Mortal Manor

This game is not easy, especially at the start of the game when your character is weak. On normal or hard difficulty, spikes will kill you instantly and they are plentiful. Monsters will crush you like a truck. Save points can be fast traveled in bewteen, but they will seem few and far between. You must perservere.
Once you get on your feet, you will be treated with a staggeringly large metroidvania spanning well over 1000 squares.
Just to give you an idea, I will link a screenshot of my map to give you an idea. It does contain some spoilers on where the bosses are hidden, so look at your own risk. It should give you an idea of the magnitude of this game.
The game is not perfect. The production value is rough in some spots, there's not a ton of monster variety, and keyboard controls are not the best. There's a lot of things that aren't explained that well. But the game is a true hidden gem for those who don't mind if it's not the flashiest visuals and can handle some challenge. The game features an leveling system that allows you to customize your character. It has a wide array of weapons that can be leveled up, each with the own damage types and bonuses. There's relics that grant interesting powers, some with trade-offs, of which you can chose 3 to have on at any given time. Then you have the standard metroidvania type stuff if you can manage to find and kill one of the games 6 main bosses, and believe me, finding some of them is not easy if you opt to turn off the map assistant.
There are secrets all over the place, breakable walls, power-ups that give stats boosts, relics, weapons, and switches. Progress can come in a lot of forms, and death is brutal. You will find yourself breathing a sigh of relief when you find a new save or make it back to one alive after finding a lot of stuff.
This game isn't for everyone, but for those willing to hang on past the early rough hours of the game, you will find a nice hidden gem, one with replayability as it boosts multiple endings, new game+, and randomizer options built into the game after you beat it once.

This game is Amazing, period...So much content and variety it's insane, the amount of customization of your play style makes it hard to settle for one style and you'll find yourself changing your equipment often to suit the scenario, and the large number of weapons to find you will constantly have new favorites which can each be upgraded twice with weapon stat improvements as well as new moves specific to that weapon. If you enjoy metriodvanias then this is a must, and in many ways this game is more open ended than most of recent additions to the genra. You can play through the game taking which ever route you can and your not shoe-horned into one specific route, which many modern metroidvanias are guilty of, they often make you feel like it's an open world and you have choices but really it's just a false sense of freedom and your really just limited to following the path that the dev chooses for you, but not with this wonderful game. I'm not fond of writing reviews, however everyonce in a while I come accross a gem like this that is criminally under appreciated I feel an obligation to shout its praises through review. If this game looks even the slightest bit interesting to you, you should buy it, and then thank me later in your dreams.

The Metroidvania Review
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How Metroidvania is it?
High Fit – There’s a vast castle to explore, with a dash of instant death mechanics that makes it feel a little closer to Ghosts and Goblins, some of the harder Mega Man stages, or perhaps similar to the original Castlevania.
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Full Review
In 2009 when Mega Man 9 first came out, I found myself stuck on Tornado Man’s stage for a decent amount of time. The stage's gimmicks included new platforming mechanics in tandem with the usual death spikes and bottomless pits, meaning that an error often sent you back to the last checkpoint to replay the section, or the whole stage from the beginning when you ran out of lives. This made it pretty frustrating for my first time through. However, Tornado Man’s stage has one of the best soundtracks in the game, and in the midst of my frustrations my foot was always tapping to that 8-bit beat. Between that and the always-charming Mega Man, with decades of nostalgia appearing on that colorful blue screen, I found myself pumped to try again, and again, until I got it right – until I got to taste that sweet satisfaction of wiping that smug half-grin off of Tornado Man’s face.

