Review: Profane

What we liked!

• The artwork: Big disclaimer, this game has one of the better artworks and boss designs out of all the Indie games I have played in the past. The arena scaled nicely with a 21:9 aspect ratio, and every single arena is custom-tailored towards the boss you are fighting at that moment.
• Smoothness and actual gameplay: The game plays amazing, and feels very fluent. You play around as a time-character that uses its mind/skills to defeat bosses. It’s a humble idea, to be honest. In the game, time is your resource, your currency, and your life total. So if you take a hit from the boss, you lose a certain amount of time left to fight that boss. But!! If the timer runs out, you are not done for the cause yet! In the game you are greeted with a lovely quote: Time is finite, once consumed, one last chance you get. This comes down to the fact that once depleted, time stops, and the next hit you take ends the battle. Amazing to listen and read through, to be honest!
• Music: This game also did a fantastic job in picking out just the right music for the game. Settle music throughout the explanation, and some nice and entertaining music during the battle phases. Only complaint I have about this, is that the default 100% master volume was quite a bit too loud for my liking. I usually don’t pull of my headphones in the title screen, whilst urgently looking for my volume mixer on windows, but this game had me do just that.

Somewhere between

• Difficulty: If you are not used to these types of games, you actually might dislike this specific game. The learning curve is steep as heck! Never in my whole 8 years of gaming, have I taken 48minits to defeat the tutorial, and never have I felt like quitting in a tutorial in a way this intensely. Once done with the tutorial boss, I was allowed to acquire 2 more skill moves, and was put right into the next boss to defeat, which took me another solid 52minits of dying time after time.

What we disliked

• Keymapping: To be short about it, this game is labeled as a “pc game” but in the opening, you are greeted with a strong warning: Controller advised. In my first run, the game felt horrible on mouse and keyboard, partly due to the fact that this game, like most Indie games, does not work with positioned keys, so AZERTY players are just out of luck, or have to rebind the entirety of all the keys. Swapping it to QWERTY makes the game more playable, but still not enjoyable. When I then eventually gave up, and connected the controller, damn does it feel different? Fair warning I presume then by the game developers.
• Lack of varieties: The game is nice to play, but after spending a few hours trying to memorize the way that a boss shoots out projectiles, and dying time after time, just to be put against a new boss with new projectiles, feels quite stale rather quickly.

If you do like skillful arena fighters, then this Indie game is a MUST try, especially if you can catch it on sale. It is quite a challenging game that tested my patience and ability to memorize patterns, and I did truly enjoy my time. Which leads me to rate this game for a score of 68%. A bit on the lower end, partly due to the fact that I have to play it with a controller, and it felt more like a pc-import then an actual PC game, but a worthwhile game to put on a small living room pc, and play on the big screen whilst sitting on the couch.