Okko the Exiled Demo Playthrough (Steam Next Fest June 2025)
2Okko is a really promising action platformer with excellent graphics and music... but some of the mechanics and design choices leave much to be desired.
It didn't entirely come across to me as a soulslike - I was initially concerned it would be one, which is why I didn't play it sooner - but it does seem to ultimately suffer multiple soulslike qualities, possibly in an even worse combination than most soulslikes. It's apparently early in development so I hope some of these can be addressed...
The biggest issue is the level design, which often involves enemies providing the only way to reach high places. If you kill them, they do not respawn until you fully restart the level, or intentionally take a death, and the latter is prohibitively expensive (you lose a lot of currency).
Pair this with a soulsvania-sized health pool, and you're very likely to bias towards killing enemies ASAP, thus locking yourself out of parts of the level before realizing it. Then you have to replay the entire thing...and risk making the same mistakes again unless you obsessively take notes. It was quickly getting to the point where I felt paranoid as I entered every single room, which is not a good feeling to be stuck with while playing an action platformer, and that feeling ended up killing the enjoyment of rooms that didn't contain any troll design choices, because there's no way to be sure until you check.
Moreover, there's no way to recover lost gems after death, and most upgrades are gated behind shop items that cost 2000 or 3000 gems. This means players who have trouble with the mechanics will never have any way to make the game feel more accessible, which fails game design 101 (but does feel like a rather soulslike thing to do, which is why I don't typically play soulslikes).
There's also a "focus" mechanic that requires hitting on-rhythm with a heartbeat, which just gets in the way, IMO. The problem is, your attacks have a delay, and I find myself automatically compensating for that to try to hit on-beat rather than start the attack on-beat, which fails the beat check. Plus fixating on that distracts from avoiding damage, because absolutely nothing else in the game follows that rhythm.
There's one more sticking point I have to mention whenever it comes up: this is a timed demo, which is always a red flag to me. Fortunately, this developer seems pretty cognizant of the pros and cons to doing that, and they mention the possibility of another demo closer to release, which I would be interested in checking out to see how it has evolved.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3479420/Okko_The_Exiled/