Ink-painted villages, hanging corpses and a parade of resentful spirits set the stage for a 2D wuxia slasher told twice over. The first campaign follows an exorcist’s revenge quest through a demon kingdom on Mount Key; the second hands the reins to a half-demon mercenary working the city of Mingzhou. Between them the game sketches a dark folklore of cursed wells, betrayed disciples and child-monster origin lore, delivered in grim folk-tale writing that treats massacred villages as environmental storytelling rather than backdrop. Serenity and gore share every frame, and the tension between serene brushwork and sacrifice altars is deliberate rather than accidental.
The parry sits at the centre of everything, and it earns the seat. Timed deflections against shielded enemies and slash-happy demons feed into charge attacks, stamina management and a skill-tree progression loop that stays generous throughout. Levels arrive as short, screen-sized encounters, and the dispel system demands a second action after every kill: banish the spirit or watch it resurrect with a purple health bar. Farming spirituality and fragments for upgrades keeps the loop moving, and the exorcism arts, unlocked through optional tutorial-style challenges at shrines, extend the kit without ever obscuring the fundamentals.
Boss quality is a scattergun. The snow ape, the Rhino Marquis and the skeleton monk land as properly authored duels; the invisible teleporting dragon locks skills at the worst moments, the shield-obsessed Dark General grinds, and the final Blood Demon strings together one-shot lightning attacks that cheapen an otherwise fair fight. The King Mandrel fight, fought largely blind inside red fog, then re-attempted as a damage-locked time attack, crystallises the worst of the design: demanding a 1:45 clear of a boss that barely takes damage is frustration with no skill ceiling to reach.
Mount Key’s guardians and the demon king’s throne room bookend the first tale, but the second campaign is where the structure pays off. Zhu’s spear kit moves while charging, deals in flashier combos and opens far bigger explorable maps, with side quests and pole-vault traversal the first protagonist never sees. The contrast recontextualises the whole game: the grounded, immobile-charge opening kit makes a better first act precisely because its limitations are real, and the second campaign’s freedom lands as earned escalation rather than repetition.
Platforming hit-detection betrays the rest of the craft. Platforms that visibly look like platforms swallow landings and drop the character straight through, and hitboxes on larger enemies wobble well past acceptable tolerance for a game built on frame-tight parries. The Switch version compounds this with a broken d-pad left input and the red-room bug, a platform-exclusive defect that floods whole screens with red fog and blinds navigation in exactly the encounters that demand sight.
The demon-bestiary manual and the folklore bestiary entries give the combat a flavour no western action-platformer carries, and the Vajra-broken trail of a mid-story betrayal twists the endgame into something personal. Mass hangings and sacrifice altars keep the visual register hostile, which suits a world where exorcism is less heroism than pest control. Even the repetitive tutorials, which restate the same information oddly often, cannot dull the core appeal of a defence that feels this powerful.
Overall, a stylish, parry-satisfying wuxia slasher whose dual campaigns, dispel-to-banish combat loop and ink-painted folklore identity outweigh erratic boss balance, wonky hitboxes and platform-exclusive bugs. Both stories reward the run, the second more than the first, and the combat alone justifies the trip; just play it anywhere other than Switch.
