Info about SINNER: Sacrifice for Redemption:

Official game description:
Rise from the depths a crumbling kingdom and to the challenge of defeating increasingly difficult demonic bosses. Choose aspects of yourself to weaken before defeating the avatars of Sin in the boss battler Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption. Inspired by classic boss-battlers and modern skill-based action RPGs, with a dash of gothic anime styling and horror storytelling, Sinner promises a thrilling and bone-chilling experience.  
A lone warrior stands on a strange shore, his mind clouded and his past forgotten, but an unstoppable force drives him on. He is Adam, guilty of a great sin and drawn to this place by powers as secret as they are terrifying. As his home, the Kingdom of Cavanis, languishes in blasphemy, Adam must face a series of trials in a desperate quest for redemption
Game Features
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*   Challenge yourself against eight distinct, brutal bosses  
*   Sacrifice strength and stats in Sinner’s “level-down” gameplay  
*   Equip a plethora of unlockable weapons and items to adapt to your weaknesses  
*   Master Sinner’s hard-but-fair combat  
*   Bring peace to a tortured soul in a dark and harrowing tale with multiple endings  
*   Take on new challenges in a variety of game modes for replayability

Release date: 22 Oct, 2018

Categories: Boss Rush, Souls-like Combat, Single-player Story, Multiple Endings, Character Progression, Real-time Combat, Strategic Combat


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Engaging Boss Rush Gameplay (weight 0.42): Players consistently praise the game's core boss rush concept, finding the boss fights themselves to be highly enjoyable, challenging, and fair. The overall gameplay experience is described as fun, smooth, and rewarding, offering significant satisfaction upon overcoming difficult encounters.
- Exceptional Boss Design & Variety (weight 0.33): The design of the bosses is a major highlight, with players commending their unique aesthetics, varied mechanics, and thoughtful implementation. Each boss feels distinct, requiring different strategies and offering a fresh challenge, which contributes significantly to the game's appeal.
- High-Quality Indie Experience (weight 0.3): Players generally view the game as a high-quality indie title, especially considering its development by a small team. They find it to be a worthwhile purchase, offering good replayability through achievements and additional modes, and appreciate its overall concept and execution.
- Appealing Art & Atmosphere (weight 0.22): The game's presentation, including its art style, visuals, atmosphere, and audio, receives positive feedback. Players appreciate the detailed graphics, fitting background music, and the overall grim yet beautiful aesthetic that enhances the boss encounters.
- Innovative Sacrifice Mechanic (weight 0.17): The innovative 'sacrifice' mechanic, where players choose to weaken their character before each boss fight, is highly praised. This system adds a unique strategic layer, making each encounter a puzzle and enhancing the game's replayability and depth.
- Strong Souls-like Experience (weight 0.15): The game is frequently compared to the Souls series, with players appreciating its challenging nature and similar 'vibe' while also noting its unique boss-rush approach. It offers a satisfying experience for fans of the Souls-like genre, providing a focused challenge without some of the typical genre elements like extensive exploration or upgrade systems.
- Decent Story & Lore (weight 0.12): The game's story is considered decent, simple, and easy to understand, providing a complete narrative. The cutscenes are appreciated for their role in conveying the ambiguous and mysterious lore of each boss, and the final boss is noted for its narrative impact.
- Fluid & Balanced Combat (weight 0.1): Combat is described as fluid, reactive, and satisfying, striking a good balance in difficulty. Players feel the challenge is appropriate, demanding respect for each boss without being overly frustrating, leading to a visceral and engaging fighting experience.
- Strategic Item Usage (weight 0.06): The strategic use of throwable items and weapon buffs is noted as an important aspect of gameplay. These items provide tactical advantages, allowing players to interrupt boss moves or exploit weaknesses, adding another layer to combat strategy.
- Multiple Endings & Replayability (weight 0.05): The inclusion of multiple endings and bonus challenge modes adds significant replay value. These features encourage players to revisit the game and explore different outcomes or test their skills further.

