Everyone who’s played enough of the Dark Souls series and its contemporaries has probably asked themselves at least once, “wouldn’t this be better if you could just skip the levels and fight the bosses?” Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, an indie “boss rush” Soulslike from developer Dark Star, explores that question, distilling the Soulslike experience into eight devilishly challenging duels.
Though it is not quite an airtight proof of concept, the ideas at its core make Sinner an interesting blueprint for a boss rush twist on the classic Dark Souls model. More than simple pattern recognition, learning the quirks in each of the long winded fights demands situational awareness and experimentation. Decoding the bosses is as important as being able to react to their attacks, and the process of figuring out what’s going on each phase of each fight binds an engaging intellectual exercise to the technical mastery (and muscle memory) that the genre generally demands.
Source: IGN.com Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption Review