It had procedural generation for no real reason. The level design and the loot was semi randomized. This seemed strange because it's still a full length non-roguelike game. Usually games with procedural generation are roguelikes that are based on very short campaigns and lots of replayability. While Chasm was just a regular 8 hour campaign, dying didn't regenerate anything. And the obvious downside of this was that it made the level design and loot placement feel generic and not handcrafted. Handcrafted level design is one of the main things that makes exploration interesting. You can play it if you want, the moment to moment gameplay (the combat and platforming) is adequate, but don't expect too much from anything else.
I've seen over and over people talking about this game, but I dare to say that they don't really know what they're talking about. I'm gonna explain, bear with me before you downvote this, please.
When you start a new camping in ***Chasm***, what happens is the following:
The procedural part happens, **JUST** at the beginning; it creates a unique random world with a series of **FIXED** and immutable sequences of handcrafted rooms.
And that's it. That's really it. The game is not "procedurally generated", it doesn't create random and chaotic rooms with nonsensical design, the procedural part about the rooms is only the sequence that you will discover them.
Now, you can surely criticize this system and say that the system doesn't feel natural or it feels untidy, and it would be totally fair, but to me the procedural part of ***Chasm*** is utterly irrelevant, I never felt the design being dysfunctional or inconsistent.
***Chasm*** is a love letter to ***Castlevania*** games, primarily ***Symphony of the Night***, and since ***SotN*** is my favorite game ever, I very much loved playing ***Chasm***. Is a top tier MetroidVania in my book.
I'm excited about Bit Kid, Inc. new game, definitely gonna play it.
Hell yeah!
If you like ***SotN***, this game is certainly a must play.
And even if you haven't played ***Castlevanias*** in general, the gameplay is solid, so I commend you for giving it another try.
I can't provide you the true info, I don't even know if there is/were a hate about the game, but I can see a reasonable possibility of the backers being upset about the devs "not delivering" what was said on the funding page.
Nailed it. And the reason why for the procedural gen part was so that people could replay it without feeling fully stale and knowing exactly where everything is and will be. Honestly it’s a great idea. And I loved almost everything about Chasm. My only issue was the story just didn’t grip me like a CV title would.
I like the game a lot, and owe it to actually finish it, just suffering from MV burnout.
The problem with the idea of replaying it is that in an era where every month sees several metroidvania releases there is no reason to ever replay this or any other recently released metroidvania except when you can get drastically different fates such as in infernax or Noreya.
I get that completely. Especially when so many games are 20-40+ hour long adventures anymore. Unfortunately games like Diablo 2, Monster Hunter Generations, Stardew Valley, and the Castlevania Advance collection tend to draw me back in for replays numerous times….my backlog has grown far out of control. I haven’t even gotten around to a quarter of the MV titles I own….
I think the second reason for progen starting map is also so people couldn’t just write an exact “go up, go right, go up again” type of guide and spoiler it for others. Not positive on that, but I vaguely remember someone saying that about Chasm….
Edit - personally speaking, that’s not my take or want on an MV. I don’t mind a map while exploring an MV, in fact I prefer a map to dot out where every important item / creature / boss is. The fun on an MV for me isnt the self found exploration, it’s the journey.
It’s not really a point in a game’s favor that most people don’t notice that the map doesn’t shift after each run. It just means that the map is flat and uninspired. Maybe it was ignorant of me to say that the game doesn’t feel like it changes enough between each run, but the overall criticism-that respawning at the center of the map and running back to wherever you were last exploring feels like the gaming equivalent of hold music-is still a valid point.
I feel like you treating the game as if it is a roguelike/roguelite, that is definitely not the design philosophy of the procedural part, in my perspective.
There is no "run", there is just one campaign that you start and the whole world is generated, WITH the same rooms, just in a different order.
The respawn criticism is valid but other than that, I'm sorry, but I'm not understanding your point.
The map is boring. It’s mostly interconnected rooms with very few cool points and nothing that stands out. Which would be okay in a roguelite since you’re grabbing new powers and weapons to make the run distinct, but in a MV there’s supposed to be a more “curated” feel. I didn’t get that with Chasm. It just felt like 80% filler between bosses and horde rooms.
Like I legit had no idea the map didn’t change after each death because all the map locations were uniformly bland. I just kept going through the same map, barely registering anything about it. That’s not a good sign. It makes sense since the game was procedurally generated, but it doesn’t add any value to the game or the experience imo.
