Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior is an impressive debut from Sand Door Studio and offers an interesting time-altering twist to the traditional hack’n’slash roguelike cross that has been popularized since the release of Supergiant’s Hades. Though the roguelike’s core loop does offer plenty of interesting tactical moments throughout the games eight to 10-hour run, the overall package lands short of the lofty heights reached by games of a similar ilk. 

In Lysfanga, you take on the role of Imë, a mysterious warrior known as the “Lysfanga” who is sworn to protect the New Kingdom. However, when you are drawn to investigate rumors in the ancient Cities of Mayura, an old and evil enemy known as the Raxes re-emerges.  

Hold your horses

The game starts with an opening exposition dump to set the scene. While credit should be given to the Sand Door team for attempting to develop the lore and history of the mystical land of Mayura, it can be a little much.

The names of people, cities, and enemies are thrown at you in a five-minute opening section to admittedly very pretty still images; unfortunately, in exposing so much early on in a bid to establish the world, the agency to then discover these stories is lost. 

This apathy is condensed further by a story that has its twists and turns but never does enough to hook its claws in entirely. This problem, in part, is down to vocal performances that feel flat, with each line of dialogue carelessly shuffling to the next. But even if the performances were top-notch, the story serves only to get the player through to the next combat set piece - an excuse to move you forward rather than a compelling reason to. This lack of character is a shame, considering the craft and care that has gone into designing what is often a gorgeously detailed environment.

Battle-hardened 

Thankfully, the core experience in Lysfanga is still incredibly solid, bordering great. When Imë arrives at a combat encounter, the game pauses and the top-down isometric view allows the player time to survey the scene. 

This mechanic gives you time to spot where the enemies are, how to get to them, and what hazards might scupper them. This feature felt very similar to XCOM in that you have as much time as desired before the combat begins to work out your moves, which in turn helps add a healthy dose of control to hack’n’slash action that can feel chaotic and random in other games. 

With each attempt, you have a specific time limit before you reset, and the attempt you just made is replayed via your Remnant; think time-trial ghost from a Mario Kart game but with more violence. Your previous Remnant’s actions carry across all corresponding runs. So if you took your first run up the left side, you can run up the right on your second, and all the Raxes previously slain will remain dead.  

As the game progresses, levels play around with this more. Certain gates open and close when passed through. While some Raxes are psychologically linked, meaning they need to be destroyed simultaneously, and so on. 

These compact battles, with increasingly exciting twists on the formula, are often brilliant. On top of this, there are recommended time challenges on each encounter. After the second act of the story, there's a whole new game mode that allows you to add modifiers to increase the challenge further and retry previous battles. For those players who are gripped by trying to find the optimal paths and quickest times, this will be the perfect hook and offers impressive replayability beyond the story. 

There are some issues here also, however. Though the game as a whole runs wonderfully, some enemies feel twitchy, such as a Raxes that, when defeated, fires in a straight line and explodes. The level design clearly wants you to deploy this on the enemy, but getting this beast going in the correct trajectory often feels random. On top of this, the core fighting styles of standard, light, and heavy weapons don’t feel dramatically different from one another, and unlocked spells and runes do somewhat change the feel of the game but never really alter the encounters in any meaningful way. 

Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior scratches the hack’n’slash itch successfully. The game is tight, the combat is slick, and it feels good to play. However, there isn’t enough content here, particularly in character build or within its story, that makes Lysfanga genuinely unmissable. Overall, Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior is fun and snappy; you just won’t be using your Remnants to replay it over and over. 

For more thrilling games, check out the best roguelike games and the best indie games available to enjoy right now.

Phantom Abyss is a new action roguelike 3D platformer from Team WIBY. The premise of this platformer is relatively simple; you’re trapped in an ancient temple and are forced to gather sacred relics in order to release yourself, along with the God of the Abyss, who sends you on your journey to freedom armed with nothing but the right attitude and a grappling hook/whip. With asynchronous multiplayer available, you can enjoy the trials of these dungeons alone, with friends, or with complete strangers. 

