Codex Lost

Introduction

Codex Lost sends the player, a Curator, through a fractured open world hunting the stolen grimoires that once held civilisation together, crafting up to 80 unique spells across elemental schools and combining them with staves and talismans in place of traditional Soulslike melee builds. Freemana built almost all of it alone, with JanduSoft publishing; it released on 14 November 2024. Reading all 19 available English-language negative reviews alongside the top positives, out of a Mostly Positive corpus (roughly 72.1% across 68 reviews), and cross-checking the game's own Steam news feed for its update history, finds a genuinely ambitious magic-focused passion project whose real strengths keep running into a long, specific list of rough edges.

A genuinely different Soulslike identity

The most consistent, informed praise in this review's sample credits Codex Lost for actually reinventing the Soulslike formula around magic rather than bolting a spell system onto conventional melee combat. One reviewer, self-described as someone who "plays the mage in every single game," wrote plainly: "this soulslike was made for me... every single spell is useful, the combat is good, the parry system is so satisfying, the story is really interesting, the variety of spells and combinations are really good." Another compared it favourably and specifically to genre landmarks: "The environments seem straight out of Elden Ring at times and that is just amazing for a single dev," while a longer, more measured review credited the "sprawling semi-open world that is both segmented yet complexly interconnected" as the game's standout achievement, adding that discovering certain late-game areas "literally made my jaw drop." Multiple reviewers explicitly and generously frame their assessment around the fact that this was built almost entirely by one person — a fair, honest context this review shares, though one that shouldn't lower the bar for what players are actually asked to pay.

A long, specific list of things that get in the way

Set against that ambition, this review's negative sample converges on remarkably consistent, specific complaints — not vague genre grumbling, but the same handful of concrete problems raised independently by reviewer after reviewer. The most frequent is a near-total absence of hit feedback: one detailed review put it precisely, "If something hits your shield, the animation simply plays out without particle effects, pushback, any sense of physicality. You can never tell if you blocked an attack or it whiffed." Another, shorter review made the same point from the receiving end: "Hit detection is non existent. Had absolutely no idea when a hit landed on me. Watching my health bar is the only way I knew if I was getting hit." Controls draw their own sustained, specific frustration — key rebinding isn't available at all, which multiple reviewers call unacceptable regardless of team size, and at least one reviewer reports the game unplayable on a non-QWERTY keyboard as a direct result. Navigation frustrates even fans of the underlying world design: despite its "open world" billing, reviewers describe no in-game map, unclear quest objectives, and checkpoints that require a consumable item just to travel back to the hub for basic upgrades — one reviewer who has "completed, and pumped hours into, all the 'proper' souls-likes out there" called the resulting backtracking "ruined... by the lack of basic fundamentals for a game of this genre."

Real bugs, and a long silence since

Beyond the interface complaints, this review's sample includes several specific, reproducible bugs: one reviewer reported the game hard-crashing whenever Escape is pressed on the main screen; another described the same crash forcing them to close the game via Task Manager; and a cluster of reviewers independently flag motion blur intense enough to cause physical discomfort, with no in-game setting to reduce it. This review's own check of the game's Steam news feed found two patches in the month following launch — 1.4.8 and 1.5.0, both in December 2024 — and nothing since, a gap of roughly twenty months at the time of this review. One frustrated reviewer speculated the developer has moved on to a sequel rather than continuing to fix this game; this review cannot independently confirm that, only that the public patch history is silent on it either way.

Final Verdict

Codex Lost is a genuinely creative, ambitious Soulslike built around an identity few other games in the genre attempt — magic as the only way to fight, not an optional playstyle — and its world design earns real, informed comparisons to genre landmarks from reviewers who clearly know the space well. What holds it back from a stronger recommendation is a long, specific and remarkably consistent list of problems that go beyond ordinary indie roughness: missing hit feedback, unrebindable controls, absent navigation tools, and reproducible bugs that a mostly quiet twenty months of post-launch support hasn't visibly addressed. For Soulslike fans specifically drawn to a mage-only build and willing to push through real jank, there's a worthwhile, distinctive game here — just go in with patience, and ideally at a discount.