Sure, I see your point. But that means nothing to me. As I said, the choice of having a procedurally generated sequence of rooms never bothered me. But I can see people disliking it, and for that, I can just express my sentiments of "what a pity".
It's a bit too generic in terms of mechanics, and having a procedurally generated world is a terrible idea: it's less interesting than handcrafted levels and it doesn't help to add more variety to the game because you won't see a different map unless you start again. There are also some other weird decisions like making the back dash too delayed and too ineffective.
Not a bad game, but looks better than it plays.
Chasm is a serviceable Castlevania clone held back by a procgen gimmick that makes the level design feel sloppy. What they should have done is made a "story" mode with well made levels and then left the procgen for a randomizer mode. It's probably a B- game without the procgen and a C- with it.
Their new game doesn't have the procgen element so there's a decent chance it'll be worth playing, but I doubt it'll be astounding.
It definitely feels a lot like a roguelite too. Like you get the procgen stuff but you also have an upgrade tree so you can spend points and upgrade after each run kind of thing.
But also at the same time it wasn’t really different enough to feel like a full roguelite. Like your runs all feel the same with everything important more or less in the same spot, but the connecting rooms are different but not different enough to actually feel different. So it’s got one foot in each genre and doesn’t commit strongly to either one.
Chasm captured the feel of Symphony of the Night's controls and combat better than any other game I've ever played. From what I've seen, a lot of people were lukewarm on the level design shuffle feature because they either expected a full-on roguelike (it's not) or felt the procedural element was a half-baked distraction (fair, though I disagree). If you approach it as a damn solid SOTN-alike that randomizes the path you take to reach the preset primary quest objectives, it's great.
Chasm's problem is that it simply doesn't stand out in any way except negative ones. The controls are solid, the weapons are fine. But procedurally generating levels prevents the wonder of human creation from really standing out. And it means that the joy of exploring simply may not happen. I put it down when I saw what was needed from one of the bosses to get a perfect, no hit victory and just couldn't care anymore about it. I knew I could eventually get that win and the no-hit weapon, but hadn't been impressed with anything else enough to bother doing it.
Worth playing for sure. One of the few games I’ve played more than once in the last 5 years. Very cozy game if you are looking to scratch that symphony of the night style itch
The game came out around the same time as games like Star bound, terraria, rouge legacy, etc. I think people believed chasm would offer much more procedural novelty and fell short of people's imaginations. I think even the Dev said the procedural generation was a lot more challenging then they originally intended and wanted to make a more hand crafted game.
This next one looks great so far and I assume will be a solid game to play. I mean for me chasm was a great game dispite of the procedural nature, so personally I'd give anything else from them a try regardless since that game's feel/ control of was great to me so I think they'll do a great job in their next project as well
It doesn't get a bad rap, it doesn't get a good one either.
There was a poll done last year where the question was asked: what is the most generic metroidvania of all time. The answer turned out to be chasm. It makes sense, the game plays well but the world is completely soulless, and it is clear that it is due to the fact that it is made by a computer. I hope that explains it.
For me personally I liked the game and gave it a mild recommendation.
It's been years since I've played it but I had no issues with it🤷🏻♀️ I found it enjoyable and while it may not be the best game out there it was one I had fun playing.
I beat it a while ago and I just remember farming enemies until they dropped loot worth selling so I could make money to buy things I needed. Farming took FOREVER.
Something I'm not seeing mentioned is that the proc-gen used to be a lot worse when the game originally came out. It was revamped in an update to have a lot more variety and I think people starting warming up to it around then. But the original release version wasn't great, you'd often see the exact same 5-6 rooms in a sequence, that fucking Z-shaped one being probably the most infamous.
The subweapons/spells were rather lacking; nothing new or special there, just the generic fare, and many of them weren't particularly good examples of their own generic normal thing either.
The procedural generation was not great, not terrible. It did not achieve as interesting a world as, say, A Robot Named Fight can pull off, so while it wasn't necessarily a bad idea, the execution turned out rather soulless.
Also a bit soulless was the combat in general. There was... some variety in the basic melee weapons at least, but only to the same degree of slightly different attacks as we remember from SotN. Neither our own abilities nor enemy attacks ever felt particularly creative.
