Speaking of Demon Souls, the game opens with an encounter that was basically lifted straight out of that game. You are basically expected to die without doing much of anything to the boss, as he can one shot kill you. Once you die, you will wake up in a grave (once again similar to another game) and the grim reaper styled character will help teach you all the skills you will need to start off with. The controls at the beginning are fairly simple, bearing a little more in common with Zelda than the Dark Souls controls or Necropolis controls. The enemies even look a lot like Zelda enemies, even the most grim environments have a decidedly chibi aesthetic. But you will quickly learn that you should not engage more than one or two enemies at a time, unlike Zelda or Necropolis, especially since being stabbed in the back is a quick way to a dirt nap. The bosses definitely brought in a Zelda feeling, though, as well as some exploration puzzles. And I definitely felt this was a welcome style.
You can purchase several important starting items from the reaper, but it will take a while before you can do much more at your base. That makes it very important to find forges in order to repair your equipment and set your magic stones. It is also important to find book stations that allow you to socket drop crystals that enemies will drop very rarely. They will drastically improve the experience you gain from the enemies of that type, and this applies across all character classes. Unfortunately there is no map, so you will largely just need to remember where the important things are. Thankfully this game is not procedurally generated (like Necropolis), so you can just learn where everything is. That being said, you can sometimes find yourself very far from a forge and in dire need of repairing your socketed sword before it breaks and disappears. So your best bet will be to routinely carry several weapons.
It will be really helpful to train with the various weapons and items in the game. You can do this in a special area on the bottom level of your base area. Any of the doors that you can newly access will light up depending on which class you are at the time. In general this is a good idea to do even if you know the controls well, these training areas have some nice starting items in them. More important, in the beginning, is learning the different contextual controls. As I said before, the controls are pretty easy to begin with, but they get much more complicated later. Shooting can be a bit counter-intuitive, and tossing items is frankly horrible. In fact the whole item system is one of my first complaints about this game. Not only does your inventory management get to be a serious pain, especially due to needing both food and healing items along with several spare weapons, but using the items during combat is not a recipe for success.
My second complaint was that the music was very sparse in use and not varied at all. If there were many different tracks, I certainly didn’t notice. It all seemed to run together. With a game that you are going to be spending so much time playing, and so much time going over the same territory, that is a pretty serious miss to not have a decent soundtrack. There is no voice track, not that I was not really expecting there to be one, but that makes the music and sound design even more important. The control difficulties and the music pale in comparison to my largest problem, though. And that problem made this an extremely difficult game to review – motion sickness. This isn’t the only game that I’ve ever suffered from this problem, there are several FPS games that I was never able to finish due to this issue, but this is definitely one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Looking at the comments on the various online threads, I’m not the only one with this issue, so you should be aware that it exists.
Unfortunately that made this game almost no fun for me. I very frequently had to take breaks because it was literally making me ill. But, if you really like brutal difficulty and don’t suffer from motion sickness, I could definitely recommend this one. Yes, the choppy framerates made it hard to enjoy, but when it was hitting all the right buttons,it had a lot of potential. The press information says that this is a 50-hour game, and I would say that is both low and high. It’s a high estimate for a single playthrough, it’s much shorter than 50 hours. But if you count all your game time due to restarts from death, then it is quite a bit longer than that. But I don’t fault the developers for that, you cannot really account for every player’s experience or skill level. So for $29.99 you are getting quite a lot of game for your buck. There are design decisions that would have held it back from a must-buy for me personally, not that every game has to be the same, but you are directly competing with games in the same genre. Even if you are worried about motion sickness, it might be worth the price of a barf bag to experience one of the best Souls-like games out there.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgEBb5tOFL8
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