It's been a while since I played Jotun. However, there are still a few things I remember quite well. Firstly, as anyone who has seen a single screenshot of the game will have noticed, Jotun is really beautiful. The painterly style of the game really impressed me at the time. The aesthetics of the game also reflect the Nordic mythological setting very well. Typical figures and creatures of the Viking world are presented very vividly and really come to life thanks to the elaborate animations. The same applies to the music, which is convincing with both melancholic sounds and more intense combat music.

In terms of gameplay, I had an all-round fun time for the short duration of Jotun (approx. 5.5 hours). I remember that the combat system was quite simple and not really complex or deep. Anyone expecting to delve deep into combat tactics will probably be disappointed. This didn't bother me much at the time, although a certain monotony did set in towards the end of the game. Another point of criticism I would add is that some of the boss battles use quite unfair mechanics, which you can only counter to a limited extent thanks to the rather clumsy controls. So it did happen to me that one boss kept shooting lightning bolts at me like crazy with me barely being able to move my sluggish character out of the way. That was pretty frustrating.

Apart from that, however, I have no regrets about playing Jotun. The narrative gripped me from start to finish, the setting was (at least at the time) still quite fresh, and the music and art style were first class. All in all I would recommend to give Jotun a try :)

Don't play this game.

The best part about this game is the voice acting.

The art style is all over the place with the only good thing about it being the boss animations.
The combat is clunky and frustrating and the exploration practically non-existent.

The game consists of 5 areas containing 2 levels and one boss fight each. Don't start this game with the hopes of playing a boss rush game like Titan Souls, you won't.

Each level has a gimmick that is extremely overused. I think the intent with this was to create intriguing puzzles, but all of them have the same solution. To put it short, the levels are drawn out, boring walking sections.

The boss fights have some potential, however, combined with the awful combat system they just become very frustrating. I ended up almost finishing a fight, only to get one-shot randomly and having to restart it way too many times.

Not a single part of this game was even in the slightest fun to sit through.

Hmmmm okay this one is really hard to rate - part of me wants to think much more highly of this, because I adore the ambition of the devs and I think Jotun is, overall, a pretty unique and fun experience. I'm conflicted because there are a lot of qualities that I appreciate here!

Unfortunately, for everything I really enjoyed I pendulum-swung back against points that kept me from loving this game. For all the abilities you pick up, combat is pretty repetitious. As gorgeous as all the character designs and animations are, the world feels too open and empty. As appealing as the structure is, by the 4th area I was beginning to lose steam with the core loop.

I am glad I finished the game because the final fight and cutscene were really spectacular. Honestly the characterisation was phenomenal, I was more hooked by the biographical snippets of the main character than I was by any of the boss fights. Also I LOVED the Icelandic dialogue, the effort put into everything is so palpable.

This is definitely worth playing, I'm glad it was recommended to me. It's imperfect but super interesting.

I wish it was more than just a boss-rush game, but Jotun is very cool. The hand-drawn art is beautiful and the boss designs are epic and feel truly massive. Video games love giant bosses but they too often struggle to translate the giant boss into a satisfying experience. It often ends up being just smacking their hands or waiting for them to crash onto the battlefield and then wail on them for a minute. Jotun is able to capture the hype of a giant boss without it being boring or derivative.

Jotun's bosses are all uniquely designed and the mechanics of the camera pulling away to show the scale of the boss and the full scope of the battle is great and makes you feel truly miniscule by comparison.

The only downsides to the game are that there is not really any exploration of the beautiful environments, since it's just a boss rush and that the combat mechanics are pretty limited.

Its a very pretty game and I did enjoy playing it but it is stupidly short and yet most of it is filler. Its a good thing they added in a boss rush mode afterwards because its really the only bit worth playing.

For me, if the whole game was the first chapter of maybe 3 or so, I would feel better about the game. Its length is so short that I've just clocked it in 1 sitting and that is a shame considering you unlock your last ability and go straight into the final fight.

Combat is very basic, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's more simple in a deliberate way that makes you worry about your timing of attacks etc.

The biggest criticism of this game is that a lot of it is just empty space and walking towards your next objective. The levels where you collect the runes are so sparse and devoid of stuff to do it.

Only one level really bucks this trend and its because you are swarmed with enemies. Going forward I was expecting each new biome to contain more enemies to fight in a similar fashion but they were just mostly empty.