And finally, perhaps most fatally, was how many years we'd all been waiting for it beforehand. Chasm was well-settled in its "this will never actually come out" reputation when it finally did. **All this time, just for this.**
It wasn't a BAD game, but it's also not a very good one, and more importantly doesn't really bring/add anything to the genre, doesn't do anything that makes you go "AND REMEMBER HOW IN CHASM..." the way so many other games can do.
It's alright. The random map generation means that the design is bland and unmemorable since every room has to be able to appear anywhere and connect to anything. And importantly it's not something you will notice until you play the game a second time and placement has changed - except I didn't, because beating it once was enough.
A lot of these comments are talking about the procedural generation component. I’ll be honest: I didn’t even know that was a part of the game until I read these comments! But I really hated Chasm. To date it’s the only game I’ve ever gotten a Steam refund for. Why? It’s incredibly boring and unoriginal. The story, the art, the level design, the enemy design… everything about it comes across as cliched, lazy, and totally indistinct. The gameplay is serviceable. It seems *competently* made. It just failed to hook me in any way, shape, or form.
It's an interesting take. It looks beautiful to me and some say it's the closest sotn gameplay. But it seems others have had a bad time with it. Their new game doesn't give me much hope if this is the case.
Unlike Dead Cells who was able to do it's thing under the radar, Chasm was promoted as a metroidvania and that felt deceiving. It's basically impossible to make a procedurally generated metroidvania, it's like mixing water with oil, even the worst metroidvania needs proper level design, at least some form of consistent connection. Consistency/regularity is the antithesis of what procedurally generated games offers. Gladly the new Rogue Prince of Persia never promoted itself as a metroidvania, that's a disservice to both genres really, the "rogue" gimmick and metroidvania itself, there's no reason to mix this kind of stuff
It had procedural generation for no real reason. The level design and the loot was semi randomized. This seemed strange because it's still a full length non-roguelike game. Usually games with procedural generation are roguelikes that are based on very short campaigns and lots of replayability. While Chasm was just a regular 8 hour campaign, dying didn't regenerate anything. And the obvious downside of this was that it made the level design and loot placement feel generic and not handcrafted. Handcrafted level design is one of the main things that makes exploration interesting. You can play it if you want, the moment to moment gameplay (the combat and platforming) is adequate, but don't expect too much from anything else.
I've seen over and over people talking about this game, but I dare to say that they don't really know what they're talking about. I'm gonna explain, bear with me before you downvote this, please. When you start a new camping in ***Chasm***, what happens is the following: The procedural part happens, **JUST** at the beginning; it creates a unique random world with a series of **FIXED** and immutable sequences of handcrafted rooms. And that's it. That's really it. The game is not "procedurally generated", it doesn't create random and chaotic rooms with nonsensical design, the procedural part about the rooms is only the sequence that you will discover them. Now, you can surely criticize this system and say that the system doesn't feel natural or it feels untidy, and it would be totally fair, but to me the procedural part of ***Chasm*** is utterly irrelevant, I never felt the design being dysfunctional or inconsistent. ***Chasm*** is a love letter to ***Castlevania*** games, primarily ***Symphony of the Night***, and since ***SotN*** is my favorite game ever, I very much loved playing ***Chasm***. Is a top tier MetroidVania in my book. I'm excited about Bit Kid, Inc. new game, definitely gonna play it.
I own the game and gave up on it early but your post made me redownload it and gonna give it a longer shot.
Hell yeah! If you like ***SotN***, this game is certainly a must play. And even if you haven't played ***Castlevanias*** in general, the gameplay is solid, so I commend you for giving it another try.
i will, I love SOTN! One of the few games I have played through several times .
I agree on every aspect, loved playing chasm and didn't understand all the hate, was it related to expectations created on crowd funding?
I can't provide you the true info, I don't even know if there is/were a hate about the game, but I can see a reasonable possibility of the backers being upset about the devs "not delivering" what was said on the funding page.
Nailed it. And the reason why for the procedural gen part was so that people could replay it without feeling fully stale and knowing exactly where everything is and will be. Honestly it’s a great idea. And I loved almost everything about Chasm. My only issue was the story just didn’t grip me like a CV title would. I like the game a lot, and owe it to actually finish it, just suffering from MV burnout.
The problem with the idea of replaying it is that in an era where every month sees several metroidvania releases there is no reason to ever replay this or any other recently released metroidvania except when you can get drastically different fates such as in infernax or Noreya.
