Chasm

Chasm is a metroidvania type game which is quasi-procedural generated. In so much that there are rooms on the map that are in the same place no matter what but the paths to get to those rooms are changed with each game. Great thing is you can always play the same map as your friend if you want. The game gives you a ‘Seed” which is a code for that specific world’s map setup. When you start it gives you something random but you can always change the seed at the start to something else if you’d like including changing it to be the same map as your friend, or their map as yours. Now before I continue this let me dictate, I don’t like metriodvania games, I don’t like procedural generation, I don’t like platformers. As such this game is an entire bag of stuff I don’t really care for personally. As such I don’t play games like this often so some concepts that you might be familiar with or are common in these games, I… well I don’t know anything about them, so bare with me. Or don’t… it’s up to you.

 

You play as a knight in training that you get to name, the name isn’t really important since it’s only used like 4 or 5 times in the entire game. The main knights have been sent out to deal with some issue, who cares what it was, so the commander of the garrison decides to send you a lone… as in ONE SINGLE PERSON to go deal with a horde of monsters in a mine. Again, ON YOU OWN. Cause you know that’s smart. He even dictates he’d send the knights, as in MULTIPLE people, TRAINED, WELL ARMED, MULTIPLE FUCKING PEOPLE. So instead he sends you. JUST YOU. All you get is a sword, not even any fucking pathetic piece of shit armor or anything, just a sword. Personally, I’d of taken that sword back to him and stabbed him in the fucking face. That’s like sending a plain clothes officer with a taser into a war zone on his own to fight the enemy instead of the fucking military. But… that seems to be how these kinds of games are made so I’ll overlook the fact that this commander would be killed for incompetence long before stating something this stupid.

 

Well you get to the mining town, which has one single, lone miner. Not one left all the rest died, noooooo, one period ever. That poor bastard. Anyways, everyone in the village which is group of people that are mostly in fairly good physical shape, they’ve all be kidnapped by monsters, the only guy left, is an old dude who can barely move and is asleep 90% of the fucking time. I’m still not convinced he’s not an evil mastermind who planned for everyone else to get kidnapped. Cause you’re not going to tell me the monsters will kidnap a fucking DOG, but not the old guy who can’t escape them but can talk and get aid. Now yes I know monsters are almost as smart as donuts, but if they’re smart enough to kidnap everyone then they’re smart enough to kidnap EVERY one, period. I don’t care.

 

You have to travel into the mines and free them, then go on innocuous fetch quests for them that are mostly asinine. A kid wants a toy, a guy wants his deck of cards, no nothing useful like hey bring us something to help us board up this place, or bring us weapons so we can protect ourselves so we don’t get kidnapped again, or help us get stuff so we can GTFO. Nah, get me some playing cards… did you hit your head dude? If not, you have a serious fucking gambling problem, seek fucking help. So yeah serious common sense issues from a story standpoint, but none of that shit seems to matter in this genre.

 

Now, when you’re in the mines, you unlock other areas to go to, and enemies and chests sometimes drop weapons, armors, and accessories. YAY you get gear… something you should have gotten from the fucking garrison, but whatever. Some of these weapons are useful, lots of them… not so much. Granted this also mildly depends on your playstyle, there are super short range daggers, medium range swords, long range swords, heavy long range swords, and magic that opens up eventually after freeing one of the people. I found the daggers to be useless cause you had to be so close that by the time you hit the enemy once they would be fucking up your entire day, and you’d have to hit them a lot. I personally went most of the game with a medium range sword because they’re fairly quick and obviously have range. The heavy weapons while I found one that I fucking LOVED the Titan Hammer, most of them were so slow that using them was a chore. Long range swords aren’t very common and usually they’re other weapons of the other types that you have that outclass them in damage in every way. Which sucks cause they’re fairly fast too.

 

Eventually you find a cult was responsible for this shit, you know, like always. Fuck cults. They were serving a shitty demon god and were just kissing a ton of ass for seemingly eons, going so far as to even allowing themselves to be turned into monsters to add to the demon god’s army. Cause you know, cults always want to be turned into fucking monsters. Seriously what’s with that? And it’s never like, yeah we’ll turn you into succubi and incubi, no it’s always some ugly ass monster. The hell man, if you’re going to turn me into one of your demon army, at least let me choose what I turn into so I can be sexy as hell; pun fucking intended. But no they just wanna serve, not a care in the world if they’re turned into a demon that’s just a giant ass on legs that spews liquid acid shit on everything, they’re cool with that so long as they can serve. The hell is wrong with cultists?

