Fallen Tear: The Ascension Reviews
The time spent in early access has been mostly good to Fallen Tear: The Ascension.
Fallen Tear: The Ascension is an interesting exercise in fantasy worldbuilding. It’s a good time, and it’ll be a better time with a walkthrough.
Fallen Tear: The Ascension also has its highlights, like the epic boss battles, its excellent story, along with the upgrade system and great animations. It’s a game where you clearly see how much love and attention to detail was poured into it, and one that you are bound to enjoy if you like exploration or great stories.
Fallen Tear: The Ascension is a huge Metroidvania with plenty to explore and find, and an unusual Bond system that gives progression a different feel. The map tools are excellent for keeping track of areas that need to be revisited, including a photo system similar to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Its beautiful hand-drawn animation is a strength, but inconsistent boss difficulty, including some damage sponges, frustrating 100% completion requirements, a subpar camera, and poor visibility in darker areas keep it from reaching its full potential.
And that’s ultimately where I landed with Fallen Tear: The Ascension. I don’t dislike what the developers have created. In fact, I can completely understand why someone who loves exploration-heavy adventures would get an enormous amount out of this. But for me, the combination of a huge world, frequent backtracking and combat that increasingly demanded specific responses turned something I initially enjoyed into something I had to push myself to continue playing. I think that’s also why my experience feels so different from my Early Access impressions. At the time, the novelty of the world and combat pulled me along. With the full game, the sheer scale of the adventure became more apparent, and I found myself struggling to keep up with it. If you have plenty of time, enjoy getting lost, love searching every corner of a map and don’t mind a combat system that asks you to learn enemy patterns, there’s plenty here to enjoy. For me, though, my gaming time is precious, and I increasingly found myself wishing the game would simply point me in the right direction and let me get on with the adventure. Fallen Tear: The Ascension has plenty of heart, some gorgeous presentation and a lot of interesting ideas. It just wasn’t the adventure I needed right now.
Despite being visually stunning, Fallen Tear: The Ascension is hampered by its ambition to be a Metroidvania with JRPG-sized proportions. Beneath the layers of unnecessary, superficial, or tedious systems, there is certainly a good game to be found, but it takes a long time to establish a satisfying rhythm of progression—a flaw that might have been made up for had the story and characters been somewhat interesting, which is not the case here.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
It has the charm, looks, and challenge that the genre thrives on, but its presentation and systems set it apart in ways that fans of this type of game need to check out. The full game is chugging toward a late 2026 release, and I’m excited to see where this indie team takes it.
While Fallen Tears: Ascension isn’t turning the Metroidvania genre upside down, it does introduce a few ideas that make it feel fresh enough. It doesn’t rely on modern additions like card systems or, God forbid, roguelite elements. Instead, it confidently sticks to its core as a Metroidvania, backed by strong visual and audio design, resulting in a polished experience with enough depth to keep you engaged for quite some time.
A bold blend of JRPG depth and Metroidvania flow that rewards skill and curiosity at every turn.
To conclude, this is a very beautiful and ambitious game that is definitely worth checking out. Even though it still has some areas for improvement, the beautiful graphics and gameplay certainly make it worthwhile to explore the world of Raoah. This is definitely worth considering, even though it is still only in early access.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
There’s so much potential and promise baked into Fallen Tear that with all the rough spots ironed out and improved narrative beats, I can see this being one heck of an experience, and I can’t wait to see what state the game is in 6 months’ time. But until then, it might be best to stick this on your wishlist and watch its progress from afar.