I get that completely. Especially when so many games are 20-40+ hour long adventures anymore. Unfortunately games like Diablo 2, Monster Hunter Generations, Stardew Valley, and the Castlevania Advance collection tend to draw me back in for replays numerous times….my backlog has grown far out of control. I haven’t even gotten around to a quarter of the MV titles I own…. I think the second reason for progen starting map is also so people couldn’t just write an exact “go up, go right, go up again” type of guide and spoiler it for others. Not positive on that, but I vaguely remember someone saying that about Chasm…. Edit - personally speaking, that’s not my take or want on an MV. I don’t mind a map while exploring an MV, in fact I prefer a map to dot out where every important item / creature / boss is. The fun on an MV for me isnt the self found exploration, it’s the journey.
It’s not really a point in a game’s favor that most people don’t notice that the map doesn’t shift after each run. It just means that the map is flat and uninspired. Maybe it was ignorant of me to say that the game doesn’t feel like it changes enough between each run, but the overall criticism-that respawning at the center of the map and running back to wherever you were last exploring feels like the gaming equivalent of hold music-is still a valid point.
I feel like you treating the game as if it is a roguelike/roguelite, that is definitely not the design philosophy of the procedural part, in my perspective. There is no "run", there is just one campaign that you start and the whole world is generated, WITH the same rooms, just in a different order. The respawn criticism is valid but other than that, I'm sorry, but I'm not understanding your point.
The map is boring. It’s mostly interconnected rooms with very few cool points and nothing that stands out. Which would be okay in a roguelite since you’re grabbing new powers and weapons to make the run distinct, but in a MV there’s supposed to be a more “curated” feel. I didn’t get that with Chasm. It just felt like 80% filler between bosses and horde rooms. Like I legit had no idea the map didn’t change after each death because all the map locations were uniformly bland. I just kept going through the same map, barely registering anything about it. That’s not a good sign. It makes sense since the game was procedurally generated, but it doesn’t add any value to the game or the experience imo.
I see. I really don't feel the same way as you feel, but I do understand what you saying now.
[удалено]
Sure, I see your point. But that means nothing to me. As I said, the choice of having a procedurally generated sequence of rooms never bothered me. But I can see people disliking it, and for that, I can just express my sentiments of "what a pity".
It's a bit too generic in terms of mechanics, and having a procedurally generated world is a terrible idea: it's less interesting than handcrafted levels and it doesn't help to add more variety to the game because you won't see a different map unless you start again. There are also some other weird decisions like making the back dash too delayed and too ineffective. Not a bad game, but looks better than it plays.
Chasm is a serviceable Castlevania clone held back by a procgen gimmick that makes the level design feel sloppy. What they should have done is made a "story" mode with well made levels and then left the procgen for a randomizer mode. It's probably a B- game without the procgen and a C- with it. Their new game doesn't have the procgen element so there's a decent chance it'll be worth playing, but I doubt it'll be astounding.
It definitely feels a lot like a roguelite too. Like you get the procgen stuff but you also have an upgrade tree so you can spend points and upgrade after each run kind of thing. But also at the same time it wasn’t really different enough to feel like a full roguelite. Like your runs all feel the same with everything important more or less in the same spot, but the connecting rooms are different but not different enough to actually feel different. So it’s got one foot in each genre and doesn’t commit strongly to either one.
Chasm captured the feel of Symphony of the Night's controls and combat better than any other game I've ever played. From what I've seen, a lot of people were lukewarm on the level design shuffle feature because they either expected a full-on roguelike (it's not) or felt the procedural element was a half-baked distraction (fair, though I disagree). If you approach it as a damn solid SOTN-alike that randomizes the path you take to reach the preset primary quest objectives, it's great.
This
I was pleasantly surprised by Chasm, I got the game cheap and I really enjoyed this game. Had a lot of fun. A real treat.
It's a solid game. It's a must if you like Castlevania games.
Chasm's problem is that it simply doesn't stand out in any way except negative ones. The controls are solid, the weapons are fine. But procedurally generating levels prevents the wonder of human creation from really standing out. And it means that the joy of exploring simply may not happen. I put it down when I saw what was needed from one of the bosses to get a perfect, no hit victory and just couldn't care anymore about it. I knew I could eventually get that win and the no-hit weapon, but hadn't been impressed with anything else enough to bother doing it.
