Bats are adorable creatures in real life. In Cathedral, they’re cruel harbingers of poverty and gravity who invariably swoop in from out of nowhere and knock you off of a narrow ledge into something else that kills you. The only consequence death carries in Cathedral is the loss of 10% of your money, but that’s more than enough to make bats a pain in the rear. It certainly doesn’t help that I’m currently stuck in a forest packed with the devils. The absence of an exit suggests that I’m missing something crucial, and yet every promising lead I discover proves useless without that missing piece. It’s only been an hour and a half and yet I’m hopelessly lost. That’s not to say that Cathedral is a bad game, though: its gameplay feels tight, the boss fights I’ve encountered are enjoyable, and the world is interestingly constructed. These bats are just getting on my nerves.

Cathedral is a metroidvania, so you’re constantly coming across items and areas that you can’t take advantage of until you obtain an unknown future ability. I’ve seen a whole lot of tiny passageways that look eerily like Metroid II‘s openings for the Morph/Spider Ball, for example. The goal—early on, at least—appears to be the collection of orbs in order to open a door. One imagines that along the way, the mostly mute main character will find clues that help them to figure out who they are and how they ended up in the eponymous cathedral.

The early cathedral gameplay serves as a decent tutorial for the basic movement, teaching you how to attack, block, and bounce off of enemies with a downward sword attack that needs to be timed correctly since it only lasts a moment. You’re otherwise left to figure out how things work on your own. Only some of the map’s icons are self-explanatory, so I often find myself wandering around in search of secrets that might not be present or presently accessible. Cathedral‘s avoidance of hand-holding is refreshing nevertheless, and I look forward to exploring more of the game once I figure out where I’m going. Those bats are becoming a real problem, though—the forest’s color scheme has a lot of red tiles, and bats are also red, making for a lack of contrast that obscures their positions.

It’s also not possible to block enemy contact damage with your shield, which can be frustrating since they can often move through walls and platforms. Cathedral is looking like a game that’ll focus on precise movement far more than careful blocking. I’m totally down with that just as soon as the bats either go away or stop blending in with similarly colored backgrounds; taking damage knocks you back a little, so getting swooped can knock you off of your platform and force you to begin your ascent all over again. That’s just one of many reasons why bats are the worst.

Cathedral impressions: I’m lost and I hate bats first appeared on Killa Penguin