I still haven’t played Elden Ring yet as I want to wait to get a better computer before getting around to it. In the meantime I have this sitting in my library unplayed for a while now. It’s one of those Dark Souls clones adapted for 2D. I was interested because of how much I love Dark Souls but I have zero experience with and indeed am terrified by metroidvania-style platforming games. Most people seem to think that this is significantly easier than Dark Souls but I found this far more difficult as I am simply so awful at platforming and had an almost impossible time navigating the map areas that require lots of jumping.

There is a story in this game, but just like Dark Souls, it’s oblique and hinted at rather told straight. You’re a guard accompanying a princess when the ship is attacked by a monster. The ship sinks and you end up on the beach on an island and need to find the princess. Along the way you meet other people who seem to be on similar missions and comment on how impossible the geography of the island is, composed as it is of pastiches of different locations from all over the world and populated by all kinds of monsters. As in Dark Souls, there are sanctuaries and shrines that provide healing and refuge where you respawn when you die. A nice twist that you choose which creed to adhere to and can only make full use of the sanctuaries of your own creed. There’s more to the story but I didn’t want to try too hard to complete this game. It’s easy enough to guess that you eventually reach the person who controls this mysterious island and need to fight him as a boss.

The mechanics of this game are all familiar, down to how equipment load determines rolling distance, how blocking with a shield consumes stamina, and so on. The obvious difference is that it’s all 2D and to compensate for that, it makes much more use of the vertical space. Your character can jump up rather high and must do so to avoid enemy attacks or reach enemies to hit them. Since I knew I would be awful at playing this, I deliberately researched and went for a cheesy mage build to use spells in combat so I wouldn’t have to rely on parrying or dodging too much. It worked out pretty well for me though I still mostly used a greatsword against regular enemies and reserved magic to burn down bosses. There are some bosses who killed me an embarrassing number of times but there are also plenty who I beat on my very first attempt.

My real Achilles’ heel though is the platforming. It isn’t too bad at first, just jumping and running around. But your character later gets more movement options like walking upside down on the map, and wall jumping and dashing forward while in the middle of a jump. Add to that map features like wooden platforms which break when you stand on them, sequences of platforms that appear and then disappear in a set pattern, and you get elaborate puzzles where you must make use of the full set of area traversal abilities to navigate. Of course, the toughest jumping puzzles are in optional areas that you can skip. But it’s still impossible to complete the game without navigating many such puzzles. Eventually it got to a point where I fell too many times from a disappearing platform or missed a wall jump and gave up. I actually got a pretty long way into the game and probably could have finished it if I just persevered, but I just didn’t want to keep torturing myself.

Overall my impressions of this game are a mixed bag. It’s so unashamedly a 2D clone of Dark Souls that I wonder how they got away with it. That’s great to me though since I love that game so much and it’s fantastic how closely they nailed everything, even small details like scarily dark areas and the recurring characters you meet along the way. My main complaint is that it really needs a map because remembering how all these 2D areas connect together is way harder than visualizing a 3D space. Getting from sanctuary to sanctuary is really easy due to the ability of the guides to just teleport you but I frequently forget how earlier areas are laid out when I go back and forget where key merchants are located as well. I think the game could do with a little more handholding at the beginning too, like pointing out that you don’t get any focus recovery potions, which refuel your ability to cast spells, unless you explicitly get them through the skill tree.

But of course the real barrier for me that it’s ultimately a platformer. I never learned to play these, I’ve never played a single Mario Bros. game actually, and so never developed the skills and familiarity to be comfortable with the genre. It’s probably because I’ve always been a PC gamer and never owned a console during my childhood. It certainly was an educational experience to discover just how awful I am at this genre and I’m glad I can finally say that I’ve tried at least one such game. But I will also never attempt to play such a game again and indeed have deleted several games from my watch list that are platformers. Maybe if I were younger, I might have tried learning but I no longer possess the patience and have other games to move on to.