SealChain: Call of Blood

A chain-reaction inventory game wearing a bullet-hell coat

"SealChain: Call of Blood" builds its entire identity around one central idea: items in your bag aren't just stat sticks, they're pieces that connect to each other through shared "ports," forming chains and, if arranged correctly, special "seal" formations with bonus effects. It's a distinctive enough hook that reviewers keep reaching for comparisons to other inventory-Tetris roguelikes without quite landing on an equivalent. "I love the 2 gameplay elements of link matching along with fast paced action, it's a great game with a lot of potential," wrote one player, while another summed up the appeal in a single line: "its fun trying to figure out how to optimize positioning items to activate combos."

The developer, AliveGameStudio, says the game had a multi-year development cycle and ran a public playtest before release, and some of that iteration shows in the amount of raw system depth on offer — "Easily one of the most interesting progression systems I've ever seen in a roguelike game in this style. It's a min-maxer's wet dream. You'll lose time just tinkering with your build, and there is plenty to unlock." What's much less settled is whether the game actually teaches players how to use that system, or whether the combat wrapped around it holds up its end.

The tutorial doesn't tell you the rules

The most consistent, specific complaint across both positive and negative reviews is that "SealChain" asks players to learn its core mechanic — how items resonate with each other — almost entirely through trial and error, because the game's own text doesn't explain it. The clearest example comes from a detailed negative review: "For example, you get an item - some kind of mushroom. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, does it say that it gives +1 to projectiles. But if you attach it to a weapon, it will give the weapon +1 projectiles. And if you don't just attach it, but attach it through a connection with some other mushroom (WHICH IS ALSO NOT WRITTEN ANYWHERE), then they will have some kind of resonance and will give even more projectiles. All this can only be learned through trial and error and memorization; there is NO information anywhere in the item descriptions about what they do."

Even reviewers who otherwise like the game concede this point rather than dispute it. "I will admit, the tutorial is vague and you really have to rely on trial and error and reasoning skills at first," wrote one player who still recommended the game. Another player's full assessment of the onboarding was blunter still: "The mechanics seem really cool but the tutorial was so vague and poorly translated for such a complex system." When both sides of a review split agree the tutorial is the problem, it's a genuine issue rather than a difference in taste.

A defensive fanbase and a real balance argument underneath it

One unusual pattern in this game's review page is how many positive reviews are explicitly framed as rebuttals to the negative ones, often dismissing critics outright. "I saw a lot of negative reviews talking about how the game was frustrating and confusing and too difficult, so I decided to see if they were right or just stupid. They are stupid," reads one review. Another opens the same way: "I saw a lot of negative reviews talking about how the game was frustrating and confusing and too difficult... Dunno what the review bombing's about, the game's quite fun!"

That defensiveness is worth naming, but it doesn't actually resolve the underlying disagreement — it mostly restates it. A more even-handed positive review acknowledged the same balance problem the "skill issue" crowd waves away: "I agree the leveling and balance early could use a tune for better runs but this game scratches that min max itch with the inventory management and upgrade system." And a negative reviewer pushed back specifically on the idea that difficulty complaints are illegitimate: "Balance in this game is absolute bs and pretty much absent (and not in OP way, quite contrary actually)." Given that Steam's own achievement data shows only 69.2% of players clearing the lowest difficulty tier before completion percentages fall off a cliff (5.4% for the next tier up, 13.6% and 1.0% for the tier above that), the "just a skill issue" framing looks harder to sustain than its proponents suggest — a very large share of the playerbase simply isn't getting past the early game.

Combat is thinner than the inventory system

A second, more structural complaint is that all the interesting decisions in "SealChain" happen in the inventory screen between fights, while the fights themselves are comparatively shallow. One player who spent real time with the game put it starkly: "This is, ostensibly, a survivor-like game but the essential gameplay is Backpack Hero. Everything is about inventory management/placement. There are no special abilities, evolutions, giant maps, nor any real... skill... involved in the stages themselves. All skill in this game comes from Inventory Management between rounds." Another described the actual moment-to-moment combat as visually noisy and mechanically thin: "When it comes to combat it has little to no gameplay involved. Hitboxes are wague, numbers and projectiles fill the screen. Its all about how good of a puzzle you have solved in your inventory."

That same reviewer also raised sound design as a specific weak point, separate from the combat complaint: "Soundfont in this game is HORRENDOUS." No other reviewer in this sample corroborated that particular claim in detail, so it's worth treating as one strongly-worded but unverified opinion rather than a confirmed pattern — though the broader "menus over combat" complaint is echoed by a player who wrote simply: "I did not care for it as I spent more times in menus than I did playing the game itself."

Less freedom than the genre promises

A final recurring criticism concerns build variety. The genre convention for roguelikes is that runs should feel meaningfully different from each other, but multiple reviewers say each playable character's item pool is fixed enough that runs converge on similar solutions. "There's not much freedom because of the preset items/drops each characters have, leading to very similar gameplay every time even on the different modes. Each character having a gimmick is fine, it's just that again, there's no leeway in building the character another way since of how items are locked." A separate review reported the same experience over a short play session, finding three consecutive runs nearly identical: "In 40 minutes of play, I managed to complete 3 runs, and they were all the same. The same stages, the same enemies, the same items, I didn't see anything new."

Verdict

"SealChain: Call of Blood" has a genuinely original central mechanic — chaining items together for compounding effects — and enough reviewers on both sides credit that system with real depth that it's clearly not a gimmick. But the game undercuts its own best idea with a tutorial that withholds the exact information players need to use that system, a combat layer several reviewers describe as vague and secondary to inventory-tetris, and a difficulty curve steep enough that Steam's own achievement data shows most players stalling early. This is a game worth trying at a discount for players who specifically love inventory-management roguelikes and are willing to treat the early hours as an unguided puzzle to solve by trial and error; it's a much harder sell for anyone hoping the "bullet hell" half of its identity carries equal weight.