Various Thoughts

Hellpoint is essentially Dark Souls on a space station. Aside from the atmosphere, the main defining features are the additions of secret doors (if you see an otherwise smooth wall with two vertical indentations appearing to make a doorframe; chances are it’s a secret door) and the ability to jump. Many games including a jump feature don’t really do anything with it, this game however has quite a few platformer sections leading to loot/secrets along with a specific jump attack.

The only notable flaws, beside the intense similarity to DS, is the kinda illogical leveling system (cost should be based on attribute level rather than total level) and somewhat janky menu system; clicking occasionally won’t work (you’ll have to use the Enter key) and dismantling/upgrading requires far too many confirmations.

Also taking cues from Dark Souls is Code Vein, a heavily Anime action RPG which combines Souls‘ general structure and gameplay style with a job/class system. Assuming you don’t hate Anime character design it’s pretty damn good… so long as you don’t fall into the trap of actually leveling your character. See, turns out each area has a hidden level cap, and going over it results in extremely slow to nonexistent progress toward unlocking class abilities for universal use. You also don’t get much from leveling up besides more health. It’s far more effective to spend your currency on weapon/armor upgrades and ability unlocks.

All that said, there’s an extra hurdle to enjoying the game: Actually getting it to launch. Numbers 6 & 8 on that list are ultimately what got it working for me (24bit 192000 Hz for the sound setting). Sometimes though it will simply refuse to launch no matter what, in which case you can try setting your system clock to UTC +9 (Osaka; and no, I have no clue why this works). Once you do manage to get to the title screen (if you do), be very careful with the settings… as changing some of those may cause it to stop launching again (in which case you’ll probably have to delete everything in the “AppData\Local\CodeVein\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor” folder).