Common complaints:
- Boss design is flawed (weight 0.99): Many players found the boss encounters to be frustrating and poorly designed. Issues include unfair mechanics, inconsistent hitboxes, excessive projectile spam, and a lack of rewarding parry opportunities. Specific bosses like the final boss (Adam) and Gluttony were highlighted for particularly egregious design flaws, such as one-shot mechanics, environmental hazards, and input reading.
- Poor Souls-like execution (weight 0.77): Many players felt the game failed to deliver on the 'Souls-like' experience it aimed for. It was criticized for lacking the depth, exploration, character progression, and satisfying combat typically found in the genre, often feeling like a shallow or poorly executed copy.
- Sacrifice system is frustrating (weight 0.7): The game's core 'sacrifice' mechanic, which makes the player character weaker after each boss fight, was widely criticized. Players felt it created artificial difficulty, reduced motivation for progression, and went against traditional gaming concepts of character growth, leading to a frustrating and unrewarding experience.
- Inconsistent combat feedback (weight 0.26): Combat feedback, particularly for blocking and parrying, was consistently poor. Players struggled with inconsistent hit detection, unclear visual and audio cues for successful actions, and misleading hitboxes, making precise combat difficult and frustrating.
- Weak story and lore (weight 0.16): The game's narrative elements were largely absent or poorly implemented. Players noted a lack of a coherent story, minimal lore, uninspired dialogue, and no meaningful character progression or side quests, contributing to a feeling of emptiness.
- Unpolished graphics and audio (weight 0.09): Players reported that the game's graphics felt outdated and unpolished, with blurry visuals and a lack of anti-aliasing. Additionally, there were complaints about half-baked animations, freezing cinematics, and unsatisfactory sound effects.
- Clunky player movement (weight 0.08): The player character's movement was criticized for being slow and unresponsive. Players also noted low poise, leading to frequent staggers, and stiff animations, which negatively impacted the fluidity of gameplay.
- Limited weapon variety (weight 0.08): The variety and utility of weapons were found to be lacking. Players felt that most weapons were similar in moveset, often useless compared to the starting weapon, and did not offer meaningful strategic choices or build diversity.
- Problematic camera system (weight 0.07): The camera system was a significant source of frustration. Players reported a locked, low FOV camera that caused nausea, limited visibility, and made it difficult to track enemies, often leading to environmental deaths.

Gameplay feedback:
- Boss Rush with Sacrifice Mechanic (weight 0.79): The game is primarily a boss rush experience, featuring 8-9 unique boss encounters. A core mechanic involves players sacrificing stats or abilities before each boss fight, leading to permanent debuffs that increase difficulty throughout the game. This 'level-down' system is a central and innovative aspect.
- Diverse Boss Mechanics (weight 0.4): Specific bosses like Gluttony, Greed, Pride, Sloth, Lust, Wrath, and Jealousy each have unique mechanics, attack patterns, and weaknesses. Players need to learn these individual strategies, often involving parrying, specific attack timings, or exploiting environmental elements.
- Limited Weapon Variety (weight 0.19): Players have access to a limited set of weapon types, including Sword & Shield, Greatsword, Dual Blades, and Dual Axes. The Greatsword, especially its running heavy attack, is noted as a highly effective strategy for many boss encounters due to its damage and poise.
- Short Game Length & Difficulty (weight 0.17): The game is relatively short, with most playthroughs taking between 3 to 6 hours to complete. While it offers a basic tutorial, the overall difficulty is described as moderate, becoming easier for experienced Souls-like players once boss patterns are learned.
- Strong Souls-like Influence (weight 0.1): The game is heavily influenced by the Souls-like genre, particularly in its boss design, combat mechanics (parrying, dodging), and overall difficulty philosophy. Many boss moves and combat rhythms will feel familiar to players of Dark Souls and similar titles.
- Rhythm-Based Combat Mastery (weight 0.07): Mastering the game's combat revolves around learning boss attack patterns, precise dodging, and effective parrying. Success hinges on understanding the rhythm of each boss and reacting with well-timed defensive and offensive maneuvers.
- Secret Chicken Boss (weight 0.07): A notable secret or DLC boss is the 'Chicken Boss,' which features unique mechanics like splitting its head and body, and spawning interfering chicks. This boss provides an additional challenge beyond the main encounters.
- Unlockable Challenge Trials (weight 0.06): The game includes additional challenge modes or 'trials' that alter gameplay, such as increased player speed, a one-life mode, or starting with all sacrifices already applied, offering replayability for those seeking higher difficulty.
- Simple Sin-Based Story (weight 0.06): The game's narrative is minimalistic, centered around the protagonist defeating the physical embodiments of the seven deadly sins. Each main boss represents one of these sins, providing a thematic framework for the boss rush.

Performance notes:
- Excellent game performance (weight 0.05): Players consistently report excellent performance, with the game running smoothly even on mid-range hardware like the RTX 2060. The visuals are praised for their quality at 60 FPS, indicating good optimization.
- No ultrawide 32:9 support (weight 0.02): A notable issue for some players is the lack of support for ultrawide 32:9 aspect ratios. This can lead to a less immersive experience or black bars for users with such monitors.
- Occasional lag issues (weight 0.02): While overall performance is good, some players occasionally experience lag spikes. This suggests there might be specific scenarios or system configurations that trigger performance dips.

