Chasm

I kept circling back to Chasm for one specific reason: the art. Before I knew anything about procedural generation or Symphony of the Night comparisons, the screenshots hooked me the way a good record cover hooks you before you hear a single note. Getting inside the actual game is a more complicated feeling. Chasm drops you into a mountain-town mystery as a rookie knight whose first real assignment spirals underground fast. The setup is lean, almost folkloric in its simplicity, and that suits the pacing fine. Combat hands you a melee slot and a sub-weapon slot from the start, and over the course of roughly ten hours you layer on swords, rapiers, whips, maces, spells, and a set of traversal abilities including a roll, double jump, wall-slide, and swim that unlock in Metroid fashion. The controls are genuinely tight. Hitting a breakable lamp and watching a little coin purse tumble out has the same satisfying crack every time. The six distinct biomes each carry their own visual identity, backgrounds built with careful parallax layering that gives depth to what is, technically, a very low native resolution (384x216). The soundtrack sits exactly where it should: present, atmospheric, never obtrusive. For mood alone, Bit Kid earned respect. The wrinkle, the one that reviewers kept circling and the community never fully resolved, is the procedural generation. Each new save stitches Bit Kid's hand-crafted rooms into a unique map layout. The rooms themselves are well-designed in isolation. The seams between them, though, can feel arbitrary. Ability gating becomes inconsistent in the mid-game stretch because the developers could never be certain which tools you had when they were placing connector corridors. A post-launch patch (version 1.07, released around 2020) added more save rooms and fast travel points, which addressed one of the sharpest community complaints, but the fundamental tension between "authored Metroidvania" and "random assembly" was not something a patch could fully resolve. The map markers for unopened chests are a small mercy. The sparse healing economy, especially early on before you unlock the merchant who sells potions, keeps things honest without being cruel. Where Chasm lands for you probably depends on what you prioritize. If you want the density of environmental storytelling that Hollow Knight perfected, or the kinetic replayability of Dead Cells, Chasm will feel reserved by comparison. If you want a quiet, classically shaped Metroidvania with beautiful pixel work, genuinely satisfying weapon variety, boss fights that reward pattern recognition, and a tone that feels like a fantasy short story rather than an epic, it delivers that with real craft. The replayability pitch is the weakest part of the package. The first playthrough, however, is a complete and well-paced thing. For a studio's debut, that counts for a lot.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Chasm.