Eastern Exorcist

My first instinct when I loaded Eastern Exorcist was that the art team deserved a raise before I had even touched a single enemy. The hand-drawn visuals carry a serious Chinese ink-painting aesthetic, cutscenes are staged in the style of Chinese opera, and the whole thing looks more expensive than its indie origins suggest. That beauty is not a distraction from hollow mechanics, either. What sits beneath the gorgeous facade is a focused, stamina-gated side-scrolling action game that takes its Souls-adjacent design seriously without requiring you to dedicate your entire life to it. You pick one of two protagonists at the start: Lu Yunchuan, a sword-wielding exorcist chasing vengeance and guilt across three chapters of branching levels, or Xiahou Xue, a half-demon fox spirit on a quest to save her cursed brother. Both campaigns run roughly four to five hours each, and they play meaningfully differently. Lu's campaign is the harder of the two, with more branching paths and tougher encounter design; Xiahou's is a shorter, slightly more forgiving ride. Each character comes with entirely separate move sets, skill trees, and a set of Exorcism Arts that grow more powerful the better you execute the core combat loop. Lu's Imperial Sword Spell lets him bank phantom swords on clean hits and detonate them on a dodge; Xiahou's Spirit Control deploys her brother's disembodied soul as an attack ally. The arts scale with how well you're playing, which is an elegant way to reward precision without punishing casual engagement too harshly. Shrines scattered through levels serve as save points, fast travel hubs, level-up stations, and challenge arenas where you can replay tougher versions of defeated bosses for substantial rewards. The stamina bar is the game's most divisive design choice, and the criticism is fair. Attacking, parrying, jumping, and dodging all drain it, and it refills just slowly enough that it consistently interrupts the combat's natural flow. Against bosses with unpredictable patterns it creates a genuine push-pull of risk management; in regular encounters it mostly just creates annoying pauses. Players who push into one skill tree hard will have an easier time managing it, but those who try to distribute points evenly report the bar becoming a wall rather than a mechanic. It is a real problem and not a manufactured one, so go in aware. The tutorial section is also overlong and, for some players, has triggered blocking bugs, though the localization has improved since launch even if some achievement text remains untranslated. What actually hooked me, more than the combat elegance, was the moral ambiguity woven into the enemy writing. The early fodder is generic, but by the third or fourth major boss the game starts contextualizing demons as spirits twisted by human injustice. Defeating them carries a genuine tragic weight, not a triumphant one. The game is comfortable sitting with the idea that banishing a demon might be treating a symptom rather than a cause, and it lets both protagonists question that reality out loud. For a side-scrolling action game, that is a level of thematic sincerity that most genre entries do not attempt. The supporting characters are thinner, and the overall narrative does not reach the dizzying heights the writing occasionally hints at, but the bones are good and the best moments are genuinely affecting. A New Game Plus mode and optional shrine challenges extend the run for completionists, though a full clear still sits well under 15 hours. Eastern Exorcist is the kind of game that could easily fall through the cracks because it is not trying to be Hollow Knight or Sekiro, even though it borrows vocabulary from both. It is shorter, more linear, and more story-forward than either, which makes it a different proposition entirely. If you want a brisk, visually distinct action RPG that respects your time, asks interesting moral questions through its demon lore, and gives you two genuinely distinct campaigns to clear, this is a confident recommendation. Just brace for the stamina bar and push through the tutorial gauntlet. Monika, Scout Team