Cinderia Preview

While Hades is far from the first popular roguelite, it’s hard to deny its impact on the genre. Cinderia is another title featuring that game’s familiar loop and mechanics, and it’s a mostly solid experience. However, there’s still plenty of work that needs to be done before it leaves early access.

Cinderia takes place in a land that goes by the same name which has long fell into ruin due to a malevolent witch and her minions. Playing as one of the few remaining survivors, you fight your way to the witch’s castle, powering up with various abilities and items.

95% of the current story is found in the opening cutscene.

In the game’s early access state, there isn’t a whole lot of story after the opening. You can find new NPCs and add them to the hub area, though this generally leads to a few lines of dialogue at most. What doesn’t help is the lifeless translation, which I have a feeling wont get much better even in future updates.

Where things are stronger is the basic gameplay, which feels very familiar when compared to other roguelites. Each playable character (you start with one, but unlock another three by finding them during runs) has access to a basic melee combo plus another unique ability.

As you progress through each area, you’ll find rooms containing spellcards. These add more moves to your arsenal, and you can equip three per run. Spellcards are upgraded for crazier effects, which often synergise with items and passive abilities obtained along the way.

Turrets aren’t the strongest, but it’s still fun to cram as many as you can into each room.

As you’d expect, the idea is to try and craft an increasingly broken build each run. My first successful run involved placing down as many turrets as possible, which exploded into multiple traps once destroyed. When combined with cooldown reduction items and passives, it was possible to spam turrets and shred everything quickly.

That’s where most of the appeal in these games is, at least for me. The individual mechanics aren’t too interesting, but seeing numbers go up as the screen fills with effects is enjoyable. At the same time, it’s where some of Cinderia‘s current issues come into play.

As you can see from the screenshots, Cinderia makes use of a relatively muted colour palette. While not fully greyscale, the only other colour you see most of the time is red. This, combined with effects going crazy as runs progress, ruins readability. It’s often very hard to see enemy attacks or hazards on the ground, especially during boss fights.

Said boss fights can also have some weird hitboxes for attacks, making them awkward to dodge. It doesn’t help that there’s not that much feedback when you’re hit, which sometimes leads you you losing a large chunk of health without realising.

There aren’t that many items right now, but they add extra variety to builds and can be upgraded further.

The current early access build is also lacking in interesting meta progression and overall content. Taking out enemies gives you souls which are spent on a passive skill tree before runs. Some are incredibly helpful like revives, while others are minor such as getting a small amount of gold. There aren’t that many things to upgrade right now, meaning you can realistically unlock most of the tree quickly.

Since there’s a lack of story, the hub feels lifeless. NPCs mostly repeat the same few phrases, and some serve little purpose right now. You can spend some of the other resources you find such as stones or candles to expand the hub and unlock extra features (you can’t even see what the room icons mean without an upgrades) but it’s not very engaging.

Naturally a lot of this will change of the course of early access, with some changes having already happened. The main addition post-launch is being able to add modifiers to the next run, making them harder to get more rewards in return.