So your task is to free everyone, do their side tasks, and the better part, go find this demon god and give him a good solid ass kicking instead of an ass kissing for once. To do these things though, you have to find artifacts which let you do various things like a parachute, diving gear, climbing gear, a glove that lets you hang on ledges because having hands doesn’t do that in metriodvania games for some reason, among other artifacts. This game isn’t as annoying in that aspect as I view most metriodvania games to be. Many have large maps and require a lot of backtracking time and time again to get to different areas witch each artifact or upgrade you get, this one the maps aren’t huge, they aren’t small by any means but they’re not huge either which makes it a lot easier to get around and most levels only require a couple upgrades in a later level to fully open their whole area. So you don’t end up getting to damn near the end of the game getting the last artifact then going back to the very first part of the game to get to new paths, thank fuck for that. I would have quit if that happened, just no I’d of lost my fucking mind.

Combat is… difficult for me anyways. In this there’s no shield to wear, there’s no blocking, there’s next to no long range combat, so you have to be in striking distance from the enemies to strike them 90% of the time. There’s a backwards dodge though that you have access to from the get go, that’s how you fight, hit an enemy then dodge away before they can cut your face off. I’m legally blind, combat like that… not exactly my strong suit. I think lots of people will like it, me not so much though. My save has 10 hours on it, I’ve played the game for 25 hours. That’s a lot of time dying and a lot of progress being lost, on a regular basis. You’re health doesn’t regen, ever. You have to get to a save point instead which tops your health off. There is only saving at save points, no autosaves which I’ve personally gotten way WAY too use to having, which was a big problem with that 15 hours of lost time.

Lastly there’s the platforming aspect, it’s really good especially after you find some artifacts, specifically your first one the spiked glove that lets you grab ledges and much later the winged boots for double jumping and climbing gear that lets you slide down and jump off walls. Only a couple platforming bits annoyed me and they were specific areas. There’s a rope swing that’s hard to time correctly to get on and sometimes if you hit the edge you fall off, which doesn’t happen anywhere else. There’s a couple areas with spiked balls on chains swinging completely 360 around blocks you have to jump on, and sometimes they seemed to hit in such a way that you couldn’t get onto them without taking damage no matter how fast or careful you were because the timing of them was just saying fuck you to the player. And in the last level embers are shot out of walls and the like and they hit platformers, if you get hit you take damage, it’s not a big issue, just an annoyance to me.

Now, as stated I don’t like these kinds of games, however that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun playing them. For a good chunk of this game I had a lot of fun. I like exploring, I like opening maps and finding pathways. I like open world games for that reason. I also even get into the platforming, there’s no real pinpoint accuracy needed in this one, as long as it’s close you’re mostly fine when it comes to the platforming which for people like me makes it well not just more fun but it makes it playable. However the fun factor faded a bit during boss fights and the very start of the game cause it is HARD at first you have little health and enemies do a shitton of damage to that little health, near the end of the game they can barely scratch you but at the start it’s so so hard. Since you haven’t learned the controls very well, you also end up dying a lot, which for me, pissed me off a bit especially if it was a boss fight, cause I always forgot to manually save, and save points aren’t close to boss battles anyways so you have to fight through enemies to get to a boss. Also later in the game you’re trying to find crates to break and chests to open in hopes for good loot, more money, items, and an achievement, and finding them all is kind of a big time bitch. On top of that, I’m use to games with a lot of story a lot of narrative, I mean look at my reviews on here, mostly visual novels. This is a metriodvania game, it’s story is told in like 20 second chunks after each of only a small handful of boss battles. Because there wasn’t a story gripping me I started getting bored too. However that’s a non-issue for metriodvania fans cause that seems to be how all of them are set up really. For me the middle of the game was the best part of the game, at that point I was strong enough and understood the controls well enough not to be dying fucking constantly, I was remembering to use save spots fairly often, and I hadn’t yet gotten fatigued looking for stuff.

That’s the rule if you like it more than you didn’t then it gets a seal of approval. I did enjoy it more than I didn’t even though this isn’t a genre I like. If more games in this genre were easier like this I might like the genre a bit more, I’d still like combat to be easier though. But that’s always going to be the case since I can’t see for shit.

Chasm was developed by: Bit Kid, Inc.

Point of Sale: Steam, X1, PS4/Vita (cross-play enabled), Switch

$20.00: Even a noob like me can play it… kinda… sorta… fucking hell I suck at this game.

A review copy was provided by the developer Bit Kid, Inc.

darkmikasonfire has shockingly awarded Chasm The Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval