Sundered

Sundered is a Metroidvania game in which the player must traverse a side-scrolling world and unlock new abilities to progress. These are unlocked at shrines, and the player can open shortcuts that provide a faster way across the game's world. The game makes use of some random elements, as enemy hordes will spawn randomly and try to attack the player. Additionally, after every death, the passages connecting the game's areas rearrange themselves using procedural generation.

The main character can use "Shards" gained from enemies to upgrade herself permanently using a skill tree. She can use "Elder Shards" that drop from bosses to sacrifice her humanity in order to gain more powerful abilities, such as turning into a gargoyle.

The game makes heavy use of Lovecraftian horror elements.

The game opens with a woman, Eshe, wandering a desert in a sandstorm when, coming across mysterious ruins, she is pulled into the ground by a mysterious force. Falling into an ever-shifting underworld, Eshe encounters the Shining Trapezohedron, which grants her the power to defend herself. The two begin to travel the caves together.

The game received overall positive reviews with an aggregate score of 74/100 on Metacritic. 8/10, calling the game's hand drawn levels "impressive" and its boss fights "epic", but criticized the random enemy hordes as just leading to "random deaths" and said that the randomly generated levels were not the same quality as the pre-designed ones. Mike Williams of USgamer rated the game 4/5 stars, calling the game "beautiful" and also praising the sound design and ambient background music. He criticized the game for forcing the player to backtrack and expressed disappointment that achieving the "better" ending would likely mean forgoing the "cool" powers the player can use.

Kyle LeClair of Hardcore Gamer rated the game 3/5, saying that the graphics were "gorgeous" and the atmosphere and story were well done, but calling the combat with regular enemies "horrible" due to the large groups that attack the player. He called it "a form of fake difficulty" that was substituted for challenge, and said that it harmed his impressions of the game heavily.