Recommendations:
- Recommended for Souls-like fans (weight 0.49): The game is generally recommended for fans of the Souls-like genre, especially those looking for a challenging boss-rush experience. It's often suggested as a good entry point for newcomers to the genre or a quick fix for hardcore fans, particularly when purchased on sale.
- Buy on sale or discount (weight 0.45): Many players recommend purchasing the game only when it's on sale or heavily discounted, citing that its full price value is questionable. Some even suggest refunding it if bought at full price, while others strongly advise against buying it at all.
- Strong boss fight focus (weight 0.11): The game's core appeal lies in its boss fights, which are challenging and central to the experience. Players who enjoy difficult boss encounters will likely appreciate it, though some suggest improvements are needed in level design and overall balance.
- Not a must-play (weight 0.05): Some players feel the game is not a significant or unique experience, suggesting that skipping it won't result in missing much. There's also a sentiment that it's a 'Dark Souls clone' with 'toy graphics' and that positive reviews might be misleading.
- Improve difficulty scaling (weight 0.01): A suggestion for improving difficulty scaling is to increase skill variety for bosses at higher difficulties, rather than just changing damage values, to provide a more engaging challenge and help new players learn.
- Add pre-boss enemies (weight 0.01): A suggestion for game improvement is to add small enemies before bosses, along with random drops, to build anticipation and add variety to the gameplay loop.
- Adjustable camera needed (weight 0.01): A suggestion for improvement is to make the camera adjustable, allowing it to be further away from the player character, which could improve visibility or player comfort.
- Frustrating specific boss (weight 0.01): A specific boss, 'Jealousy's Lionduck,' is highlighted as a point of frustration, with the expectation that many players will refund the game after encountering it.
- Better alternatives exist (weight 0.01): Alternative games like Salt and Sanctuary or Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin are suggested at a similar price point, implying that these might offer a better or more complete experience.
- Hope for a sequel (weight 0.01): One reviewer expressed a desire for a sequel, indicating a positive overall experience and interest in seeing more from the developers.
- Watch YouTube for visuals (weight 0.01): Players are advised to watch YouTube videos to check out the game's visuals before purchasing, suggesting that visual appeal might be a key factor or that the game's presentation is best previewed.
- For masochists only (weight 0.01): The game is suggested for players who enjoy extreme difficulty or 'bad games' as a form of self-torture, implying a niche appeal for a very specific type of player.
- Turn off motion blur (weight 0.01): A specific technical recommendation is made to turn off motion blur, indicating a potential visual issue or preference for a clearer image.
- Needs affirmation (weight 0.01): One review vaguely states that the game 'needs affirmation,' which is unclear but suggests a desire for more positive recognition or validation for the game.

Other player notes:
- Short game length (weight 0.15): Players consistently note that the game is very short, with initial playthroughs typically lasting 3-5 hours. While some replayability exists for achievements, the overall content duration is limited.
- Miscellaneous minor observations (weight 0.06): These clusters contain various individual observations, personal ratings, or general hopes for future development that are too disparate or lacking in specific detail to form cohesive, actionable summary points. They represent isolated comments or general encouragement.
- Support for domestic development (weight 0.05): There is a strong sentiment among players regarding the game's domestic origin. Many express support and hope for the continued improvement and success of local game development, viewing this title as a positive step.
- Mixed but distinct art style (weight 0.04): The game's art style receives mixed but generally positive feedback. While some find it to have a 'Jekyll and Hyde' quality, others appreciate its simple style and clear map distinctions, despite the protagonist's unique 'Kolobok-style' appearance.
- Fair pricing for indie game (weight 0.04): The game's pricing is generally considered fair, especially given its indie status and during sales. While not the absolute cheapest, players feel it's reasonable and supports a small studio.
- Limited customization, lacking polish (weight 0.03): Players reported issues with the game's basic settings, specifically the inability to customize button layouts. Additionally, the game was criticized for a lack of detailed sound effects and animations, impacting the overall polish.
- Developer response strategy criticized (weight 0.02): Some players have criticized the developers' approach to responding to feedback, specifically noting that responses seem to be primarily directed at negative reviews, which can be perceived negatively.
- DLC boss and weapon underwhelming (weight 0.02): Feedback on the DLC boss and its associated weapon is somewhat lukewarm. The boss is described as 'strange,' and the weapon obtained from it is considered 'so-so,' indicating it might not be a significant highlight.
- Character 'Lust' lacks theme (weight 0.01): One specific piece of feedback humorously notes that the character 'Lust' does not adequately embody the concept of lust, suggesting a thematic disconnect or missed opportunity.