Mortal Manor is a similarly challenging game – a Metroidvania with death spikes that can wipe out all of your progress – but it has none of Mega Man's style to temper the frustration.
Don't get me wrong. Mortal Manor has a lot going for it. I was impressed by its modest 14MB offering from the outset. The controls are tight and responsive, and enemies are designed well enough to make every mistake feel like it was my fault, not because of some unfair telegraphing or other RNG factor. It emulates the perfect formula for that hard but fair feeling of achievement. It’s created a bit of a cognitive dissonance for me though. I’ve always been an advocate of mechanics and level design being the primary force that makes a game great. Graphics, music, and general presentation are secondary to a tightly woven challenge or well-constructed narrative – with narrative being somewhat optional because it is, after all, a video game. Mortal Manor presented to me the first game I’ve played that was purely substance over style. Style is something that is completely subjective – I’m sure that some people will dig the graphics and sound of Mortal Manor. But the graphics and sound did absolutely nothing for me. It was so much not to my tastes, I had to turn the music off. I was experiencing real physical pain after hours of hearing the same shrill sounds.
Thus, my primary reason for pushing through the game was my sense of integrity as a reviewer; that I had to beat the game before forming an opinion on it. This isn’t the first time I’ve forced myself through a difficult game, that I wasn’t enjoying, just for the sake of reviewing it. And experience has taught me that trials very often reap great rewards, even in video games. But I can’t honestly say that pushing through Mortal Manor was worth it. I’ll try to explain my reasons.
On the subject of “Substance over Style”, there’s one matter of substance that I feel Mortal Manor fails significantly on; it has a great introduction to its story, but the game as a whole does little to hold up that narrative promise. Digging deeper into its locales reveals monsters named “Flying Monster”, bosses named “Failed Genetic Experiment named Robert”, and other similarly bland, generic enemies. The first boss that you’ll likely face is a giant frog of no real significance, and the final boss, while something that I could have predicted, similarly doesn’t seem to have any “substance” to him other than an “X” marking the game end point. I try not to compare everything to Hollow Knight because I don’t think it’s fair, but Hollow Knight is a great example of Mortal Manor’s opposite in this regard. Hollow Knight takes every opportunity to use its environment to tell a story, creating a rich world that I wanted to see more of. Mortal Manor's world was boring simply because it makes no effort to do the same.
Furthermore, and unfortunately, the gameplay that I’ve praised up until this point started to feel the same way, boring. According to my map, I only completed 45% of the castle by the time I had made my way to the final boss and saw the “Incomplete Ending” according to my achievement. Even with the worst Metroidvanias I’ve played, I felt some compulsion to keep exploring – to keep discovering. After a fleeting moment of satisfaction after the "Git gud" phase at the beginning of the game, I lost that compulsion to explore with Mortal Manor completely. I got tired of seeing the same fireball spitting eyeball tower in every biome I entered. I was tired of whacking the same kind of skeltin over and over. Even the boss mechanics showed little creativity; the first frog boss alternated between a single shot directed at the hero and a spreadshot in 8 directions, which is similar to the pattern the final boss uses. I started to get a feeling that the game’s quality was being trumped by a desire for quantity. This lack of variety is exacerbated by the instant death mechanics.
I actually was pondering about Metroidvania game design shortly before I started playing this game – wondering if Instant Death has a place in the genre. Salt & Sanctuary gets away with it, as does La Mulana with its “Welcome to La Mulana” achievements. It’s pretty popular today to compare difficult games to Dark Souls, so let’s do that. In the original Dark Souls, if you die, you lose absolutely nothing; except the souls you are carrying. I know some people focus on the soul loss, but you get to keep any items you picked up before dying, any shortcuts you activated stay that way, any enemies that are programmed not to respawn stay dead, and you don’t even technically lose the souls permanently; you can go back and retrieve them. In Mortal Manor you lose everything since your last save point when you die. This is the same as Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night, but neither of those games had instant death mechanics. The aforementioned Mega Man is also similar, but Mega Man has about 2-5 hours worth of extremely linear gameplay, tightly designed for a one-way experience. I lost everything when I died in Mortal Manor, but I seriously questioned whether it was worth going back to re-explore the parts that I lost. I think the ultimate result is a game with a broken identity. It wants to be both a linear-like challenge and a Metroidvania, but it’s missing the complimentary mechanics to be truly good at either. I think it would have done well to take a page or two from Dark Souls/Hollow Knight/Salt and Sanctuary, or even Axiom Verge – just changing the death mechanics would help a lot.
Technically though, you can play on Easy Mode and remove the Instant Death in favor of near-mortal injury. Once you beat the game, you can customize a LOT in New Game+ to perhaps rectify any gripes you might have. If you just like having room after room to check off, Mortal Manor is a meaty package. It even has a randomizer mode if you want to keep it going forever. Mortal Manor has a lot going for it, and if anything on its store page looks appealing to you it has more substance than some of the other games I’ve played.
But if you take one look at its screenshots and find it unappealing, I can't promise you a hidden gem hidden behind its production values.
2.5 out of 5

