Kingdom Shell

Solid with a smattering of spectacular

Why

Why Not

Impressions

Kingdom Shell starts off as bog standard as a Metroidvania can be, albeit with very detailed pixel art. You have some basic melee and ranged enemies to beat up, ability gates to bounce off and secrets to discover. This persists even after the first boss, where you go from detailed but bland mountains to detailed but (somewhat) bland undermountain caves. Then, just as you're about to relieve a gnome king of his treasure, your floating exposition buddy shows up. And you jump on his cloud for a shoot 'em up section & boss fight.

That's where Kingdom Shell really started growing on me, and its a pity it happens over an hour into the game because there's a chance some players bounce off before that and miss a really well made game. There definitely are a lot of stretches which scream 'standard Metroidvania', but it also never dips below 'solid' and the high points are great. I especially enjoyed the Queen fight for its presentation and sharp but fair increase in moveset complexity compared to earlier bosses.

It's a bit unfortunate that her fight is toward the end of the game, and that in general the 'quality' of the experience scales up dramatically as you near and pass the halfway point. There's potentially a bit too much time at the start spent on relatively mundane environments and entirely mundane enemies; a bit more early creativity with enemies and environments could've lead to more players sticking around to get to the really interesting stuff. Having said that; I've seen the release version of the starting area and the dev definitely made huge improvements versus what it looked like then, so good on them for putting in what was probably a fair amount of work to address issues.

There are a few variations on the standard formula as well. For one, your only source of healing is a consumable Nectar which doesn't refill at save points (at least until you unlock it through exploration) and dying causes you to drop a fixed percentage of your currency on respawn, no corpse runs. Secrets are handled in some interesting ways too, with a mix of standard illusory walls, hidden ladders just poking out from ceilings and cryptic rumours delivered by random NPCs who demand large sums of money up front.

Some things could stand to be a bit more 'standard Metroidvania', like multiple map pins so you're not struggling to remember why you couldn't progress past that dead end. Overall though Kingdom Shell is a polished, enjoyable experience which builds up steam over its runtime to a satisfying conclusion. Well worth fishing out of the sea of competent Metroidvanias we're surrounded by these days.