Chasm landed in July 2018 on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita, with the Nintendo Switch version arriving that October and the Xbox One in November. Bit Kid, Inc. developed and published it, with Leadman Games sharing publishing duties. It is a Metroidvania, and it is built on a gamble: that a genre defined by hand-placed, memorized geography could survive being shuffled.
Trailer, via Bit Kid.
Daltyn and the Sealed Town of Karthas
The setup is lean. A mining community goes quiet. A young soldier named Daltyn is sent to investigate, and he arrives at the remote mountain town of Karthas to find paranormal forces have sealed it off from the outside world. Trapped, he has one direction left to go: down, into the mines.
What waits there is six large areas, each rendered in retro pixel art, each laid out fresh. Chasm pairs procedural generation with handmade room sequences, so the story stays the same for every player while the map does not. That is the whole pitch, and it decides whether the game works.
Swords, Whips and Boss Patterns
Combat borrows openly from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a debt Bit Kid has never hidden. Daltyn carries a melee weapon and a sub-weapon, and those two tools do most of the damage. As he descends, he levels up, collects weapons that run from swords to whips, and picks up artifacts that change how the environment can be crossed, opening routes that were closed before.
The boss fights lean on pattern recognition. Learn the tells, learn the openings, repeat. Between bosses, the game mixes fighting with platforming: rooms with moving or disappearing platforms, environmental hazards, traps. The balance between hitting things and not falling on things is the actual texture of play.
There is a second layer worth naming. Townspeople are trapped in cages throughout the mines. Free one and they return to town, where they open a shop or offer a service, and each rescue unlocks a sidequest that expands on what that service does. Each map is split into themed sections, catacombs and gardens among them.
What the Randomness Costs
Here is the problem with procedural generation in a Metroidvania, and Chasm runs straight into it. The genre’s pleasure is memory. You learn a corridor because someone designed that corridor to be learned. When the layout is assembled rather than composed, the rooms can be readable and still not be memorable, and the handmade sequences do not fully fix that.
The result is a game that plays well moment to moment and rarely lodges. The leveling is steady, the artifacts do open the map in genuinely different ways, and the cage rescues give the descent a reason beyond the next door. Those are real systems doing real work.
But the trade is visible. Chasm swaps the sharpness of a hand-drawn map for replay value, and it does not quite earn back what it gives up. The combat is competent rather than precise. The bosses ask for memorization, which is the right call, but memorizing a pattern is not the same as fighting something you had to think through.
It is worth saying plainly: this is a good game with a structural bet that only partly pays off. The pixel art is confident, the six areas are large, and the loop of descend, level, unlock, rescue holds for a long stretch. What it lacks is the sense that any single room was placed for you.
The Score
Chasm holds a critic aggregate of 7.0 out of 10 across eight outlets, and that number is honest. It is not a knock on the craft. Bit Kid built a working Metroidvania and then made it unpredictable, which is a harder thing than it sounds and a riskier one than it looks.
The parts that matter most are the artifacts and the rescued townspeople. Those are the systems that give the randomness a spine, because they reward exploration regardless of what the map happens to look like on a given run. The parts that matter least are the traps, which read as filler between fights.
If you want a Castlevania descendant with a map you can hold in your head, this is not it. If you want one you can run again and get something different, Chasm is exactly that, and it knows it.
7 of 10.
Chasm by the Numbers
- Score: 7.0 out of 10, averaged from eight outlets
- Developer and publisher: Bit Kid, Inc., with Leadman Games
- Release: July 2018 on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita; October 2018 on Nintendo Switch; November 2018 on Xbox One
- Genre: Metroidvania, platformer, role-playing, indie
- Modes: Single player
- Protagonist: Daltyn, a young soldier
- Setting: Karthas, a sealed mining town, and six procedurally generated areas below it
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
