Cathedral

Cathedral is an old-school Metroidvania from Decemberborn Interactive, a tiny outfit that clearly spent a long time inside classic NES action-adventure games before deciding to make one of their own. You play as a knight who wakes up inside a mysterious cathedral with no memory, and the loop is familiar: explore interconnected rooms, find the five elemental orbs, unlock new abilities, backtrack, go deeper. Six hundred rooms is not a small number, and the world earns that scale. Biomes shift in tone and palette, enemy types push back with genuine teeth, and the hand-drawn pixel art has the kind of frame-by-frame care that you only see when someone was doing it for love rather than deadline. The combat sits in that crisp, momentum-based zone where jumping and sword-swinging feel weighted without being sluggish. You will die to room patterns that seemed unfair until the third attempt when they suddenly click. Boss fights are designed around that same philosophy: readable once you slow down, punishing when you rush. The map system respects the genre tradition of leaving some mystery intact, which means yes, you will occasionally wander and feel briefly lost. For some players that is the whole point. For others it will be the friction point that stalls a run. Where Cathedral earns its quieter devotees is in its soundtrack and pacing. The music does that thing great chiptune-adjacent scores do, where a looping motif stops feeling like background and starts feeling like atmosphere you are physically inside. Rooms have a stillness to them between encounters that gives the exploration genuine weight. The story is light, delivered in fragments, and does not overstay. The game seems to understand it is a mood and a mechanical exercise first, and a narrative second, and it is comfortable with that hierarchy. The mixed Steam reviews are worth understanding rather than just counting. The criticisms that surface consistently are around difficulty spikes that feel abrupt rather than earned, and a map that can feel undercooked when you are trying to locate the one door you missed in a 600-room world. These are real friction points, not nitpicks. If you came from Hollow Knight expecting its level of environmental signposting and map granularity, Cathedral will feel rougher. If you came from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and thought the vagueness was part of the character, Cathedral will feel like home. This is a game for people who want to sit inside a carefully constructed pixel world and let it work on them slowly. It rewards patience over aggression, attention over speed, and has the quiet confidence of a project that knew exactly what it wanted to be. Not everything lands, but the handcraft is visible in every room.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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