Ichorous is a challenging boss rush that sees you absorbing blood from unsettling creatures to return it to your sinister master.
You serve a monstrous patron whose blood fuels many other terrible beasts in the dungeon. For whatever reason, it’s decided that it wants all of that blood back right now and it’s sending you to collect. Since the monsters are far from willing to give up the stuff in their veins, you’ll need to extract it the old stabby way. This involves some acrobatic combat against a handful of foul beasts that will see their dungeon lairs utterly coated with red by the end of each battle. Hopefully theirs, but these creatures aren’t pushovers.
Each boss can take quite a beating, so you will really need to learn their patterns and attacks if you want to have a chance. Your character is pretty mobile, able to slash in a few directions and dash when they need to get out of the way quickly. The monsters move fairly quickly and have tons of health, so stealing whatever hits you can while on the move is pretty important. Just expect to get drenched with blood the whole time you’re doing it.
That said, you’re going to take some bumps along the way (with a fairly jarring effect when you get hit). As you’re collecting blood for a powerful creature, you can absorb some of what you’ve collected to heal yourself whenever you like. Since you’re getting drenched every time you hit the monster, it means you can heal quite a bit. However, the patron gives you neat power-ups whenever you beat a boss, but these have negative effects that are tied to how much healing blood you’ve used. If you use very little, the negatives are negligible. Use a lot and they really hurt. So, the more you can avoid healing, the more powerful you’ll get.
Ichorous is a sharp action game with some great gross bosses and challenging fights. Tying it together with a reward system that increases your power for playing well really makes it satisfying.
Ichorous is available now on itch.io.
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