Colossus - Eternal Blight

A brother, a blight, and no chosen-one nonsense

Colossus - Eternal Blight opens with a premise it refuses to dress up as destiny. Lucian isn't a chosen hero or the subject of a prophecy — he's just a younger brother who won't accept that Lance, sworn to stop the corruption spreading through the kingdom of Eireos, has vanished without a trace. That's the whole hook, and it holds up: the story stays personal rather than epic, filtering the Blight's spread through one family's stubbornness instead of a save-the-world mandate. One reviewer summed it up simply as "rescuing your little bro, that's a cool tale," and that's more or less the tone the writing earns — sincere without being self-important.

The Blight itself does double duty as both antagonist and mechanic. It's not just a threat to fight off; it's a temptation, offering corrupted abilities that turn fights in your favor at a cost the game keeps reminding you is permanent. Choosing to fight the corruption, contain it, or let people fall to it isn't a dialogue-wheel flourish — several players note the consequences ripple forward rather than resolving in the same scene, which is a harder thing to pull off convincingly than most narrative-choice RPGs manage.

Parry, dash, or die: the combat carries the game

The combat is where Colossus earns most of its praise, and deservedly so. It's built around precise parries, fluid counters, and dashes through openings rather than raw button-mashing — several reviewers describe it as unforgiving of sloppy play but satisfying once its rhythm clicks. Three distinct classes with their own skill trees let you lean into a pure discipline or hybridize, and the option to dip into the Blight's own corrupted abilities adds a genuine risk-reward layer most action-RPGs don't bother with.

Where it stumbles a little is telegraphing. More than one player flagged that normal enemies don't always give clear tells before their attacks connect, making the parry timing feel like guesswork in a system that otherwise rewards precision. That's a fair criticism for a game whose entire combat identity rests on reading incoming attacks correctly — when the tell isn't there, the mechanic that makes the game special starts to feel arbitrary instead of skillful. It's the kind of rough edge that's genuinely fixable in Early Access, but right now it does undercut some fights.

Zelda-style puzzles in a JRPG-flavored world

Outside of combat, Colossus leans hard into exploration and puzzle-solving across Eireos's four regions, and the comparisons players reach for — classic JRPGs, old-school Zelda, even Secret of Mana — are earned rather than aspirational marketing copy. The puzzles are generally pitched at a friendly difficulty: engaging without being frustrating, ramping gradually rather than spiking.

That said, quest logic isn't always self-explanatory. A few players note objectives that stay unclear about what a given NPC actually needs from you, and one detailed post-launch review specifically calls out struggling to understand how a quest wanted a confrontation resolved, despite otherwise enjoying the writing. More concretely limiting: side-quest board missions currently can't be abandoned once accepted, which locks players out of the rest of the board if they pick the wrong one first. That's a rougher design gap than the puzzle pacing itself, and the kind of quality-of-life fix that should be straightforward for Early Access iteration to address before 1.0.

The art and music do a lot of the atmosphere's heavy lifting

The hand-crafted pixel art carries a lot of the game's atmosphere, and it's consistently the single most-praised element across the review pool — animated environments that shift with the day-night cycle, detailed backgrounds, and towns that feel inhabited rather than decorative. Several reviewers single out the way locations feel like they have their own personality, a harder trick to pull off in 2D pixel art than concept art alone can promise.

The soundtrack draws similarly strong and consistent praise, described repeatedly as a highlight in its own right rather than just serviceable background music — more than one reviewer specifically calls it a "banger" unprompted, which is a rare degree of consensus for something as subjective as a game's score. Between the visuals and the audio, Colossus punches well above what its Early Access price tag would suggest, and it's the combination that seems to be winning over players who admit the genre (JRPG-inflected action-adventure) isn't usually their thing.

Still early, and it shows in places

This is Early Access, and it plays like Early Access in the ways you'd expect rather than in ways that undermine the core game. A handful of players mention crashes when large groups of small enemies spawn, control quirks that feel "a bit strange" without being broken, and only ten supported languages so far. One player specifically flagged technical issues outside of core gameplay that dragged down an otherwise strong impression. None of this reads as a project in trouble — it reads as a genuinely ambitious combat-and-story RPG still filling in its edges, with a development team that multiple reviewers explicitly trust to keep improving it. The class system isn't even fully unlocked yet by some accounts, meaning the build available today is a partial picture of what's being built toward.

At NZ$24.99, the amount of already-playable content — full story arc through the current build, three classes, four regions, a meaningful choice system — reads as a fair asking price for the EA stage it's at, especially against the near-universal 100% positive reception among its 62 English reviews so far. It's rare to see a debut Early Access title land this consistently well with almost no dissenting voices; the praise clusters tightly around the same handful of strengths (combat feel, art, music, atmosphere) rather than scattering across incompatible opinions, which is usually a good sign the game knows exactly what it's trying to be.

Verdict

Colossus - Eternal Blight is a confident opening chapter for an action-RPG that knows its combat needs to be the star and mostly delivers on that promise, wrapped in a hand-crafted pixel world that earns its JRPG and Zelda comparisons. The telegraphing issues and quest-clarity rough patches are real, but they're the kind of problems Early Access exists to catch before a 1.0 release, not signs of a shaky foundation. Worth a look now for players who don't mind some jagged edges, and worth watching closely as it heads toward a full release.