Aphes is a thousand-year-cursed Greek-flavoured city-state where immortality has curdled into hunger, class resentment, cults and political decay, and the worldbuilding is the crown jewel. Martial-law posters, miner diaries, cult doctrine, love-letter tragedies and Colossus conscription notices reward every reading impulse, the political layer of warring factions lands with real weight, and the closing epilogue’s per-character scrolls scale with which side quests were finished. It is an unusually dense, readable world, and the writing treats its players as literate.
The structure is genuinely novel: party-RPG systems wrapped around a metroidvania-Souls hybrid, with ten interlocking regions, 106 chests, bestiary creatures granting permanent attribute elixirs, memory echoes, a lion trading quest junk for trinkets and DLC trials layered on top. Five weapon classes with two of each type invite exhaustive experimentation, and the parry, once learned, is genuinely satisfying. Mid-game unlocks reshape the experience twice: conduit fast travel arriving at the halfway point kills the tedium stone dead, and the realisation that the glimmering light signals nearby chests and secrets transforms how every remaining area is played.
Blade Dance is the combat identity and it is gloriously, hilariously broken: a cheap, mobile, hyper-damaging dagger skill that tears through everything, so overpowered that it becomes the whole build and never stops being fun. Riding one broken skill across a thirty-plus-hour completionist run is its own reward, and the elemental system, while uneven with astral strictly best over underpowered ice and fire, gives the upgrade economy texture through rare-material gating.
Boss quality is the sharpest weakness: the best are strong, from an amphitheatre harpy to the Titan rift, but too many lean on adds, one-shot zones and invincible phases, with bomb spawns in one late fight ranking among the worst mechanics the genre offers. The Black Warden chase in Styx is memorable design undercut by its cheap pacing, optional boss reskins in the DLC trials are at least honest about being cool rather than new, and the roster overall is generous even when individual fights are not.
Vague quest design pushes note-taking out of the game entirely: the Roxanne, Bion and Myron chains are so oblique that keeping browser notes becomes necessary, objectives refuse to state what they want, and missable content like the fennec-fox creatures and one silent bazaar echo gives no feedback at all. The story itself arrives through enormous unvoiced text dumps that invite skipping, a contradiction the game never resolves, though the plot still lands through the notes and epilogues even when the dumps are skipped wholesale.
Jank accumulates at the edges: low animation frame counts up close, bugged climbing, interactables with no highlight, a resting glitch in the sewers and one texture glitch in the mine, nothing game-breaking but all noticeable. Environmental hazards claim their share, drowning edges and insta-kill pits, and Blade Dance itself can launch its user off a cliff, a self-inflicted death the skill’s own momentum causes. Platforming generally is the least polished layer of an otherwise confident structure, and the talisman and gift-trading economy with the lion gives the collectible loop a social dimension no comparable game offers. The Paragon trials’ memory-plaque platforming, at least, is well designed even when its bosses are reskins.
Overall, a dense, text-heavy Greek-myth Souls-vania whose interlocking exploration, readable worldbuilding and one gloriously broken skill reward the completionist instinct more than anything else in its field, with vague questing, add-spam bosses and unvoiced text dumps as the honest costs. The epilogue scrolls, the glimmer-light secrets and the fast-travel unlock make the thirty-plus hours feel earned rather than padded, and the whole thing holds together with genuine warmth.
