although not exceptional, was perfectly serviceable. The controls and combat felt fairly snappy and enjoyable. I thoroughly enjoyed the forgiving nature of the game, with saves per room, nigh-infinite healing using a meagre amount of currency (even if it is a little _too_ slow), and quick resets at either the current room or the last hub.
Unfortunately, the deeper I got, the more the rough edges started to grate away at me. It started with the odd little quirk, a lack of polish here and there. Random use of soft particle effects, in an otherwise beautiful pixel art setting (the moths and hit effects). The annoying pulsing shadows when left on one health. The repetitive sound design of the enemies (I ruthlessly murder the bats ASAP just to stop the damn flapping). An angry worm moving in unpredictable ways. A bugged room transition that consistently placed me inside the floor. Pixelated text rendering and a myriad of fonts. Odd bugs, like things not spawning occasionally, or things happening out of sync. Confusing menu behaviour (just let me press B to close the dang thing).
These weren't really enough to sway my feelings though. I was still having fun, and I can forgive a recent release from a small team a lot of issues. The bigger problems really started showing as I progressed deeper into the game, and it's with the enemy behaviour design.
Some of this is apparent earlier in the game, although it's not very problematic. Little things, like enemies that will endless walk towards the nearest edge of a platform attempting to reach you, making it almost impossible to safely jump to the platform without defeating them first. This is exacerbated by enemy attack patterns, which often have very little telegraphing before the attack occurs, and can have deceptively long range.
This became more egregious the deeper I got.
There's a moth type enemy that will attempt to float above you, maintaining a fixed distance, and drop projectiles in a fixed pattern. This can make it almost impossible to deal with them by regular means, unless you can very quickly scale something faster than they will float, or before they aggro.
There's a reaper style of enemy, with scissors and a blade you encounter mid gameish. They have an incredibly repetitive attack pattern, that offers little room for rebuttal, and absolutely zero opportunity for using your combo attacks without tanking some damage.
This is the general issue that persists amongst the enemies in Noreya - they're overly aggressive, especially when confronted with many at once. Despite attempting to minimise the amount of hits I'd take, after a while I began to accept there were two options for dealing with most enemies. Either cheese them, by finding a location you could avoid their attacks, while still attacking them and get them stuck there until they died. Or, accept that in most encounters, you're probably going to lose some health.
This problem is exacerbated by the size of enemy hitboxes, and their desire to endlessly run at you. Many times I felt like I was taking damage when I hadn't made contact with the enemy.
For the most part, this is fine. By no means game breaking. A bit tiring and oft disappointing, but manageable. I'm still having fun.
And then you get to the bosses.
The bosses in Noreya are all so very close to being excellent. Most of them have a nicely designed arena to fight in, and a unique set of attack patterns and puzzles to solve. Unfortunately, they mostly suffer from the same problems as the enemies, only far worse.
- hitboxes on their attacks are often poorly represented, leading to regularly being hit when you feel you should've avoided damage
- hitboxes on the enemies themselves being hard to understand, again leading to regularly taking damage from contact with the boss
- bosses being very large, and arenas offering little space to manoeuvre around the bosses without taking damage. Combine this with their propensity to push you into corners, and you guaranteed to lose some health. (side note: dodges seemingly have no iframes, and many of the bosses are larger than your jump height, or float obnoxiously around head height, leaving you no room to get around them)
- poorly telegraphed attacks (this is particularly prevalent on the sword and mage bosses in the cathedral)
- randomised attack patterns (the lack of telegraphing could be manageable if you could learn the order of attacks. from my tests, you can't)
- incredibly dodgy homing behaviour. Lots of the bosses use attacks with some degree of tracking, which often leaves you with nowhere to go. Hyper aggressive tracking combined with oversized hitboxes and small arenas with limited mobility leads to frustration. (Sword guy and Worm both absolutely sucked for this)
In the end, I found the most effective way to handle most of the bosses was just... to stop trying to avoid attacks, and just absolutely wail on them, using my oversized health pool and the few seconds of invulnerability from taking damage to beat them into submission before I died. This was completely unsatisfying and let me feeling disappointed instead of victorious.
And now I've landed at finally fighting Greed. And I am not having any fun. Sadly, I fear this is where my journey ends. The combination of tight platforming combined with inconsistent, unpredictable attack patterns is just frustrating. Once again, I'm just crutching on my health pool instead of trying to do better, because it feels more like fluke than skill. And then you get to the actual fight, and once again, you're backed into a corner - this fight even introduces walls you can't wall jump off, completely pinning you into corners with the oversized boss and his infinite ads.
The thing that upsets me the most is I can see so clearly the vision for these encounters, and they're great. There is just so much potential packed into this, that is just falling short by lacklustre execution.
Despite all this, I really want to say give it a go. I still have 20 hours of mostly good times from this game. All the earlier content felt really solid, and really enjoyable. I cannot stress that enough. Even the earlier bosses felt good. And the developers are still actively patching and fixing things, so I'm sure it's going to get better. For that alone, I want to recommend it. But I recommend it with a big dose of caution. My problems could well just be a skill issue, you might have a great time.
EDIT: I left Greed alone, had dinner, and continued my exploration. 100%'d the map, found all the items, and basically did everything else I possibly could. Had a great time. Came back after getting beefy, wailed on Greed first try. Turns out bosses are hard when you're hangry. The game is good, although I still think the sword guy and mage guy were both kinda bad compared to everything else. The enemy behaviour and hitboxes are still a little rough, but nothing so severe as to tarnish the gold project. Certain enemy behaviours got easier to deal with after unlocking certain tools, but were ultimately still a bit of a pain. I'm going to rewrite this review tomorrow to sound a little less negative, because I really have enjoyed this game <3

