I saw a lot of people being pretty excited about this game. I wasn’t convinced by the videos I was seeing, but I’d somewhat frequently see people calling this the game of the year for 2021. I know people exaggerate a lot, but I saw that enough times to think there may be something there… And then it popped up on Game Pass which I have a temporary account for, so why not play through it!

Not much to say here, let’s review this! Very quickly, this is not a long review.

Developer: Acid Nerve
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release date: November 23th, 2021 (July 20th on PC)
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Top-down action adventure

Review

Here you play as a little crow dude. He’s a reaper, so his job is to go and kill creatures to take their souls. His first mission ends up with his target soul snatched by a really big crow dude who knocks you out. You find him again, and he notes that the soul went into Death’s door, and to finish your mission you need to help him open it. To open it, you need to bring a few big souls that are strong enough to do so. So you go out to find the Witch, the Frog King, and the Beast, so you can murder the shit out of them for no reason and use their soul to open Death’s door and possibly find your target soul. There’s not that much to the story until you actually open the door, which is then a fast-track to the end unless you want to explore and find hidden stuff. There are a few twists here and there about the people that control the doors you use to travel quickly through the world, but it’s pretty straightforward plot-wise, there’s not much there even with some of the lore stuff you can find about the doors and the people with locks for heads, and the theme of the fear of death.

Outside of combat, you have a world that some might consider Dark Souls-ish, with each map being fairly straightforward, but having lots of side paths and, eventually, shortcuts so you can travel through it faster by opening gates or setting up ladders to different parts of it. It has a bird’s eye isometric camera so you see a lot of the surrounding area. There are secrets here and there you can find, though some require powers you get later. There are blocks you can blow up with bombs, metal thingies you can use a Hookshot to get to, and torches you can light to solve “puzzles”. The secrets can be one of 16 shrines that will give you crystals (which can increase your health or energy), or orbs that give you souls which you can trade-in for stat upgrades. Puzzles are largely fairly simple “use bomb to break wall” or “light all torches”. Enemies are all over the place for you to fight, though mostly you can avoid them if you want, except for the many spots where you need to kill all enemies to open gates. There’s a few hidden areas that require specific spells, and finding those give you an easy miniboss to beat that will power up that spell. The fire upgrade is kinda good, that’s about it. As you travel around you’ll find spots that spawn doors. Those doors bring you back to the hub area, so you can use the doors to travel quickly to different parts of the world. Doors are also checkpoints for when you die.

Combat is pretty much as simple as it gets. You have a repeatable combo attack (3 hit combo with the reaper sword… which is the only weapon you should use). The attack hits everything within an arc. You have a charge attack, which hits a bit harder but takes longer to come out of course. You have 4 magic spells, which also take time to charge and prevent you from moving, but they’re all ranged attacks so you can aim in any direction while you’re charging. Those are the bow, the bomb, the fireball and the Hookshot. The bow and fireball take one energy to use, the bomb takes 2 (and takes longer to charge) and the Hookshot is free (but mostly useless in battle). You recover 1 energy per hit you deal to enemies. And your only defensive option is a dodge roll. Combat is extremely simple. Get used to the enemies’ tells for when they’ll attack, dodge out of the way, and attack until they telegraph another attack so you move back. And of course you can try to stand back and use your bow, but that’s limited since you need to recover energy. And some projectiles you redirect in the direction you’re looking if you hit them. And that’s the combat. It’s very simple, but it does work very well. The one enemy I had trouble with is the weird goblin guy with a hammer and armor, when there’s multiple at a time they’re kinda tough to deal with. The Beast gave me issues and is the only boss that killed me, multiple times, but I was being a dumb and not realizing it had a really easy pattern.

And there’s really not much else to talk about here. You heal by using a seed on a pot and touching the flower that grows there. When you come back to life all seeds you planted regrow. When you’re in the hub you can talk to the big crow in the middle, he gives you stat upgrades for souls. Attack power, attack/charge speed, faster movement speed + dodge roll cooldown, faster magic charge speed and stronger magic are the things you can power up. There’s a few upgrades for each, each costing more and more souls. The game is pretty short so unless you grind you’re not filling up the power-ups, but you’ll have most of them and you’ll be fine for the final boss. Heck, you’ll be fine for the final boss without any of the energy or health upgrades (I didn’t have any, I only found 6 of the shrines, 3 of each type), and you start the game with the only good weapon so not much to worry about there.

One REALLY weird note is PC performance. The performance was fine in my machine, I was pulling ~240-300fps at 1440p, no problem there. What was weird was the temperatures. My case, the Matrexx 50, would suck balls at airflow… if I couldn’t instantly improve it by removing the front acrylic window that is blocking the front intake fans. So since I’ve started doing that, the temps for the GPU have not gone over, like, 64 degrees celsius on any game. That’s super good. But this game, somehow, forced it to a consistent 74 degrees. Still not bad, but I really wonder why this, of all games, was seemingly forcing my GPU so much. I thought it may have been the slight overclock that I’ve started doing recently, but no, even if I let it clock normally it still goes to 74 degrees (and the framerate only drops by ~30 fps). That’s quite odd.

Overall

This game was… very okay. The combat is fine but not much to write home about, and there’s not much to the game outside of combat as a lot of the puzzles are really straightforward. The world isn’t THAT fun to explore. The highlights are definitely the boss battles, those are well designed and interesting. Betty annoyed me a bit but that was my fault for not paying attention, but when I did it was a fun battle.

I dunno, this game kinda disappointed me. Not because it’s bad, but because people were hyping the crap out of it and it didn’t reach anywhere near the “GotY” level of quality people are claiming about it. Yeah, it looks good, it controls really well and is overall a fun experience, but for a game to be at GotY level it needs to excel. This doesn’t.

If you have Game Pass it’s worth the time playing it. If you’re paying for it, I’d recommend waiting for a sale. I’m giving this a recommendation, but keep your expectations in check, unlike what I did 😀