---see where this game landed on my metroidvania tier list beneath this review!---
I really enjoyed it despite its shortcomings. A retro, raw and punishing Afterimage might be the closest comparison I could draw:
A tough as nails (at least initially) retro Castlevania style (even more retro than that) metroidvania with different spells, weapons, levelling up and one of the largest maps comparable to a retro Afterimage.. and it has ..a whopping 18 Steam reviews! What went wrong!? Well, aside from probably having no advertising, there is some real jank (which I'll get into) and it is a very unforgiving game. Very niche title actually, and many that would enjoy it as much as I did will never hear about it due to its obscurity. Like Afterimage, I always had a millions ways that I could choose to go, which then led to another million ways to go. I loved this. On top of that, the punishing nature of the game made the exploration more tense than is in your typical metroidvania. That same tension I'd feel playing something like Dark Souls or EverQuest (back in the corpse run days..). I also want to mention that this game has a randomizer mode (I haven't tried this yet, but intend to do that with a replay of this game soon).
Some of its most common criticisms:
Too difficult and punishing - to which I say "Nah. Bring it on!"
The start of this game is VERY hard. You need to make some almost pixel perfect jumps while dealing with the trickily placed enemies. You do low damage and die fast. If you aren't dying to the enemies, it's to falling in the instant kill spikes (though you can play the game on easy mode where it allows you to respawn on the same screen if you fall into spikes). On top of this, whenever you die, you respawn at the last checkpoint but it doesn't save any of the progress you made. I thought this was a punishment I disliked in modern 2D games, but Mortal Manor changed my mind. I think it depends on the game, because here it really worked for me. Often I'd get 8+ rooms deep in one direction, get low on HP and have to decide if I wanted to try and make it back to the last save point, or try exploring more squares to see if I could reach a new one. The tension that this was constantly creating was fantastic.
As far as your character being weak at the start, I found that one solution was to grind XP. Half an hour killing stuff to upgrade your HP and damage stats makes a remarkable difference to your survivability. It's like Dark Souls in that respect I guess, where you always have that option to resort to if you're struggling.
Another point is that you want to make sure you stick it out until you manage to get that first major ability upgrade (and survive getting it back to the save point..). Zipping through all those screens that gave you nightmares early on with your multiple jumps and dual grappling hooks is very satisfying, the payoff is worth it.
The music loops are godawful
20 second music loops do not cut it in a video game. There are some rare exceptions where some music is so backgrounding and unobtrusive that you might not notice a small loop, but these are retro sounding and in your face, and they would actually be fine if turned into longer pieces (well, possibly) but this added a layer of pain to the entire experience. My only advice here is to try the trick I use whenever I encounter games like this.. lower the in-game music volume down to very low so it plays fainter in the background. I prefer this to turning it off completely because I find music (however repetitive) still helps areas feel like they have their own sound and makes the experience more immersive.
Needs more set pieces, the bosses also suck
While there are some fun bits in the world that you interact with, for the most part it is just room after room. Similar to what one would say about large parts of exploring in Afterimage. Now I loved exploring Afterimage, so while sure, it could have been better, I still had a blast trying to explore all of the maps squares. The bosses felt so low effort in this game, basically floating blobs that fire projectiles and feel like big versions of regular enemies. They were mostly pushovers as well.
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My Metroidvania Tier List (PC) (excluding Metroid & Castlevania titles)
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-Not an objective list, purely how much I enjoyed the games-
S+ Aeterna Noctis |
S Tier (Truly Special) Astalon: Tears of the Earth | Hollow Knight: Silksong | MIO: Memories in Orbit | Hollow Knight | Master Key³$ | Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom |
S- Blasphemous 2 | Cathedral | Crypt Custodian³ |
