Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020
1. EYE: Divine Cybermancy - PC
2. Legend of Grimrock - PC
3. Legend of Grimrock 2 - PC
4. Shovel Knight - Wii U
5. Yakuza: Like a Dragon - PS4
6. Yoshi's Island - SNES
7. Vectorman 2 - Genesis
8. Super Mario Sunshine - GC
9. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest - GC
10. Bomberman '93 - TG-16
11. Cannon Fodder - PC
12. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei - Saturn
13. Dragonborne - Game Boy
14. Rock n' Roll Racing - PC
15. The Lost Vikings - PC
16. Blackthorne - PC
17. Contra III: The Alien Wars - SNES
18. Bravely Default II - Switch
19. Axelay - SNES
20. Ryse: Son of Rome - XBOne
21. Killer Instinct (2013) - XBOne
22. Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition - PC
23. Thief: The Dark Project - PC
24. Killer Instinct - XBOne
25. Killer instinct 2 - XBOne
26. Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth - PC
27. Thief 2: The Metal Age - PC
28. Wing Commander II - PC
29. Wing Commander III - PC
30. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV - Switch
31. Shadow Man Remastered - PC
32. Wing Commander: Privateer - PC
33. Salt and Sanctuary - Switch
34. The Elder Scrolls: Arena - PC
35. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall - PC
36. Resident Evil Village - PC
37. SaGa Frontier Remastered - Switch
38. Metaloid: Origin - Switch
39. SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions - Switch
40. Metro Exodus: The Two Colonels - PC
41. Metro Exodus: Sam's Story - PC
42. Panzer Paladin - Switch
43. Returnal - PS5
44. Dark Void Zero - DSiWare
45. Panzer Dragoon Saga - Saturn
46. Magic Knight Rayearth - Saturn
47. Cathedral - Switch
Cathedral is a retro Metroidvania that shares an aesthetic with Shovel Knight but lacks basically all of the polish and balance. You can't blame this on them trying to be like an 8-bit game; most of the painful design decisions are definitely from more modern times. It's a shame, because there are some decent bones to this game but it seems to hate you playing it.
The story is thinner than the original Metroid; you are an animated suit of armor that gets up and walks around, runs into a ghost, the ghost says "we need orbs to open this door", you get the orbs, open the door, and fight the final boss. And at the final boss you maybe get an idea of why you did all this, but it doesn't quite hold together. But you don't play a retro Metroidvania for the story, you play it for the gameplay.
Let's start with the good. Your primary attack is melee, but you quickly unlock an arrow shooter that is used for both hitting enemies and triggering switches to solve puzzles. Later on you will find more items that can be used to solve puzzles or progress through areas. The game also has a bit of a unique approach to some of the unlockable abilities. You have three slots for some abilities, one is for an active ability, one is for a movement ability, and one is for a passive. Initially you can only equip one of the abilities in each slot, but by end game you get to use both at the same time.
Which lets me segue into the various things the game just gets wrong. That aforementioned "you need to pick between two things" ability equipping sounds like a neat idea to force decisions, but in practice it just makes you feel gimped. Forcing choices on passives or combat actives is good; it lets you find a playstyle you like. Forcing you to decide between a double jump and a dash is awful, especially since you get forced into using one or the other to progress.
Remember that aforementioned arrow launcher? It quickly becomes only good for doing puzzles. It has the same damage as your basic sword but uses ammo, and shortly after getting it you can get a sword upgrade that doubles its damage. Eventually you can upgrade the arrow launcher to match that but then you get another sword upgrade right afterwards that raises your damage to 3 per hit. The arrow launcher can't catch a break. But this fits with a general pattern of the game; upgrades are not balanced to make you feel like you're getting stronger, they keep you from feeling like you're falling behind. You spend the entire game at a point of dying in three hits to anything in the area you're supposed to be in and everything taking fourish hits to die.
And that leads to the thing that sticks out the most; the game does not buffer your button presses when you're mashing. Your swing is fast, but not one frame, so getting the cadence wrong really hurts your DPS and makes it feel clumsy when you're trying to chew through enemy HP. And with your fairly short sword (it's not as bad as Zelda II, but it's pretty short) not being able to get in that last hit before an enemy rams you is a source of a bunch of deaths. And getting this mashing right is critical against bosses, because they have far too much HP. Frankly, things would have been better with a slower swing and less HP on enemies, like you see in Castlevania games.
One final thing to point out; the further you get in the game the more dickish the enemy placements are. The game delights in having segments with instant death enemies for no reason other than to remind you the devs hate you. You have to do lots of narrow platform climbs against flying enemies that you don't have good tools to deal with. And checkpoint starvation gets very real in the later areas, with one particularly egregious moment being a needed checkpoint in the final dungeon (which goes on for WAY too long because they wanted to reuse every tileset in the game) being behind a hidden wall.
Overall, Cathedral is a poorly balanced Metroidvania that lacks charm and is hard for all the wrong reasons. Compare it with Blasphemous, which is hard in a carefully planned way that is designed to make you feel like you've gotten better, rather than getting lucky that an enemy decided to jump in this direction rather than that direction and you could make it through without being knocked off. I wouldn't get this unless you really need another Metroidvania to play.