Unworthy is a Soulslike Metroidvania I found in a recommendations list somewhere. Its main defining feature is that you can’t jump. It accomplishes this much better than Mable and the Wood, mainly by not trying to be a platformer anyway. There are no bottomless pits and shockingly few spike traps. There is rather severe falling damage, but this is mainly to prevent you from bypassing levels and not as a way to create a disaster cascade from getting hit. There’s no knockback from enemy attacks at all, actually, which is both a blessing and a curse because there’s no mercy invincibility either, so enemies will quickly combo you to death if you don’t get out of the way on your own. There is a midgame upgrade that gives you the ability to move vertically, but it works very differently than a jump ability and I overall found it delightfully fun and inventive, plus it made moving around areas a breeze.
I was initially dubious of the monochrome silhouette artstyle, but it actually works surprisingly well. Important bits never blended into the background as I feared (well, almost — the trees in the starting area you have to burn down did not register to me as interactive objects), and the animations were so incredibly detailed and well-done that I never had any problem reading enemies. It works very effectively for that all-important horror aspect, giving your audience enough rope to scare themselves; the faceless silhouettes of the monsters imply just enough while leaving a lot of room for your imagination, never quite giving you the comforting certainty of a full picture. (And after taking a peek at other Soulslikes with splattergore aesthetics, I appreciate how comparatively tasteful it is.)
With no platforming, the focus is strongly on combat. I haven’t yet gotten around to Dark Souls itself, but I’m given to understand this is a very faithful imitation: You die in 3-4 hits even with level up bonuses, enemies are absolutely merciless in stunlocking you to death, you have to get around this with a dodge roll that grants you invulnerability to all attacks, but both the dodge roll and your attacks consume limited stamina. Oh, and if you die you lose all your money unless you can make it to the room you died in before you die again. (Not that it really matters because the game hands out currency like party favors.) I found it highly stressful, but in a good way. Even regular enemies have surprising depth to their attacks and tactics, requiring you to put a lot of thought into dealing with them; bosses in particular will change up their attack patterns multiple times as the battle progresses, avoiding the common problem of boss fights getting repetitive. The lack of jumping made combat a lot simpler since you only have to remember one action to avoid damage, which I appreciated after getting swatted out of the air all the time in Hollow Knight.
Unfortunately, I think the weapons are very unbalanced. Initially they had good tradeoffs — this one has better defense, this one has better reach, this one is slow but strong — but once you get the bow you rarely have reason to use anything else. Few enemies have ranged attacks and the bow staggers most of the ones that do, so it’s trivial to pepper most enemies with arrows before they can even reach you. Bosses in particular fall into a predictable pattern of shoot from position of impunity, dodge roll, shoot from position of impunity, rest, repeat. I initially tried playing ball and mixing melee with the final boss, and only won once I threw my hands up and used the bow exclusively. I feel like ranged weapons shouldn’t have been an option at all, as it breaks the combat structure pretty severely.
The game is both cheap and pretty short… which is good, since you need to play the game at least 3 times to see everything. It’s possible to permanently lock yourself out of the secret sidequest to unlock the true final boss, you see, not that the game tells you this anywhere or what you have to do to avoid it. I consider this a violation of the fundamental principle of Metroidvanias, which is that you’re supposed to be able to come back to stuff later because you know you can’t solve everything you see immediately. If I have to at any point ask, “Am I supposed to wait and come back here with another ability, or will that lock me out of this content permanently?” the fun of a Metroidvania is shattered.
There is also a ton of stuff locked by a key you can only get by talking to an NPC in the first area multiple times after the point at which you first encounter him, with no indication that he has more dialogue or that you will get anything for doing so. I should not have to consult a guide to figure out how to progress, that also goes against everything Metroidvanias stand for.
I haven’t mentioned the plot because there isn’t much of one. I get a strong feeling the writer has English as a second language, as while it’s generally coherent there are a number of confusing phrasings and grammatical errors. It’s also not well-implemented at all — you will occasionally have the gameplay interrupted with an unskippable cutscene of a disembodied voice assaulting you with nonsensical fantasy jargon, and that’s about it. I wasn’t even entirely clear on why I was doing anything or if my actions in the ending had any effect. Apparently the plot is explained in the manual or something, because TV Tropes tells me the backstory is: In this world, sin is a tangible magical force, and people offered it to their god to cleanse themselves; but the head honchos found out that sin could be used to make themselves stronger, and so started experimenting with it by concentrating it into a substance called “filth” that corrupts everything it touches. This unsurprisingly blew up in their faces and now everyone’s a monster. I’m given to understand this is also pretty much copied straight from Dark Souls.
Oh, and be warned there’s no way to pause, which is a pretty big oversight. I can understand not letting us pause time to leisurely sort through our inventory in the middle of a fight, but can you please give us a separate button for an actual pause in that case?