Early Demo Preview: Spiritfall

Have you ever imagined what it could be like if you took Super Smash Bros and put it into a roguelike format? Well, the million dollar question has been answered by Spiritfall! Developed by Gentle Giant, this platform fighter will have you slashing, smashing, and launching your enemies as you push through the map as far as you can. Augment your attacks, upgrade your abilities, enhance with relics, and grow stronger to destroy those who stand in your way. And have no fear, if you die, you will be able to enhance even further and make each run better than the last!

Spiritfall - Impressions

Out of the 7-8 demos I have played so far, 3 have really caught my attention. Spiritfall is one of them. I am a big platform fighter fan (Super Smash Bros and Rivals of Aether all the way), so seeing a combination of those mechanics into a replayable roguelike format sounds really exciting, and so far, I feel Spiritfall is doing it justice.

In the game, you will have 4 different ways to attack. A light attack, which can be different based on which direction you are facing and if you're in the air, a launcher attack, which is used to smack enemies towards the wall (which also damages them), a bolt ranged attack, and an assist. Using all of these, combined with your dashing, will be your arsenal to eliminate enemies.

All of these abilities can upgraded further with blessings and essences, which you can choose which to go to on the map. You will also encounter other types of rooms that could enhance max health, give relics to augment yourself more, currency to use at the shop, and even some hidden stages to really take your power to the next level. All of this culminating in a boss fight that you will NEED everything you can get for.

If you die, it will be okay though! You can also get special currency that is used at your home base to unlock new passive abilities and make your next run go even further. At home base, you will also be able to practice moves and choose your weapon before heading back into battle.

After playing for a bit, I actually found it hard to put down. The battles felt challenging, but very tight and fun. I will say there are 2 things I appreciate about the roguelike elements in Spiritfall: The feel of augmentations and moving from stage to stage. Each blessing and essence feels like it really affects the abilities it changes and can make your run easier or much harder. The moving from stage to stage part is a bit on the smaller side, but I appreciate that the portal to move to the next stage will appear wherever you are standing once all rewards are selected instead of at certain parts of a level that you have to walk to. It makes moving from stage to stage quicker and keeps more of my time in battles.

Steam Deck Performance

As far as performance on the Steam Deck goes, this one plays near perfectly. I don't recall seeing battery drain go over 9.4W and stuck at a solid 60 FPS. The controller support is great and it supports a native resolution of 1280x800. I don't see any cloud save support yet, but that can easily change when the game is fully released.

You can try out Spiritfall's Demo now on Steam and wishlist ahead of its March 2023 early access release date! This is one I will be keeping my eye on personally and can't wait to see what content will be added.

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