Gravethorn Review

A Solo Developer's Love Letter to Blasphemous and Bloodborne

Gravethorn wears its influences openly, and almost every review says so before saying anything else. "This a 2D love letter to Bloodborne & Blasphemous with some TLF & Skelethrone thrown in for good measure," one reviewer wrote, while another framed it more bluntly as "Blasphemous-lite, not to the polishing and punishing level of Blasphemous but it's challenging enough without making it boring." You play a memory-wiped Inquisitor waking in a grave, piecing together a "regrets and forgotten past" story across a roughly 8-to-14-hour run through a grim gothic world. It's a familiar recipe, executed by a single developer, and the reviews consistently treat that combination, familiar systems, one-person scope, as the frame for everything else they have to say about it.

Gunplay-as-Parry Gives the Combat Its Own Identity

Where Gravethorn does carve out something distinct is in how it handles its Bloodborne-style parry: instead of a shield or a dedicated parry weapon, you fire a pistol at the right moment during an enemy's wind-up to stun them. One reviewer laid out the loop this creates: "if you fire your gun at just the right time when an enemy is winding up an attack it will stun them for a few seconds. You're mostly dodging/dashing out of the way." Reviewers who engaged with the buildcrafting on top of that praised its depth relative to the game's tiny price tag, one wrote that they were "really surprised at how much you can equip and how many different builds you can have on the fly," pointing to sigils, forbidden arts (spells), trinkets, and an unusual "sufferings" system that trades a stat penalty for a bonus ability, removable later with limited-use serums. "10/10 design surrounding those," the same reviewer said of the serum system specifically.

Tight, Fair Bosses Are the Consistent High Point

Across both positive and mixed reviews, boss design draws the most reliable praise. "Tight, deliberate combat makes every fight feel earned, and the challenge hits a perfect 'tough but fair' sweet spot," one reviewer wrote. "When you win, it's because you improved, not because the game went easy on you." Several reviewers specifically contrasted this against more repetitive complaints elsewhere in the game, noting that even when the moment-to-moment moveset felt thin, individual boss encounters still delivered. That said, difficulty isn't universally well-tuned, one reviewer got stuck at a mid-game "white werewolf boss" they found disproportionately harder than everything around it, and a negative review complained that certain boss health pools felt like "sponges" relative to the damage output available, turning some fights into attrition rather than a real test of skill.

Bugs, an Unclear Metroidvania Structure, and a Punishing Point of No Return

The most consistent technical complaint is a stream of minor-to-moderate bugs, invisible dialogue choices forcing blind picks, an enemy that stopped spawning adds correctly, and one especially bad case where "common enemies in NG+ suddenly started taking 77 hits to kill" until a restart fixed it. Structurally, several reviewers pushed back on the "metroidvania" label itself: one wrote plainly, "this is not a metroidvania... I didn't find a single ability that isn't a glorified key," and another discovered a double-jump ability sitting unused for most of the game because nothing actually required it until the final boss. The harshest structural complaint concerns a late-game boss that locks your save file irreversibly on death, one reviewer found this cost them access to another boss entirely, a rough design choice for a game that otherwise wants you exploring and backtracking.

A Real, if Understated, AI-Voice Complaint

Beyond the design critiques, a specific and recurring point in the reviews is that Gravethorn's voice acting and some of its music were made with AI tools. One reviewer who did not recommend the game called this out directly: "i also didnt mention the fact that bro used AI for his voice acting and music. so the music whenever u do hear is feels boring. theres no personality to the music at all." Another reviewer who did recommend the game acknowledged the same thing but waved it off given the game's scope and price: "There was also complaints that there is AI voice acting, who cares? you barely notice and its a solo dev. I would rather have some Voice than none at all." It's a small but real split among the audience, not everyone treats it as a dealbreaker, but it is a genuine, repeated observation rather than an isolated complaint.

An Easy Recommendation at Five Dollars, a Harder One at Full Price

Value is the throughline in almost every positive review. "For $5, its hard not to recommend," wrote one reviewer who otherwise had a long list of criticisms, and another declared, "Why is this only 5 dollars? I wouldve easily payed 15-20 for this." A reviewer who tried the earlier free demo confirmed the full release represents real, substantive progress: "the full game has improved several times over compared to that one, shedding that rough early feeling and becoming a much more solid and complete experience." The most common criticism that survives even the price discount is that the moveset stays thin across the whole runtime, a handful of reviewers described bosses eventually blurring into "dodge left/right, then attack," and wished for a second weapon or a broader base moveset to keep the back half of the campaign feeling fresh.

Verdict

Gravethorn doesn't hide what it's borrowing from, Blasphemous, Bloodborne, and The Last Faith are named in nearly every review, but its gunplay-as-parry hook, its unusually deep trinket-and-sigil buildcrafting, and its genuinely well-tuned boss fights give a familiar formula enough of its own texture to stand on. The bugs, thin core moveset, an unforgiving point-of-no-return late-game boss, and the AI-assisted voice work some players noticed are real, recurring complaints rather than nitpicks, but at $4.99 for eight-to-fourteen hours of a legitimately atmospheric soulsvania, the value proposition reviewers describe is hard to argue with. Fans of the genre willing to overlook some rough solo-developer edges will likely find, as one reviewer put it, "a hidden gem" worth the asking price.