This game looks like Shadow of the Colossus, and presents itself like Shadow of the Colossus.

It is not Shadow of the Colossus.

That is not to say that this game isn’t unique; it definitely is unique.

But unique does not mean good.

The heart and soul of this game is wandering around the game world taking out titans. Each of them has their own arena, and there are 19 of them in total.

This sounds like a boss rush. But it really isn’t. The reason is that the gameplay mechanics of this game are very strange.

As a 2D game, you run around laterally. You really only have two abilities – the ability to roll and the ability to shoot your arrow. Note that is arrow, singular – you shoot ONE arrow. If you miss with it, you need to retrieve it to shoot again. This means either walking over it, or holding down the fire button to draw it back to you. Drawing back your bow to fire or summoning your arrow back both immobilize you as long as you’re doing it, and firing your arrow is not instantaneous and can be done with varying amounts of power.

Your character dies in one hit; if anything hits you, you die. The only things which don’t instantly kill you are a poison cloud (which kills you after a couple seconds) and some spores (which mess with the gameplay interface, and will kill you if you walk through too many of them). Both of these things appear in exactly one titan fight. Otherwise, if you get hit, you’re dead.

When you die, you respawn at a nearby checkpoint. Note that this is not actually in the room with the titan, and in some areas, you actually have to do a fair bit of walking to get back to the titan – not a ridiculous amount, but there are definitely a few areas where this is a bit wearing.

The main reason why this game is so weird is that the titans themselves are very weak – they are really, really, really good at killing you, but most of the titans can be killed with a single shot from your bow. This means that many of the titans, once you figure out how to beat them, can be killed in under 30 seconds – and many can actually be killed in under 10 seconds.

The problem is that you probably won’t do this the first time. You’re likely to die. A lot. I died 218 times on my way through this game. Almost all of your time spent playing this game is time spent dying.

The game, then, is basically you setting up for the perfect shot, and then executing on it successfully once to win the encounter.

Some of the titans do require a bit more doing than this – some of them require multiple shots to kill in various capacities. Ironically, most of these titans are actually easier than many of the one-shot titans simply because they tend to be less lethal, and therefore, easier to fight. One of the first titans you fight is an ooze which splits repeatedly, and it is one of the easier titans despite requiring by far the largest number of shots of any titan in the game. It is also one of the only titans which actually feels like a “boss fight”. However, most of the rest of these titans are just about executing on a short series of things, usually 2 shots, or some sequence you must do to expose the boss’s weak spot.

The net effect of all this is that, rather than feeling like you’re beating down a bunch of badass bosses, instead it feels like you’re facing off with a bunch of heavily twitch-based scenarios – almost all of the fights are not about figuring out what you need to do (this is generally obvious), but actually executing on it. The few titans which are harder to figure out what to do against tend to be the most frustrating, as you don’t even know if you’re “doing it right” until something you try actually works.

Because so many of these fights can be over so quickly, really it is basically banging yourself against the wall that is the titan until you get your one perfect shot, at which point you win and it is off to the next one. This can make some parts of the game feel very short indeed – if you quickly kill a titan, it feels very ephemeral.

And the reality is there isn’t anything else here for you. There are the nineteen titans, and that’s it. That basically means that this is a game which fundamentally contains 19 pieces of content, and all of the gameplay is centered around beating these 19 mostly twitch-based pieces of content.

After that, you’re done with the game forever and never need to touch it again – and probably don’t want to, as the titans really don’t feel that satisfying to fight. Rather than being impressive enemies, they’re just twitch challenges. The only one that really felt all that exciting to me was the very final (secret) boss, who was pretty fun to look at and by far the most visually interesting foe in the game.

There is no real story to speak of – there are maybe three or so vague hints throughout the game, but you really have absolutely no idea whatsoever why it is you’re doing the thing you’re doing. It is implied that your arrow is somehow special, but why are you trying to drain the souls of all these titans?

Who knows. And frankly, who cares? The game does nothing to make you feel like you’re part of a story; it is very gamish, and the vague attempt at profundity comes off as just that – a pretentious stab at relevance.

If you are all about twitch-based challenges, and enjoy dying repeatedly while attempting them… there are still much better games for you. This game was an interesting experiment, but I can’t recommend buying it. If you own it already, it might be worth taking a glance at it just for its oddness, but you aren’t really missing anything - just 3-4 hours of your life you won't get back.

14 killed
146 deaths
02:41:25

Would I recommend it? If you hate yourself I would.

This game is very pretty. It's also very hard.
I don't mind hard games, even though I'm not great at them, but I do mind having my time wasted.
Do you remember Super Meat Boy? Hard, one 'hit point', but when you died, you instantly started at the beginning of the level and could keep going.
In this game, you die from one hit, but you get kicked back to a checkpoint outside of the boss room, and have to jog back.
Most of the time, it takes me longer to get to a boss room than I survive during the boss fight.

If you're really good at this kind of game, it's probably awesome. I'm not good enough to have fun with it, so I can't recommend it.

I really wanted to like this game.
The graphics and music are beautiful, and the gameplay is solid.

But it's just too damn hard, and in a bad way.
You die in one hit, and then you have to backtrack a bit and try again. If you're gonna make a game where you might die after only a few seconds of action, respawning should be INSTANT. Otherwise it's incredibly tedious.

The boss attack patterns are also horribly chaotic and unpredictable. If the boss does something you didn't expect, you're dead. There's no room for mistakes, and often you'll feel the deaths weren't your fault. Whenever I did manage to kill a boss, I didn't feel very proud of it. I felt like I just got lucky.

Even the parts in between the action are boring. The world is big and pretty but completely empty. If you get lost or go the wrong way, you're not going to get anything out of it, just more backtracking.

I managed to get to the final boss (I think), and then I had enough and gave up.

Edit: I should point out I usually like hard games when they're rewarding, and have 100% completed games like Super Meat Boy, Castle in the Darkness, and 1001 Spikes. This one isn't rewarding at all, and I gave up because it just wasn't fun for me. Your character doesn't grow. There's nothing to collect. There's almost no story to keep me interested. And the battles feel more like luck than skill due to the one-hit mechanic. It's just not fun enough for me to take the punishment.