A+ Afterimage | The Last Faith | Oolo³ | Supraland³ | Supraland: Six Inches Under³ | Frogmonster³ | Little Big Adventure³ | Little Big Adventure 2³ |
A Tier (Amazing) Elderand | Ori and the Will of the Wisps | Doomblade^ | BioGun | Zexion | Chronicles of the Wolf | Kotama and Academy Citadel | Blossom Tales 2³$ |
A- Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights | Depths of Sanity | F.I.S.T. | Pampas & Selene | Ender Magnolia | Mandragora |
B+ Blast Brigade | Haak | Turbo Kid | Nine Sols | Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus | Biomorph | Minishoot’ Adventures³ | Banjo-Kazooie³ | Banjo-Tooie³ | Donkey Kong 64³ |
B Tier (Really Enjoyed) Animal Well | Alwa’s Legacy | Steamworld Dig 2 | Islets | Blasphemous | After Death | Pronty^ | Mortal Manor* | Escape From Tethys | Outbuddies DX* | Monster Sanctuary | Elliot Quest | Rebel Transmute | Moonlight Pulse | Environmental Station Alpha | Twilight Monk | Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown | Death’s Door³ | Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-yo³ | Yooka-Laylee³ |
B- Shadow Labyrinth | Haiku, the Robot | The Mobius Machine | Ultros | Voidwrought | Crystal Project³ | Unsighted³ | Tunic³ | Prey (2017)³ |
C+ (Fun) Lone Fungus | Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores | Guns of Fury | Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night | Ghost Song | Kunai | Kingdom Shell | Axiom Verge | Treasure Adventure Game | GigaSword* | Infernax | Flipwitch# | Momodora 4 | Momodora 5 | HunterX | HunterX: code name T | Gestalt | Alruna and the Necro-Industrialists | Super Roboy | BladeChimera | AntiChamber³ | Blossom Tales³$ |
C Tier (More or Less Enjoyed) The Throne | Plague of Yamorn* | Constance | Column on the Sea | 9 Years of Shadows | Jrago* | Laika: Aged through Blood | MF-01 Aerostrike^ | Xanthiom Zero | Carrion^ | Chasm | Wuppo | The Mummy Demastered | Catmaze | Curse of the Sea Rats* | Death’s Gambit: Afterlife | Castle In The Clouds DX# | Omega Strike | Aggelos | Midnight Castle Succubus# | Overbowed | Rabi-Ribi | TEVI | Far Star | Sheepo | Skelethrone: The CoE* | Unworthy | Undivine | Somber Echoes | Oirbo* | Ato | Side Scape³$ | And All Would Cry Beware³ | Lycanthorn 2³ | Vomitoreum³ | Maid of Salvation³ | Grumpy Jack³ | Jedi: Fallen Order³ | Arkham Asylum³ |
C- (Meh) HeroSquare | EldritchVania | Plus Ultra: Legado* | Beholgar* | Astronite | Cookie Cutter | Rusted Moss^ | Grime | Moonscars | Elephantasy | The Messenger | Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth | Iconoclasts | MindSeize | Momibosu | Axiom Verge 2 | Hijiri in the Succubus Castle# | Ebenezer and the Invisible World | Mars 2120 | Luna’s Light* | Tales of Kenzera: Zau | Gato Roboto | Itorah* | Dystobel* | The Knight Witch | Stardust Demon | Kong: Survivor Instinct | Vision Soft Reset | Primal Planet | Weapon Hacker | End’s Reach³ | The Shaman’s Ark³ | Elephantasy: Flipside³ | Kharon’s Crypt³$ | Bloody Hell³ | Powerslave: Exhumed³ |
D & E tiers don't fit the length of this review, so i've left them out.
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^ = Mouse & Keyboard are STRONGLY advised.
* = Very raw indie or contains some jank or lack of polish.
# = Pornovania.
³ = 3D game or different camera perspective: Not a 2D sidescroller.
$ = A Zelda-like.
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Took me 40 hours according to Steam to complete this game. It definitely takes a lot of patience to get into since it can be frustrating in the beginning. It might even be worth playing on Easy at first. Once you do get into it though, there's a lot of fun to be had, and a lot to do. A huge world filled with secret areas and items, on top of multiple modes and endings kept me plenty busy. Plus the dev has been super responsive answering questions and issuing patches for issues myself and others have brought up in the forums. Definitely worth the asking price.

If you're hungry for a hardcore retro Metroidvania from NES era, this game is fantastic with crunchy exploration but be forewarn this game is brutally difficult particularly at the beginning.

Mortal Manor is the game where I need to write my first review. It seems to be very unknown which is absolutely undeserved. In short: this game is incredibly good.
Many metroidvania games lack of the urge to learn the map. Often you can simply rush through the levels (Hollow Knight), dont need to explore its secrets, ... But Mortal Manor reminds me very much of old Castlevania games although they are different types of metroidvania. In Mortal Manor your skill really grows during the game. It just feels fantastic to jump and run through the map after you have better equipment.
+ exploration
+ platforming mechanics
+ satisfying gameplay experience
+ music
- rough beginning