I usually buy the Humble Bundles for the soundtracks. Most of them are very bland and boring but there are the occasional gems. Such as the Savant: Ascent soundtrack. As I liked the soundtrack,I thought I might as well give the game a go.

My first impression: whoa,this game is terrible. It is so limited, are they shitting me?

It seemed like one of the extremely cheapo games with hardly any depth. But somehow, I didn’t immediately uninstall it.

And here’s where the beauty begins: the game is designed in a surprisingly addictive and nice way. First, the rules: you are ‘Savant’ the titular character and you shoot at enemies which spawn around you. You have to stand on one of two spots and can switch between those either by rolling or jumping. You have three lives and die when you get hit by an enemy.

So far so easy. My initial impression was that it is extremely limited, but au contraire, these limits enable quite an interesing gameplay, where you have to react quickly but don’t have to care about accuracy too much. This enables the player, once he gets how the game works improve considerably. At first I used to die immediately, few days later I was finishing the whole game in a breeze.

But dying is discouraging, right? Well, usually yes. But even if you don’t finish the level without dying, the game features a little bit of RPG elements: you can power up your character using items found in the level and these powerups are persistent. The player has an incentive that even if he doesn’t manage to finish the level, he can power up and maybe then finish the level.

The game is extremely short, just three levels (well actually only two and a boss fight) but the presentation is quite polished. It uses music from Savent (the artist) pretty extensively and the enemies even dance in the beat of the music. I, as the player, started to dance to the beat of the music too, you got into a nice flow. The graphics are pretty nice, could be lifted from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which I do like. And you feel like a crazy badass, standing around and shooting hundreds of enemies in something quite similar to a bullet hell shooter.

There is not all gold. Some things are buggy, for example if you switch the game into full screen, the game does not scale but stays the same size, in the top left corner. When you die in the boss fight, you might die with zero points yet the sound for counting up numbers still rings, which is kinda insulting as you’re presented with a big fat 0.

Anyway, for a $2 game, this is absolutely stellar. Some people complain about the length (it is short), but seriously, how much can you expect?