It wasn’t until I’d toppled the first few of Karma Exorcist’s brutal bosses that I finally got my hands on its game-changing grappling hook, but this stunning 2D Metroidvania actually got its hooks into me from the outset. At a recent BiliBili: First Look event in Shanghai, I was completely taken aback by Karma Exorcist’s stunning hand-drawn environments, sizeable cast of challenging enemies, and the expanding set of addictive abilities possessed by its stylish demon-slaying lead. Karma Exorcist has instantly gone to the top of the list of my most-wanted Metroidvanias, and with a bit more polish it just might have the goods to challenge the modern greats of the genre.
In Karma Exorcist you play as a demon hunter who emerges from the shattered stone finger of a giant petrified hand, diving headlong into a journey through an underworld overrun by rampant evil karma on a quest to cleanse the realm of various ghost emperors and other mythical beasts. Our hero possesses no memories and no real identity, all he has is a soul-severing blade and an unquenchable thirst for dispatching demons in what is effectively the Chinese folklore equivalent of hell, known as ‘di fu’.
The slayer’s quest takes him through 11 distinct biomes that unravel in all directions as new abilities are unlocked. During the opening hours of the story I was able to explore the gloomy underground depths of a cave crawling with gnashing slugs, a ruined, sandswept structure riddled with crumbling platforms, and even an entirely optional tomb that had me dodging Indiana Jones-style boulder traps and evading surprise attacks from golem statues that would suddenly spring to life. Beyond these opening areas, Karma Exorcist’s story will apparently take players from river shores lined with red spider lilies, to the cavernous Hall of Kings, and up to the rocky peaks of the five ghost emperor mountains. If the opening areas are of any indication, I expect every inch of Karma Exorcist’s underworld to be rich with atmosphere and begging to be explored.
Karma Chameleon
Of course to reach all four corners of its map, the slayer’s arsenal and ability set will need to expand, since he begins the adventure with a pretty simple setup. He can perform basic sword-slashing combos, a dodge-roll to avoid enemies or to squeeze through gaps in the terrain, and a pretty modest jump. He can also pull off a more damaging sword-thrust, which needs to be recharged by successfully landing regular attacks, and each enemy he takes out also fills up his gourd, which can be consumed in order to replenish segments of his initially limited health bar, similar to using silk in Hollow Knight Silksong.
All of that’s enough to contend with the relatively non-threatening deputy demons that greet the slayer upon his arrival, but there are apparently over 100 enemy types in Karma Exorcist and they start to ramp up their threat level pretty early on. Lantern-toting bats that unleash spinning flame attacks during tricky platforming sections, spear-toting soldiers that emerge from the earth to stab you when you’re caught standing still, and lumbering skeletons wielding heavy hammers that seem hellbent on knocking the slayer from one afterlife into the next, are just a few of the malevolent meanies I had to either face down or flee from during my hands-on.
Thankfully there are 20 weapons to wield in Karma Exorcist, and the fraction of the full set that I was able to find during the hands-on helped me balance the scales against its increasingly imposing enemies. What’s neat about Karma Exorcist’s combat system is that you can map the slayer’s arsenal to three attack buttons. In my case I kept the slayer’s sword bound to one button for fast slashes, the oversized axe to the second button for slower but more damaging attacks, and the throwing daggers to the third to allow me to deliver ranged attacks against enemy archers and the like. This seemed to give me the most balanced attack in Karma Exorcist’s opening hours, but I’m told that in the full game you can configure up to eight preset loadouts to switch between as the slayer’s arsenal expands further and the range of enemy types increases.
Swapping between these loadouts will likely become paramount when it comes to toppling Karma Exorcist’s boss beasts, which started fairly modestly but soon began to overwhelm me with their more complex attacks. The story’s first major monster, a hungry ghost king, can be dealt with fairly easily by dodging out of the way of his stampeding rushes like a bullfighter before getting a few sword slashes in after he crashes into the wall behind you, but subsequent bosses are not so easily sidestepped. A teleporting warrior monk kept me on my toes by pulling down bolts of lightning from above and conjuring up floating swords that homed in on my position. Meanwhile another demon that escaped out of a chained coffin like some sort of hellborn Houdini, quickly closed the gap between us by dragging itself towards me with a powerful grappling hook. Each of these more dextrous demons proved particularly tough to beat, and much like Hollow Knight it became clear that repeated deaths are a core part of the Karma Exorcist experience.
Each death isn’t met with an instant do-over, either. Instead you’re teleported back to the most recently visited shrine, minus the slayer’s soul which caps his health at three bars versus the standard five in a system similar to the shade mechanic from Hollow Knight. You then have the option of battling your way back to where you died to retrieve your soul and be born again at full strength, or summon your soul to the shrine by paying a chunk of the hard-earned coin you’ve collected from fallen foes. Either way, there’s a clear penalty for each death, which keeps tension levels high every step of the way through Karma Exorcist’s danger-filled world.
Consider Me Hooked
The juice is worth the squeeze, though, since each boss you fell gives you a new weapon or ability to further shake up the experience. That brings me to the grappling hook, or the soul-snatching chain as it’s known in Karma Exorcist, that was my reward for dispatching its second major boss. The grappling hook is primarily used to scale to previously out-of-reach areas, suspending the slayer in a slow-mo state in midair while you manually aim at a ledge to attach to, but it can also be used in combat. I found myself hooking onto flying enemies and zipping towards them to attack them with my sword, or firing the hook at lumbering demons toting heavy shields to propel myself past their defenses in order to attack them from the rear.
My newly expanded maneuverability also allowed me to uncover more secrets tucked away in suspect hidden walls and the like in typical Metroidvania fashion. Some of these were pages from the Book of Life and Death to trade with a librarian for coins, which can then be spent at merchants to acquire soul gems that can be equipped to boost stamina recovery or minimise recoil from incoming attacks. Others were single use consumable talismans, that granted temporary attack and defense buffs, which proved to be handy in some of the more enemy and deathtrap-lined gauntlets later on.
The spike-lined pits aren’t the only rough edges apparent in Karma Exorcist’s current state, however. Many of the menus were clearly work in progress, and the map system was somewhat unreliable – when you’re sniffing around for hidden entrances to a seemingly out of reach room in a Metroidvania, it’s kind of crucial that the map reflects your actual position in the world, which wasn’t always the case during my hands-on.
Elsewhere I managed to beat a particularly fierce boss on about my fifth or sixth attempt, not because I had finally cottoned on to its attack patterns and identified when to time my assaults, but simply because it glitched out in the bottom corner of the arena and allowed me to completely decimate its health bar while it was completely incapacitated. Beating that twitching beast felt less like Hollow Knight and more like a hollow victory.
Thankfully there is still plenty of time for developer Cyclos to exorcise these minor demons and iron out the bugs, since Karma Exorcist isn’t due to launch until sometime in 2027, currently targeting a simultaneous launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Based on its absorbing opening hours, Karma Exorcist clearly has all the makings of a magnificent Metroidvania, and its journey through the depths of an evil karma-soaked hell could well have Hollow Knight fans in heaven.
Tristan Ogilvie is a Senior Video Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. He attended the BiliBili: First Look event as a guest of the organisers.
