Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster

Introduction

Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster, developed by Dormidin Studio and published by Selecta Play, released on Steam on 9 September 2026 at NZ$19.79. It's a hand-drawn 2D Metroidvania set in the world of Arborea, in which players fight through a large, hostile map using a heart-devouring sword and a set of animal-morphing abilities unlocked over the course of the campaign, with the game's marketing framing the story's ending as shaped by player choice. The game ships on Windows only, with full controller support. As a small, independently-published launch, it debuted with a very small but leaning-favourable review base: 9 total reviews at the time of writing, 8 of them positive.

What's working: hand-drawn art, fluid movement and real scale

What comes through most clearly across the review sample is how consistently reviewers credit the game's presentation and movement feel. One detailed reviewer, who logged an extensive session and published a follow-up feedback list, writes: "I really like the aesthetic of the game, it has a very hand-drawn vibe to it, actually reminds me a lot of Adventure Quest... Some backgrounds are actually very beautiful... The actual character movement is very responsive, the frames are very fast, and the game has a ton of secrets and optional content to explore." A separate reviewer, translated from Russian, adds a specific detail about the presentation's method: "the drawing is excellent, I like this style. Especially since emphasis is placed on the fact that it was drawn by hand, without the use of AI." That same reviewer also praises the game's music and sound, and reports the map "changes constantly," keeping locations from growing stale the way they have in other Metroidvanias they've played.

Reviewers repeatedly cite the game's sheer size and variety as a strength. The same detailed reviewer reports "12-16 hours for a playthrough, not even counting all the side activities, extra ending, and collection quests," while a separate Spanish-language reviewer, several hours in, writes, translated: "everything is spectacular, character mobility, scenery, bosses, mid-tier enemies, etc... there's a huge variety of enemies and a very large map with save points you can fast-travel from." A different English-language reviewer, tracking their progress across multiple play sessions, describes the combat directly: "The combat and movement are still incredibly fluid. The ability to dash through enemies and obstacles feels so damn good once you get the timing down," adding that the game's optional parry system is appreciated specifically because "it isn't mandatory. You can develop your own combat style instead of feeling like the game is forcing one mechanic on you."

The honest problems: contact-damage hitboxes, obtuse pacing, and missing launch options

Set against that praise, Barbarian Saga's review sample carries a specific, recurring complaint: contact damage. The same broadly positive, detailed reviewer who scored the game 7.5 out of 10 writes, "at least 5 players pointed it out, and I kinda agree with it to an extent, yes the 'contact hitboxes' probably made the game much worse than it actually is... until you get some muscle memory, yea, you might keep clipping on things." A separate, negative review lists the same issue first among a set of concrete complaints: "Collision damage. No up swing. character comes to a dead stop when swinging sword. no animation cancelling into block, combat feels terrible." That same reviewer also reports enemies that "insta respawn" on re-entering a room, an unmarked map that leaves NPCs impossible to track, and a late-game green zone where "random patches of green grass... hurt you for some reason," with hazards visually blending into the background.

A second recurring complaint concerns pacing and navigation. The detailed reviewer reports the game's progression "made a bad first impression because the design is almost misleading... you would expect to get double jump early in the game... but you get it like 6-8+ hours into the game," adding that although exploration "eventually falls into place," it takes several hours to get there. The same review notes the game's core hook, animal-morphing, arrives too late to feel central: "the game is sorta advertised as the animal morphing metroidvania, but you get those abilities so late into the game, it's barely a factor." Beyond design pacing, reviewers flag concrete missing launch options. One Spanish-language reviewer scored the game 7 out of 10 specifically because of this gap, writing, translated: "the video configuration section doesn't have borderless or windowed mode options, this causes poor performance with two monitors, when trying to interact with the second screen, the game goes to a black screen." The negative reviewer separately reports the game shipped with "NO CONTROL REMAPPING," and another reviewer notes a mislabelled button prompt showing the wrong controller icon for a key ability.

Verdict

Barbarian Saga: The Beastmaster backs up a very small but leaning-positive launch with real strengths in its hand-drawn art, fluid movement, and sheer exploratory scale, drawing consistent praise from reviewers who stuck with it across multiple hours. Its honest problems are specific and, notably, are raised even by its most positive reviewers: contact-damage hitboxes that multiple players independently flagged as a source of friction, an opening stretch that gates the game's own headline mechanic, animal morphing, many hours in, and a launch missing basic display and control-remapping options that reviewers reasonably expected to be there. None of that undoes what a leaning-positive reception is responding to in the art and movement, but the pacing and options gaps are worth going in aware of. This is a cautious recommendation for Metroidvania fans specifically drawn to hand-drawn presentation and a large map to lose themselves in.

Wanderer callout

A reviewer who stays broadly positive across two separate progress updates, while still naming the one mechanic they dislike each time (a healing system they don't enjoy) rather than staying silently uncritical, is exactly the kind of grounded, evolving evidence Wanderer treats as more valuable than a single first-hour verdict: it shows how a real player's opinion holds up as they see more of the game.