October Assassination #7
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"There is no Light (TinL)" is a freaking hidden gem and one of the best games I've played this year. It looks absolutely fantastic, sounds great, and has one of the most frantic, aggressive, over-the-top combat sequences I've ever experienced. If other Soulslikes favor calm and composure, TinL rewards split-second reactions and a complete mastery of your toolset, which is mostly fixed - you can choose how to upgrade your character, but everyone will end up maxxing out every skill and having to rely on everything to survive.
Let's break it down, starting with the graphics. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen how juicy that pixel art is. The animations are smooth as butter, the visual language tends to be remarkably consistent within each level, but also shows a lot of variety between levels. If you're looking for 2D pixel-art gorey, horror-driven world building, this is your jam. Enemies are monstruous and have limbs where they shouldn't. Walls have tentacles and multiple eyes coming out of them. Enemies crawl out of cesspits dripping blood. Everything makes sense in this twisted, dark world, and the game never gets old to look at.
To complement the visuals, we have a really good soundtrack. It tends towards atmospheric while you're exploring, and picks up pace once you're in combat. You can usually hear the enemy grunts before you see them, and I love how chatter builds up as you walk around populated areas, with you hearing rumbles that transmit a mood without being specific words. It's good stuff, although I doubt I'll be listening to the soundtrack on Spotify.
The lore and worldbuilding is also quite nice. If you spend the time needed to read all the lore books and to talk to everyone, as well as engage with the sidequests, you'll find a fascinating world filled with a rigid class hierarchy, religious domination, fanatism, blind faith, and a pretty harsh critique of some of those elements. At the same time, the farther away you venture from the starting area, you'll start to come with the best and the worst of the world - from the inhabitants of the Abyss and the darkest circles of hell, to a society that learned to live in peace with monstruous spiders. It's compelling and well realized, even when it didn't need to. The weakest part for me was the final stretch of the game, as the game's resolution is not that satisfying and ends on a kind of weird cliffhanger, but the rest of the stuff is good enough to make you overlook that.
And last but not least - gameplay. Oh man. This is the good stuff. The game is mostly split on exploration and combat encounters. Exploration is supposed to be the easy part, but given how big each area is, how many branching paths you have access to, and how zoomed in the camera is, it's extremely easy to get lost. You'll mostly be dashing around and there's some light platforming that can get on your nerves, but if you die, that's usually fine - you'll just be sent back to the last checkpoint and face no further consequences. Which is good, because while you might be dying a bit on the exploration side of the game, you're guaranteed to die a lot in the combat encounters. Combat starts and ends in a heartbeat - most boss fights took 20-30 seconds to beat, and sometimes I would die within 1-2 seconds of getting into the arena. It's that quick. Part of it is because you have very little health, hence, little room for error. Part of it is because health flasks do not recharge, so you cannot spam them at every battle - you have to decide if the odds are tilted enough in your favor that you can wrap the encounter with the remaining health, because otherwise you just wasted a flask. And if you really want to dish out a lot of damage (a plus early in the game, a must later since enemies regenerate health if you leave them alone for a few miliseconds) you'll have to be constantly attacking, charging your special meter, and blasting specials on them almost non-stop. You'll collect additional weapons as you beat main story bosses, and learning to rotate between those is crucial since using the special ability of an acquired weapon introduces a cooldown. Also, your attacks (and specials) can be used to break enemy's stance (based on the indicator above their head). It sounds like a lot to take care of during combat, and it is, but once you get in the flow and choose the right buffs for your build, it's addictive. My favorite / most frustrating fights were Avarice (enter the arena, take the first three hits within the first second, I'm dead) and the Son of Fly King. Seriously, this game has one of the best combat systems I've ever seen, and I just beat Elden Ring.
It's a crime that this game does not receive more attention, so I'm hoping this review helps to change that.