Emotions:
- Frustration (weight 0.24): Players experienced frustration primarily due to clunky controls, inconsistent hitboxes, and poorly designed boss encounters, often featuring unfair mechanics, excessive health, or environmental hazards. The 'Sacrifice' system, which makes the player weaker, also contributed significantly to this emotion, as did various bugs and audio issues.
- Disappointment (weight 0.22): Disappointment stemmed from the game failing to meet expectations, particularly as a 'Souls-like' title. Players felt the combat system lacked depth and satisfaction, content was scarce, and overall design choices were flawed or unoriginal. The game's short length, unpolished state, and perceived lack of innovation also contributed to this sentiment.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.21): Satisfaction was derived from overcoming the game's challenges, particularly well-designed and unique boss fights. Players appreciated the game's art style, music, and the innovative 'Sacrifice' mechanic. The overall quality for an indie title and the feeling of accomplishment after mastering difficult encounters also contributed to positive experiences.
- Excitement (weight 0.06): Excitement was generated by the game's challenging adventure, unique mechanics like the weakening system, and the anticipation of new boss designs. Players enjoyed the 'boss rush' format and the ability to play aggressively without death penalties, leading to a desire to continue playing and recommend the game.
- Anger (weight 0.04): Anger arose from perceived unfair boss mechanics, unbalanced challenges, and overall poor game design choices. Players expressed strong negative feelings towards specific boss encounters and the game's general quality, sometimes describing it as 'torture' or 'disgusting'.
- Appreciation (weight 0.04): Appreciation was directed towards the developers for their innovative ideas, particularly the intriguing puzzle and narrative elements, and the game's overall value for money. Players acknowledged the small indie team's efforts in creating a challenging and enjoyable experience, including good balancing and a fitting soundtrack.
- Annoyance (weight 0.02): Annoyance was caused by specific gameplay issues such as slow attacks, short weapon range, and tracking enemy attacks. Technical problems like stuttering and bugged achievements, along with unbalanced weapons and useless mechanics, also contributed to this feeling.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.02): Enjoyment was a direct result of engaging in the game's core combat, particularly the diversified and fun boss rush encounters. Players found the overall gameplay experience satisfying and appreciated the game's focus on boss battles.
- Amusement (weight 0.01): Amusement stemmed from humorous observations about the game's difficulty, often comparing it humorously to Dark Souls. Players found the challenging nature of the game, and sometimes the protagonist's appearance, to be a source of lightheartedness.
- Challenge (weight 0.01): The emotion of challenge was directly tied to the game's high difficulty, particularly the strategic boss order and the demanding nature of the boss fights and trials. Players found the varied boss designs to be a significant source of challenge.
- Disgust (weight 0.01): Disgust was expressed when players felt the developers were out of ideas or intentionally trying to provoke negative reactions. This emotion was also linked to the overall poor quality of the game, especially when compared unfavorably to Dark Souls.
- Intrigue (weight 0.01): Intrigue was sparked by the game's unique and innovative mechanics, such as the 'reverse-thinking' sacrifice system and the anti-traditional level-down design. Players were curious about the game's concept and gameplay innovations.
- Hope (weight 0.01): Hope was expressed for future improvements from the developers, including the potential for a sequel or new titles. Players saw promise in the game despite its flaws and wished for its continued development.
- Neutrality (weight 0.01): Neutrality was observed in reviews that provided factual descriptions of game mechanics, assessed the game in a balanced manner, or noted its small story and easy difficulty without strong emotional attachment.
- Admiration (weight 0.01): Admiration was directed towards the small development team for achieving good results, particularly in the excellent design of bosses and the overall quality of the game. Players also appreciated the efforts put into the graphical elements.
- Defensiveness (weight 0.01): Defensiveness arose when players felt the need to protect the game against negative comments or criticism. This emotion indicated a strong positive sentiment towards the game, leading them to counter opposing views.
- Boredom (weight 0.01): Boredom was caused by monotonous repetition, particularly repetitive boss patterns and uninteresting design choices. Players found the gameplay to become tedious over time due to a lack of variety.
- Confidence (weight 0.01): Confidence was demonstrated through strong recommendations for the game and a willingness to defend its reputation. Players felt assured in the game's manageable difficulty and its overall quality.
- Relief (weight 0.01): Relief was felt upon finishing and deleting the game, suggesting a sense of burden lifted. The short playtime and low cost also contributed to a feeling of relief, implying that the investment was minimal for the experience.
- Surprise (weight 0.01): Surprise was experienced upon discovering a secret boss or by the effective and impactful implementation of the power-decreasing principle, which was an unexpected and well-executed mechanic.}