Let me preface this by saying something – I have never played any of the Dark Souls games or Souls-inspired offshoots. Not a one. So it may have been hasty on my part to schedule a demo of Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption. Developed by Dark Star Game Studios and published by Another Indie, this is a game that quickly separates the worthy from the unworthy. In this case, I was certainly the latter. But let me give you some context.
Dark Star Game Studios is composed of veterans from Blizzard, Konami and Ubisoft. Those are some big names, so it stands to reason the production values for Sinner are something to marvel at. And they truly are. Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is just as beautiful as it is brutally unforgiving. The graphics are lush and dark, full of menace and strange beauty. The premise of the game is that a soldier named Adam with a tortured past is trying to atone for his sins. To do so, he must fight 7 monstrous creatures modeled after the 7 deadly sins. Essentially the entire game is a series of boss fights, with one little quirk – before every battle, Adam loses a part of his strength, receiving a permanent debuff. In layman’s terms, that means every fight will be more difficult than the one that came before it.
The upside of this mechanic is you can face the first 7 bosses in any order you choose, but the 8th final boss will always be the most challenging. I’m not sure which of the sins I fought in the demo, but he was probably Gluttony. He was massive and in place of a stomach he had a massive jaw full of hungry teeth. Whenever I got too close, that gaping maw would open wide to try and swallow me whole. That’s not even the most powerful attack though. The arena for this fight was a frozen ice field, so when the boss got really uppity, he would crash through into the frigid waters and then blast up to the surface to fall on me. Even outside of those nasty attacks, he had plenty of bone crushing swings of his mighty cudgels, or if that didn’t work, would try and drown me.
It’s no exaggeration that the longest I lasted against this boss was about half a minute. Usually he would chew me up and spit me out in around 10 seconds. Which is an issue for most gamers. However, if you’re a hardcore Souls fan looking for the next great game, Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption might just be it. It’s slated to release for Steam and all consoles (yes, even Switch) in Q3 of 2018. For my sake, I hope it’s a bit more balanced before then.
