Record of Lodoss War-Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth-

My first instinct when booting this up was that Team Ladybug had done something almost unfairly specific: they took the exact feeling of a late-90s Castlevania and mapped it onto a 90s fantasy anime license that, for most Western players, only half-exists in memory. That could have been an empty exercise in nostalgia. It is not. The high elf Deedlit wakes up alone in a labyrinth with no explanation, and the game trusts you to care before it earns that trust. Impressively, it does earn it. The core mechanical hook is the Sylph-Salamander spirit swap, and it is genuinely clever. You carry two elemental spirits, wind (Sylph) and fire (Salamander), swappable on the fly. Equipping one makes you immune to attacks of that element and regenerates MP on contact. It also levels up the other spirit passively as you attack, up to level 3, at which point your active spirit starts auto-recovering HP. Get hit, drop a level, start rebuilding. The rhythm this creates is closer to Ikaruga than to any Metroidvania I can name: read the room, flip your element, maintain your streak. Boss fights in particular make this sing, with encounters against dragons like Narse and Shooting Star, plus story characters like the grey witch Karla, demanding real-time spirit juggling that feels earned rather than punishing. On top of the spirit layer, there are 67 weapons to find or buy from Ghim's shop across six stages, split between melee types (daggers, axes, swords) and bows with elemental properties. The loadout tinkering is light but present, and hunting Parn's Sword from a no-hit first-phase boss clear adds a satisfying challenge for completionists. The six-stage structure is an unusual and welcome design choice. Each stage functions almost like a contained chapter with its own boss, its own palette, and its own batch of locked doors waiting for later traversal abilities, things like the slide, double jump, Windstorm, and water breathing. Warp gates keep backtracking from becoming a chore. The map is genuinely modest in size, a single screen can hold it all, which means you are never truly lost. For players who bounce off the genre because of sprawl and directionlessness, that is a feature, not a compromise. The game's runtime lands between five and ten hours depending on thoroughness, and almost every review I encountered noted the same half-rueful observation: it ends just when the mechanics are fully clicking. The pixel art is meticulous. Deedlit's sprite has idle animations and a flowing cape that clearly borrow from Alucard's design language, and the bosses scale up to full-screen impressiveness without losing that hand-crafted density. The soundtrack draws from a deep well of late-SNES and PS1 influences, with tracks that feel authentically period-correct rather than lazily retro. There are a few valid criticisms worth hearing: the regular enemies are sluggish and the game leans accessible rather than demanding, which may leave genre veterans underwhelmed until the later boss encounters. Some hidden rooms behind cracked walls are genuinely easy to miss, and HP upgrades locked behind those secrets create a subtle but real stealth difficulty curve. A boss rush in the final stage also reads as padding given how recent the preceding fights are. None of these break the experience. They nudge it from excellent to very good. You do not need to know Record of Lodoss War to enjoy this. The labyrinth itself is the story, a half-remembered dream space where Deedlit encounters friends and enemies from a war that means everything to her and nothing yet to you. By the end, that asymmetry closes more than you might expect. Team Ladybug understands that a small game handled with care leaves a longer impression than a large game handled carelessly.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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