Valfaris

Valfaris does not ease you in. Steel Mantis, the small team behind Slain: Back From Hell, opens this heavy metal 2D action-platformer with a crumbling fortress suspended in deep space, corridors crammed with grotesque enemies, and a guitar riff that sounds like it wants to hurt you. That is the entire design philosophy in about thirty seconds. If that first minute feels like too much, the game is telling you something important. If it feels exactly right, buckle in. The combat loop is structured around a modest but satisfying arsenal of weapons split across melee and ranged categories, each drawing from a shared energy resource tied to a blood meter you refuel by staying aggressive. It is a system that actively discourages hiding behind cover or playing cautiously. Therion, the heavily armored protagonist, is built to wade forward, trade hits, and keep the pressure on. That design tension, between taking damage and needing to stay close enough to refuel, creates a rhythm that suits the soundtrack perfectly. And the soundtrack, composed with genuine heavy metal craft, is worth mentioning twice. It is not background noise. It is load-bearing structure. The pixel art sits comfortably among the best in the genre. Backgrounds layer organic, disgusting detail against mechanical geometry in ways that reward pausing to actually look at the screen, which the game rarely gives you time to do. Enemy designs lean into a kind of bio-mechanical grotesque that feels coherent and specific rather than randomly edgy. Boss encounters, which come frequently enough to punctuate the pace without overstaying their welcome, are where the visual and mechanical ambition meets. Some of them are genuinely spectacular set pieces. Where Valfaris earns its criticisms is in its checkpointing and difficulty curve. The game saves progress at specific altar points that can feel spaced further apart than is comfortable, and a few mid-game sections will ask you to replay longer stretches after a death than feels proportionate. Players who bounced off Slain for similar reasons should know that Steel Mantis has refined things meaningfully, but this is still a game that expects discipline and patience from the player. It does not have the pinpoint fairness of the best Souls-adjacent games. Deaths can sometimes feel like attrition rather than genuine lesson. And the narrative is present but thin, more premise than plot, which is fine when the tone does so much of the heavy lifting, but worth knowing if story investment is what you are chasing. As a piece of intentional craft from a small team that clearly loves both the genre and the aesthetic they are referencing, Valfaris earns genuine respect. The opening is not slow, but it is dense in a way that can feel overwhelming before the weapon options open up and the combat vocabulary clicks. Once it clicks, the whole experience becomes something close to meditative in its brutality. A tight, focused, handmade thing from people who knew exactly what they were making. That specificity is rare. Kai, Scout Team