About Hunter X Athena:
Of course I find more Hollow Knight circle jerk on an obscure souls like metroid-vania lmao. Shout out to the Rick and Morty equivalent fanbase for being absolutely everywhere. The game is incredibly fun but does suffer from some pretty glaring issues. The general metroid vania loop of explore-> kill things –> level –> acquire skills to advance further and backtrack explore is present. You won’t get the play time that you get out of better games like Ender Lillies, Vigil, Bloodstained, or even Rabi Ribi but the combat is really fun. At least when it works. The parry mechanic is smooth and what made the game for me. it’s very satisfying to use on bosses (the ones that it can be used against ) and once you figure out the rhythm of dodging, dashing and attacking to get one down. In the first half of the game this is great, but there is a spike in difficulty which in my opinion would be fine if almost all the bosses after the first half didn’t require you to fight them in the air, which is definitely where the game is the weakest. The problem is that it can be sometimes difficult to tell what’s happening to your character because it’s obscured, combine this with “floaty orbs” being a staple of bosses in the second half and you can die without understanding what actually happened to you.
