- October 31, 2019
- Decemberborn Interactive
- 20h median play time
Cathedral
In the end, I have very mixed feelings about Cathedral. I appreciate the style and concept, and even find the game fun a lot of the time. But all that is put at risk by questionable design and unbalanced difficulty. If you’re not afraid of a little pain, you’ll likely have a lot of fun. Those that are adverse to annoyance will need to decide if this game is worth the price of admission. That said, I do hope that developer Decemberborn AB is able to use my critiques to make a more balanced Metroidvania in the future. Because rough spots aside, there’s a lot that I enjoyed here.
Platforms
Buy Now
About
Cathedral is a single player platformer game with a fantasy theme. It was developed by Decemberborn Interactive and was released on October 31, 2019. It received mostly positive reviews from both critics and players.
Make your way through more than 600 rooms, and unravel the secrets of your past by finding the five elemental orbs. Cathedral features a vast world, meant for exploring!
- Challenging yet fair difficulty with rewarding exploration and secrets.
- Tight and responsive controls with satisfying combat and well-designed boss fights.
- Huge, detailed pixel-art world with varied environments and catchy chiptune soundtrack.
- Steep difficulty spikes especially in late game and some boss fights can feel tedious or unfair.
- Excessive backtracking due to sparse checkpoints, far travel distances, and limited fast travel options.
- Some design choices are frustrating like needing to swap abilities at shrines, unbalanced upgrade system, and occasional unclear progression or obscure puzzles.
- music103 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
The music in this game, characterized by its 8-bit and chiptune style, is generally praised for being catchy, nostalgic, and fitting the retro aesthetic, with some standout tracks that linger in players' minds. However, many reviewers note its repetitiveness and occasional grating or overly intense moments, which can detract from the overall experience, especially during long play sessions or backtracking. While the soundtrack appeals strongly to fans of classic NES-style tunes, a desire for more variety and softer interludes is a common theme.
“The music is catchy and memorable even months after playing it, the difficulty is well balanced across all areas and ramps up naturally without any frustrating spikes, and player movement feels smooth and responsive rather than stiff or jarring.”
“The soundtrack will get stuck in your head, the art is nice, and the controls are super tight.”
“A genuine top-tier action adventure game featuring great visuals and catchy music.”
“All of this combined with poor controller response and an insanely repetitive soundtrack that stresses you tf out while playing... spending more than $5 on this game is a huge loss in my opinion.”
“When a game goes ahead to make legitimately every single mistake a platformer and exploration game can make, you know you're in for a rough time with blind jumps, a camera that's disorienting, music that's too loud and actually painful to listen to, a colour scheme that is far too bright with details for what you're meant to be doing and where you're meant to be going completely unclear.”
“I can only describe the music of this game as a cruel experiment on ear torture.”
Cathedral Review (Switch)
In the end, I have very mixed feelings about Cathedral. I appreciate the style and concept, and even find the game fun a lot of the time. But all that is put at risk by questionable design and unbalanced difficulty. If you’re not afraid of a little pain, you’ll likely have a lot of fun. Those that are adverse to annoyance will need to decide if this game is worth the price of admission. That said, I do hope that developer Decemberborn AB is able to use my critiques to make a more balanced Metroidvania in the future. Because rough spots aside, there’s a lot that I enjoyed here.
70%Cathedral (Switch eShop)
In conclusion, Cathedral is a pretty solid metroidvania, if a bit too paint-by-numbers for my liking. The combat is solid and exploring areas is just as fun as these games always are, but there’s quite a bit of missing polish here and constantly collecting gold just doesn’t offer the satisfaction that it should for a game like this, and when gold is everywhere, that does lead to an empty feeling.
70%Cathedral [Nintendo Switch]
Cathedral’s adventure is certainly an enjoyable one thanks to its solid level design and fun boss battles, but it is lacking in the innovation required to really help it stand out. The Nintendo Switch library is packed to the brim with Metroidvania-style adventures after all, and honestly, it doesn’t really offer anything that would make you want to choose to play it over the multitude of other titles available. Fortunately, Cathedral does offer enough quality across almost all facets of its design that it still manages to stand out as a worthwhile release in the genre. Sure, it might not do anything you wouldn’t have seen before and it does have a few flaws here and there, but the solid level design, the expansive world, and the fun boss battles ensures that it offers more than enough to pique the interest of Metroidvania-loving gamers.
75%
Buy Cathedral
Videos
Games Like Cathedral
Frequently Asked Questions
Cathedral is a platformer game with fantasy theme.
Cathedral is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac OS, PlayStation 4 and others.
On average players spend around 27 hours playing Cathedral.
Cathedral was released on October 31, 2019.
Cathedral was developed by Decemberborn Interactive.
Cathedral has received mostly positive reviews from both players and critics. Most players liked Cathedral for its music but disliked it for its grinding.
Cathedral is a single player game.
Similar games include Castle In The Darkness, Alwa's Awakening, Souldiers, Chasm, Aeterna Noctis and others.