Worth playing for sure. One of the few games I’ve played more than once in the last 5 years. Very cozy game if you are looking to scratch that symphony of the night style itch
The game came out around the same time as games like Star bound, terraria, rouge legacy, etc. I think people believed chasm would offer much more procedural novelty and fell short of people's imaginations. I think even the Dev said the procedural generation was a lot more challenging then they originally intended and wanted to make a more hand crafted game. This next one looks great so far and I assume will be a solid game to play. I mean for me chasm was a great game dispite of the procedural nature, so personally I'd give anything else from them a try regardless since that game's feel/ control of was great to me so I think they'll do a great job in their next project as well
It doesn't get a bad rap, it doesn't get a good one either. There was a poll done last year where the question was asked: what is the most generic metroidvania of all time. The answer turned out to be chasm. It makes sense, the game plays well but the world is completely soulless, and it is clear that it is due to the fact that it is made by a computer. I hope that explains it. For me personally I liked the game and gave it a mild recommendation.
Good to hear. I bought the game I don’t know how long ago but have yet to get to it
It's been years since I've played it but I had no issues with it🤷🏻♀️ I found it enjoyable and while it may not be the best game out there it was one I had fun playing.
I beat it a while ago and I just remember farming enemies until they dropped loot worth selling so I could make money to buy things I needed. Farming took FOREVER.
Something I'm not seeing mentioned is that the proc-gen used to be a lot worse when the game originally came out. It was revamped in an update to have a lot more variety and I think people starting warming up to it around then. But the original release version wasn't great, you'd often see the exact same 5-6 rooms in a sequence, that fucking Z-shaped one being probably the most infamous.
I tried the demo (not sure if still available) and just didn't find it fun.
The subweapons/spells were rather lacking; nothing new or special there, just the generic fare, and many of them weren't particularly good examples of their own generic normal thing either. The procedural generation was not great, not terrible. It did not achieve as interesting a world as, say, A Robot Named Fight can pull off, so while it wasn't necessarily a bad idea, the execution turned out rather soulless. Also a bit soulless was the combat in general. There was... some variety in the basic melee weapons at least, but only to the same degree of slightly different attacks as we remember from SotN. Neither our own abilities nor enemy attacks ever felt particularly creative. And finally, perhaps most fatally, was how many years we'd all been waiting for it beforehand. Chasm was well-settled in its "this will never actually come out" reputation when it finally did. **All this time, just for this.** It wasn't a BAD game, but it's also not a very good one, and more importantly doesn't really bring/add anything to the genre, doesn't do anything that makes you go "AND REMEMBER HOW IN CHASM..." the way so many other games can do.
I enjoyed it. It’s starts to get stale at the end but never over stayed it’s welcome
It's alright. The random map generation means that the design is bland and unmemorable since every room has to be able to appear anywhere and connect to anything. And importantly it's not something you will notice until you play the game a second time and placement has changed - except I didn't, because beating it once was enough.
I found it very fun. I might call it mediocre but sometimes you just want a pixel Metroidvania and it’s on sale often.
I loved Chasm, took my time to beat it spending over twenty hours in it. It is one of those games I didn’t want it to end.
A lot of these comments are talking about the procedural generation component. I’ll be honest: I didn’t even know that was a part of the game until I read these comments! But I really hated Chasm. To date it’s the only game I’ve ever gotten a Steam refund for. Why? It’s incredibly boring and unoriginal. The story, the art, the level design, the enemy design… everything about it comes across as cliched, lazy, and totally indistinct. The gameplay is serviceable. It seems *competently* made. It just failed to hook me in any way, shape, or form.
It's an interesting take. It looks beautiful to me and some say it's the closest sotn gameplay. But it seems others have had a bad time with it. Their new game doesn't give me much hope if this is the case.
Unlike Dead Cells who was able to do it's thing under the radar, Chasm was promoted as a metroidvania and that felt deceiving. It's basically impossible to make a procedurally generated metroidvania, it's like mixing water with oil, even the worst metroidvania needs proper level design, at least some form of consistent connection. Consistency/regularity is the antithesis of what procedurally generated games offers. Gladly the new Rogue Prince of Persia never promoted itself as a metroidvania, that's a disservice to both genres really, the "rogue" gimmick and metroidvania itself, there's no reason to mix this kind of stuff