The Guise

I keep a soft spot for games built by a single person with a clear vision, and The Guise is exactly that kind of project. Rasul Mono spent years on this thing, and you can feel the handcraft in every corner of its dying villages, labyrinthine dungeons, and demon-filled valleys. The central hook is quietly clever: you play as Ogden, an orphan who slips on a cursed mask and is permanently transformed into a creature. There is no toggling back. Your feral body is your only tool for the entire game, and the small existential weight of that sits underneath every skirmish. The ability progression is the loop that actually holds. You start with a basic strike and a jump-attack, and from there each boss you defeat hands over a new monstrous skill to absorb. Defeat the right boss early and you unlock acid spit; beat another and Ogden learns to climb walls and run across ceilings. A companion bat that chips in during fights also surfaces somewhere in that chain. Eyes dropped by fallen enemies feed into the Eye Collector upgrade system, which nudges you to explore thoroughly rather than rush. Optional side quests, collectible amulets with stackable effects, and two different endings with their own distinct boss encounters give the world real replay texture for completionists. Here is where honesty matters though. The combat, which is the spine of most of your time here, has a softness to it that reviewers and players alike have flagged since launch. Hitboxes feel slightly misaligned on Ogden's attacks, and the impact of each hit lacks the snap that makes melee feel satisfying. Bosses look wonderfully diverse but tend to cycle through fairly similar patterns once you read them. Enemy variety across the world is decent, yet most of them share behavioral DNA. The result is that exploration occasionally tips from atmospheric crawl into repetitive slog. A Steam player also noted early launch crashes and a bugged invincible boss that wiped progress, though updates addressed those issues. What saves the experience is the presentation. The visual style is genuinely singular: nearly monochrome backdrops with creatures and characters carrying the color, which gives everything a slightly theatrical, stop-motion quality that reviewers have compared to Coraline and Studio Ghibli filtered through Hollow Knight. The writing is stronger than the genre average, with the orphanage setup and the mythology of the All-Father and his twelve warring children giving Ogden's transformation genuine emotional stakes. The soundtrack leans ambient piano in exploration and lifts into something more urgent during boss encounters. It is not a soundtrack that rewires your memory, but it serves the mood faithfully. At around seven to ten hours for a thorough run, The Guise knows roughly how long it should be. It does not overstay. For the patient kind of metroidvania player who prioritizes world feeling over mechanical precision, there is something genuinely worth spending time with here. Go in knowing the combat is the weak link, and the rest of the handmade grimness lands.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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