Shrine's Legacy Review

A love letter to a very specific corner of the SNES library

Shrine's Legacy wears its influences on its sleeve, and its review sample knows exactly which influences those are. Positive Concept Games spent roughly five years building this tribute to a specific, somewhat underserved lineage of early-90s action RPGs -- Illusion of Gaia, Soul Blazer, Terranigma, and Secret of Mana -- tracking its progress through more than 70 development diaries and a string of public demos stretching back to a first release in late 2020. That long, transparent gestation ended on 7 October 2025, when the full game launched at NZ$29.99 with singleplayer and local co-op support. Its review sample, 153 reviews at the time of writing, sits at Very Positive, and reading through it makes clear this is a game built for a specific, devoted audience that it largely succeeds in satisfying -- with real, specific caveats attached.

The presentation draws essentially unanimous praise. Reviewers repeatedly describe the pixel art and animation as genuinely transportive, with several longtime fans of the Quintet school of SNES action RPGs saying the game nails not just the visual style but specific mechanical touchstones -- one reviewer, a speedrunner of Secret of Mana, breaks down how the sword-dash attack is lifted directly from Soul Blazer's move set, framing it as a deliberate, well-researched homage rather than a vague pastiche. The soundtrack draws similarly strong praise across the sample, and reviewers consistently call out the game's local co-op as a genuine highlight, with multiple reviews describing playing through the full campaign with a spouse, friend, or child and specifically recommending the game as something to share rather than play solo. The story, at least through its first half, earns warm reception too, with reviewers praising a tone that balances mature themes with old-school sincerity.

Where the sample turns more measured is combat, and the complaint here is specific and recurring rather than vague dissatisfaction. Multiple reviewers describe long stretches -- several cite four or more hours -- spent essentially pressing a single attack button, with elemental weaknesses against certain enemies doing little to meaningfully vary the moment-to-moment feel of fights. One detailed critical review, from a player otherwise sympathetic to the game's SNES inspirations, argues it "has the vibe down" but "misses the mark in enough places that it's harder to enjoy," singling out combat as the clearest example of style outpacing substance. A second, closely related complaint concerns pacing: a significant share of reviewers flag the game's dialogue and cutscenes as extensive and, critically, unskippable, with one reviewer calling the dialogue system "the real antagonist of this game" and another describing forced sequences of watching characters act outside the player's control as a direct drain on goodwill built up by the presentation.

Beyond design complaints, several reviewers report genuine technical problems at and shortly after launch. One describes a reproducible crash to desktop tied to a specific item interaction within the first ten minutes of play; another reports that attempting local co-op locked up their entire PC and disabled Bluetooth controllers, forcing a hard restart. A separate design complaint concerns a mandatory encounter built around continuously spawning enemies that can only be meaningfully fought off using a finite magic resource -- several reviewers call this a frustrating, un-signposted difficulty spike rather than a fair test of skill, particularly given its placement as a required story gate rather than an optional challenge. The story itself draws a similar late-game critique: multiple reviewers who finished the campaign describe it peaking around the midpoint before fizzling by the end, with one pointing specifically to a rushed, unearned shift in the antagonist's motivation that undercuts the hours of buildup that preceded it.

It's also worth weighing the price against what's actually being sold here. At NZ$29.99, Shrine's Legacy sits squarely in the mid-tier of premium indie pricing, and reviewers are split on whether the roughly 15 to 20 hours most report for a full playthrough justifies that cost given the combat's limited depth. Several reviewers who enjoyed their time nonetheless say they wouldn't pay full price again, framing the game as a sale purchase for anyone not already deeply invested in its specific genre lineage, while the game's most enthusiastic fans -- often longtime players of the exact 90s titles it homages -- describe the price as an easy, even generous ask for a project this clearly labour-of-love in its construction. That split tracks closely with how familiar a given reviewer already is with Illusion of Gaia and Soul Blazer specifically: the closer a reviewer's own nostalgia lines up with the game's reference points, the more forgiving they tend to be of its mechanical shortcomings, and the less that nostalgia applies, the more the combat and pacing issues seem to dominate a reviewer's overall impression.

It's worth noting the developer has continued actively patching the game since launch, and at least one reviewer who played shortly after release explicitly credits recent updates with sanding down some of the rougher technical edges reported by earlier players -- a sign this is a living release rather than an abandoned one. For the specific audience this game is built for, that ongoing support, combined with genuinely outstanding presentation and a co-op experience reviewers describe with real warmth, likely outweighs the combat and pacing complaints. But those complaints are consistent and specific enough, raised by reviewers otherwise well-disposed toward the game's aims, that they shouldn't be waved away as nitpicking from an unsympathetic audience -- they're the clearest read on where Shrine's Legacy's ambition currently outpaces its execution.