Themes · complaint churn
Difficulty curve
Spikes and walls, too hard or too easy, no way to adjust it.
- Steam complaint1,648#5 of 11 · 818 reviews · 5.5% of negative reviews · median 28h
- Stated reason for quitting42#6 of 12 · 21 quit sentences
In HALL PASS
What responds to it.
Scoreboard cluster 05 Difficulty wall: August FIXED, now Tuned 85% our estimate
- Enemy HP and speed, never spawn countsHow difficulty is tunedTuned
We never raise difficulty by spawning more enemies. In a survivors-like, enemies are the XP supply, so more of them makes the game easier. We measured this: on Night II with a 1.15 spawn multiplier the bot reached the bell at the median. Difficulty comes from enemy health and speed.
- Making the first night winnable without an easy modeStudy Hall mercy and ClutchTuned
The lab had already measured what kills a new player: 88% of the damage is contact from the two cheapest enemies, arriving on a smooth curve that empties the health pool around three and a half minutes in. Every discrete fix we tried (a boss change, a spawn change, a roster change) missed, because the problem was not discrete.
Per game
Where it shows up on Steam.
Weighted count in each game's reviews, with the share of that side and the median hours of the reviewers who raised it.
Per community
Where it shows up on Reddit.
| Community | In request threads | In praise | In complaints | In quit sentences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| r/vampiresurvivors | — | — | 6,262 2,706 items | 6 3 sentences |
| r/roguelites | — | — | 7,216 3,359 items | 25 14 sentences |
| r/roguelikes | — | — | 9,916 4,132 items | 10 4 sentences |
| r/brotato | — | — | 3,272 1,467 items | 0 0 sentences |
| r/SoulstoneSurvivors | — | — | 545 252 items | 0 0 sentences |
| r/hallsoftorment | — | — | 429 201 items | 0 0 sentences |
| r/DeathMustDie | — | — | 350 158 items | 0 0 sentences |
| r/20MinutesTillDawn | — | — | 184 87 items | 0 0 sentences |
In their words
The highest-weighted reviews that matched.
Truncated to the first few hundred characters as they were in the harvest reports. The weight beside each is one plus the natural log of one plus its helpful votes.
At the moment of this review the new content patch dropped and it is a BIG step but in the wrong direction. The whole premise under this kind of game should be fast paced free movement and power fantasy and its the opposite of what act 3 has brought to the game. Too many movement
Fun at first but shallow in the long run I came to this game as someone who has completed Vampire Survivors 100% as of 1.0 and if you're looking for a game of this type and haven't played that yet, go play that instead. As for Soulstone Survivors I was having fun with the first c
game needs some rebalancing, there's a lot of cool ideas that fall short, the more you play the more you notice there's at best 4 good tomes, and like 6 good weapons, alongside the fact only a few characters feel "fun" to play and to try and reach the harder tier 2 and almost imp
Every positive review is true and I genuinely enjoy the game, but they fail to mention how bad the balance is. Once you hit tier 3, you'd better hope that the RNG gods are with you , otherwise, finishing a run is pretty much impossible. Tier 3 boss is also bs, seeking orbs that y
This game does nothing better than the other superior games in the genre. It is grindy in a nonrewarding manner, repetitive, boring, and has an uninspiring generic graphical style. Let's compare it to the other games in this genre: *Where as Vampire Survivors makes you look forwa
After 88/88 unlocks I have conflicting feelings about this game. On one hand it is well made, looks nice, and is even fun to play (at least at the beginning). On the other hand, it has two terrible flaws. The first is the traditional opposition found in the quasi rogue-lite genre: skill-based vs....
I'll be glad to revisit this review when the game has more content, but for now, I can't recommend it. I went into it expecting that there were going to be far more god powers than there actually are (after all, the store page says there are _hundreds_ of them), and for there to
At first you are going to like this game. But after a period of time, you will realize, that the game has very little depth. Every run feels the same. This is because the enemies are just blobs of health and damage, with mildly varying movement patterns. Don't let that fool you into thinking ther...
There was a time I would have whole-heartedly recommended DMD. You can see my playtime. I got some friends to buy it, even. The pixel art is beautiful, the combat is smooth as butter, and (most) classes feel like they have a unique identity with appropriate...
The game is balanced poorly. You either find builds that trivialize everything, or you simply don't scale enough to keep up with the enemies. There's a lack of diversity with only 3 levels and bosses only have a single pattern. In order to access the hardest difficulty level, you
I really, really, really want to like this game, but right now there's several things keeping me from enjoying it as much as other games in the genre (see: Vampire Survivors). For one thing, while the color palette is really cool looking, the combination of it + constantly flashi
[h2]Vampire Survivors is an action roguelite that spawned its own subgenre through the sheer addictiveness of its gameplay loop. Despite this popularity, it suffers from incredibly high power creep and misguided design philosophies that tarnish the late-game experience.[/h2] [table] [tr] [th]🟩 Pr...
How it was counted
The patterns that matched.
Case-insensitive regular expressions from the harvest scripts, reproduced as written. A review or sentence counts once for the theme if any pattern matches.
Steam harvester complaint
difficulty (spike|wall|curve)too (hard|difficult|punishing)impossibletoo easyno challengetrivial