Honestly, Noreya is a good metroidvania. It gets the game feel, graphics, music, sound, etc right. Not only that, Noreya KNOWS what it wants to be: a puzzle-heavy, expansive metroidvania that strikes a balance between combat, exploration, platforming, non-linearity, and puzzle pieces.
That said, this is a very opinionated game. The devs have a lot of ideas that aren't necessarily fun, but they place it in the game because they want the player to feel a certain way. Personally, this goes against my idea of what a game should be, where the designer is there to serve the player, not the other way around.
For instance, getting the true ending is perhaps the most convoluted experience ever. Not only do you need to solve 2 biome-wide puzzles (where you need to switch between the two worlds), you need to run around the map destroying what is essentially fast travel points. From a design standpoint, I can see the point. But boil it down, it's just tedium and forced backtracking wrapped up in a awkward justification of "because the player must earn it!' thingy.
Heck, the final true ending boss is worse. It's not hard to beat, but it violates everything the game had been building up to teach the player. Instead of a puzzle boss you get a bullet hell boss, Instead of your upgrades being useful, only those that improve your survivability matters, because you cannot damage the boss with normal means. Heck, if you never paid attention to the symbolism in the world, you'd probably never even know how you're supposed to deal damage to the boss.
All in all, Noreya feels like a bunch of ideas tossed into a bag and then the devs try to justify them afterwards. As a metroidvania, it's a solid B-tier game; and unlike most other indie games out there, where some of them are just plain outright lazy in their design (e.g. Faerie Afterlight), the devs have put a LOT of thought into creating a specific experience.
So take my non-endorsement as what it is: my personal disagreement to the dev's vision, instead of Noreya being a bad game in any way.

An amazing metroidvania!
**The good:**
- The story was very interesting, ignore the first 5 story messages that include the tutorial, the rest of the writing is pretty good
- Combat is simple but fast and if it's too hard, you can explore further to make it easier. The skills are way more helpful than I expected.
- The exploration in this game is top-notch! The map is enormous, possibly bigger than Hollow Knight. Full of secrets. There are a few harder platforming sections
**Neutral**
- The first 5 bosses were disappointing, while the last 2 were very entertaining and challenging.
- The soundtrack is small (in number of songs), given how big the map is, it gets repetitive unfortunately (even if it's a good fit for the game)
**Bad**
- The early game is poor and does this game a disservice by pushing people away. I'd argue wait until you get the first "story skill", that's when the game picks up. Also the writing looked bad early, but became really interesting later on
**8/10. I highly recommend it.** I was struggling to find something to play after DOOMBLADE and Nine Sols, I tried Deviator (huge disappointment), Biomorph which I tried hard to get into, but the combat, movement and plot just aren't there. Then somebody on reddit recommended this and I was hooked. Finished in 3 days (20 hours).

"El salto en la pared sirve para saltar en la pared"
Hablando en serio, el juego tiene muchísimo potencial e ideas muy buenas (el sistema de mejoras con los dioses a los que te afiliás me parece fantástico), pero en su estado actual no debería recomendarlo, todavía está muy verde... así y todo lo voy a recomendar porque tengo fe en los devs y espero que lo arreglen pronto. Con un par de parches y un lindo descuento debería valer mucho la pena.

absolutely STUNNING game, genuinely excited to keep playing more
lots of great puzzles and intuitive controls, with a larger-than-i-expected map! love the accessibility features which are so welcome in a game of this genre

I personally loved this game. I waited to complete the game before commenting. I also was a backer of this project.
I really loved the art, the music, the level design, the puzzles, and most of all the lore; I truly found the lore very interesting, where you follow pieces of the journey of a human in a world of deities, and you fight to restore your life.

While a lot of people could complaint about the challenges, such as the early and general difficulties of the game and some awful bosses, the best advice I can give you is to aim beyond those obstacles. Yes there is a lot of monsters in every room which will put a threat in your exploration, and at the early game they will be the main issue, but don’t judge the game only on this mechanism.
Take time to apprehend the gameplay, play with the move and skill sets of your character. The game gets easier once you start to understand how to explore and earn some useful abilities. There is more than one way to do a lot of stuff in this game. And in late game, they don’t pose a threat anymore.

For a MetroidVania-like game, this is my first experience where platforming is this important, and I kind of like it (I mostly played Metroid games and I don’t recall so much platforming gameplay).

For a few negative points, the game has some coding issues (performance issue, some crashes, exceptions) (note: I also played on Linux but it’s not specific to this platform), but the devs truly worked on fixing those, bringing support, so maybe I should say "had"? And nothing to break your experience. Well except when I got a corrupted save file, but I decided to still play the game, so I started again and I noticed how I much improved from my first run. Don’t give up.
I also got sometimes frustrated by some bosses (oh boy I spent a lot of time on one of the first boss and endgame ones), because they require to be steady and have player stamina, but it gets easier with experience and a bit of dedication. Advice: maybe try to explore more when stuck in front of a tedious fight so you can find some welcomed powerups.
A new update with boss health bar is in process of being released, so I guess it makes fights easier when you can see where you reach.

The game is not too long, 15 to 20 hours top, for a full run while discovering, which is nice.

I look further to see more games from the same studio and publisher. Thanks for such a nice gameplay experience.

This is a very good metroidvania, I've been waiting since early access for this and it definitely didn't disappoint. Lots of platforming and puzzles in almost each room with interesting boss battles. Lots of secrets to uncover in this long and fun journey.

The Devs are very friendly and active, there were few hiccups here and there but it's all sorted out. This is a very recommended metroidvania with another unique style.

Overall Rating 8/10