There are four main levels, each based around an element like fire or water. At each main stage, there are six temple runs to choose from, and only three of them need to be completed to progress to the next zone. There are also extra levels that you can access by collecting keys from chests, which are scattered throughout each map. 

However, various restrictions in each dungeon go beyond simple obstacles like traps and spikes. These could be limited health, one-hit kills, or a temple Guardian: an ancient deity that chases you across the map trying to kill you. These restrictions are what keep you on your toes.

Rage against the temple 

The action-adventure parkour game has been in Early Access for over two years, with the developers slowly polishing up rough edges and adding new features in correspondence with community feedback. Unfortunately, right now, ahead of its official release on January 25, more refining is needed until Phantom Abyss can join the ranks of the best roguelike games. This game has more than a few issues that need resolving, all of which make an already complicated game more frustrating. 

My biggest gripes with this action platformer concern the temperamental physics, repetitive maps, and lengthy load times. While perfection is often impossible in game development, roguelikes demand a higher baseline thanks to their inherently irritating premise of starting all over again after each death. Unfortunately, Phantom Abyss misses the mark, and its problems make an annoying game even worse. 

For example, while flying through the mossy ancient tombs, I often found myself scrambling at walls and ledges after my flow was interrupted by my grappling hook/whip falling short of its target. Despite all my efforts to line it up in the right way, it would only occasionally work. This meant almost instant death every time, which was especially frustrating when I was trying to outrun a Guardian. 

Such strange physics also made Phantom Abyss feel like a retro platformer. While these can be great fun, it did mean that your whip swings in a very disjointed way. In addition to this, each level feels very basic and somewhat familiar. However, this was mostly down to the fact that they are. Despite levels being procedurally generated, each map has similar layouts and obstacles, with most of the changes being small, like adding poison gas or dangerous enemies. This repetition means that exploring the ancient tombs gets old pretty quickly. 

It’s common for roguelikes to corner a player into punching a hole in their monitor. However, they need to get the balance between rage and reward just right in order to be enjoyable. Every death should always be your fault, something that you learn from and fix before the next run. And, while there is some training involved in how you navigate dangerous obstacles in Phantom Abyss, sometimes you are left wondering what, if anything, you could have done differently to avoid death and having to completely restart. 

At one point, I was being chased down a narrow corridor by a flaming head Guardian who was trying to eat me. After falling through the cracks right by the doorway, I restarted at the other end of the corridor. Unfortunately, this meant that the Guardian lay between me and the next checkpoint. I couldn’t go back, or around the gigantic flaming monster, so I was quickly gobbled up and sent back to the very beginning to try it all over again. These untimely restarts, combined with the lengthy load times, made completing Phantom Abyss feel like slogging through wet clay despite its fast-paced premise.

It’s dangerous to go alone 

The best part of Phantom Abyss is the asynchronous multiplayer, which means that you don’t have to wait for players to join; it’s instant. This feature also means that you can play alongside others without strangers impacting too much of your run. While you can rely on others to open doors for you, a feature which I did take full advantage of, these gateways are timed and mean that you can’t just sit back and wait for someone else to do the grunt work for you.

This form of multiplayer also means that you can travel into the dangerous dungeons with friends and try to complete the runs with support rather than entirely alone. Even though this will probably make the experience slightly more bearable, that’s not something to be praised in the grand scheme of things, as any game can be made better if you add your friends into the mix. 

So, as a whole, Phantom Abyss is a pretty nondescript roguelike and 3D platformer compared to some of the giants like Spelunky 2 or Ghostrunner 2, which checks all the boxes concerning creative level design, fluid traversal, and rewarding challenges. Still, the concept does show promise, such as its fun capacity for multiplayer and somewhat challenging maps, and it could potentially be refined with a few tweaks to the dungeon layout, Guardian behavior, and loading times. If you’re a fan of retro platformers, then this action-adventure game may still be worth checking out, but, unless you have a burning desire to play, it’s hard to fully recommend

If you’re a fan of games that push you to the limit, then check out the best survival games and the best FPS games that are available to play right now.