Kelipot

I have a soft spot for the games that Western outlets simply never showed up for, and Kelipot is a textbook case. Unlimited Fly Games built something genuinely unusual here: a side-scrolling roguelite where the run structure and the narrative are not awkwardly bolted together but feel like they belong to the same sentence. You play as Prince Abel, searching for his brother through a plague-shattered city called Celephais that keeps fracturing into parallel timelines. Each run is framed as a genuine chapter in that story, not just a mechanical excuse to reset your health. The combat sits at the intersection of hack-and-slash and bullet hell, and that crossover is earned rather than accidental. Boss patterns are dense and creative, especially in the later worlds, and the dash-based movement gives you just enough room to read and react without feeling cheap. Where the build variety shines is in the rune and item system: permanent runes stack between sessions, shaping a slow meta-progression, while per-run items can pivot your playstyle from melee sword work to stomp-based crowd control mid-dungeon. Over a hundred items in the pool keeps individual runs feeling distinct, even if the level layouts do start to repeat after a dozen hours - a fair criticism that the community has raised, and one worth knowing going in. The art is the thing that will make you stop and stare. Every character and enemy is rendered in a hand-illustrated style that sits somewhere between painted ink and stained glass - detailed frame-by-frame animation on top of that, so Abel running on all fours when a rat-soul ability activates is not a bullet point, it is a small moment of craft that you notice and remember. The music earns its place too: atmospheric, never loud-for-loud's-sake, doing the heavy lifting for the mood in the quieter story beats. The practical caveat English-speaking players need to hear: the localization has been a work in progress since the game launched, and a fan translation team did a lot of the heavy lifting for a while. As of now the English text is serviceable, but some updates have shipped in Chinese only with English catching up later. If narrative text matters a lot to you, check the current community threads before jumping in. The story itself - revolving around parallel worlds, grief, and the meaning of fate - is good enough that unclear translation is a real loss, not a minor inconvenience. Multiple endings reward replay, and the branching boss encounters mean choices you make in the story genuinely reshape what you fight. For the audience that loved Hollow Knight's atmosphere, wanted more build-crunch than Hollow Knight offers, and does not mind a rougher localization in exchange for handcrafted artistry from a small studio that clearly cared, Kelipot is worth the time it asks for.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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