Apotheon [official site] is an attractive but shallow game whose more interesting ideas are marred by an unwieldy control system.

You play as Nikandreos, a man tasked with taking back power from the gods after Zeus decides to forsake mankind. You'll achieve that by visiting the domains of key individual gods from the Greek pantheon and besting them in order to collect their powers as embodied by objects. There's a hub world structure and between god domains you have access to the agora and agora market where you can buy upgrades for weapons or armour, as well as learning recipes for potions and so on.

The game is styled after the black-figure Greek pottery prevalent about 6 or 7 centuries BC, where black silhouetted figures enacted scenes across the surface of vases. It's a lovely conceit and one which theoretically lends itself well to a two dimensional side scroller – the game equivalent of twirling a vase to get a story. That's not quite the reality of Apotheon, though.

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