The secrets are merely chop something to find an entrance, or walk through a hidden tunnel and that is kind of ok for a isometric camera angle but it feels thoroughly underwhelming.

Contrary to others, I like that the map is so obtuse and won't tell you where you are. You need to work out the landmarks and where you are in relation to them. I can see why everyone else hates this system though.

Also of note is the tree level. The map is actually useless due to no real landmarks to reference. Everyone's complaints boil down to "You go exploring with this map that isn't really that helpful and then find nothing" and they are 100% right.

Really disappointing to say the least.

For free, its an afternoon of fun. If paying, I think this is reserved for sales at about £6 but about £3/4 would be the sweet spot.

Jotun is a boss rush game filled with padding and boredom. The meat of the game - the bosses - are damn disappointing gameplay-wise and don't really feel like big epic bosses.
For a game focused on combat, the player offers little to no actual tactics to employ; you can only rely on your basic, slow, attacks and a pityful dodgeroll. Each boss usually revolves around going close to them (usually right underneath them) and just attacking their feet until they die. The filler between the bosses are just so goddamn boring and only serve the purpose of stretching the playtime.

The animations are solid with alot of telegraphing, but overall the gameplay is just a goddamn disappointment.

I’ve recently been taking an extended luxuriance in the indie world, partly out of necessity (I currently lack access to my higher end consoles), but also partly out of a wish to be surprised. With AAA games, you tend to know what you’re getting due to the massive marketing accompanying the release of such titles; with indie games, you generally don’t know as much, with many of them falling under the radar.

Alas, given my last six or so mixed-to-negative reviews, I’m beginning to wonder if this is ultimately a pointless pipe dream of mine. While indie developers aren’t subject to the same executive mandates as their bigger budget brethren, it is also true that they definitively lack access to those lucrative resources that, in many ways, make-up for studio interference.

Developed and published by Thunder Lotus Games, Jotun didn’t do anything to change this POV. Having recently watched the latest Thor film, I was hoping the game would do justice to Norse Mythology by way of intermixing genuine respect for the lore with a gallant tale. After all, its premise of a Viking warrior traveling across the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil in a quest to enter Valhalla sounded like the perfect recipe for success. And yet, it’s clear that this concept needed to be handled by a company with more manpower and funds - almost all aspects of Jotun feel half-baked in scope, as though any interesting proposals had to be nixed because of monetary constraints.

I know it’s not fair to rag on a small business for this issue, but you guys have to understand that planning is everything in game development. If you know how much cash and time you’re working with beforehand, you’ll know what you can achieve and what you should probably save for the sequel. It seems like common sense, but there have been many instances of games falling apart because something was prioritized that shouldn’t have been, or a story element was crafted yet unable to be maintained for the duration of the title.

The manifestation of Jotun’s narrative illustrates this problem from the get-go. Main protagonist Thora’s backstory is conveyed ENTIRELY through text blurbs: there isn’t a single bit of animation, pre-rendered or in-engine, only lines of dialogue that autoplay after completing a level. I’m not saying there had to be anything extravagant or rich like in a Kojima production, but even some motion comic murals would’ve gone a long way towards injecting a grandiose flurry into what the heroine had gone through (The Witcher 2 and AC Chronicles: China did something similar). As it stands, the paganist tale you get is pretty bare, combining cliché family troubles with good old-fashioned bad luck, things that won’t hook anyone without the requisite flesh. And yes, I know that chapters from the Poetic Edda weren’t exactly Shakespearean, but the stream of consciousness generated by the prose more than made-up for any conceptual flaws.

Without visceral beats to draw you in, you’re left with the gameplay, which is, again, rudimentary to a fault. Jotun is a top-down adventure without a jump, leaving you with just attack, heavy attack, dodge, and God powers. Your standard strike is a simple axe swing too slow for my liking; I guess the design technically makes sense given the size of the maul and the fact that fights come down to simply hacking away at the enemy’s health (a feat that would’ve been far too easy via button mashing). Still, in spite of these justifications, I can’t help but be reminded of those characters from old-school arcade fighters who were made deliberately lethargic for the sake of establishing hard stat differences from the rest of the roster.

In Jotun’s case, of course, it’s not other playables but bosses that Thora’s sluggish disposition is being contrasted with. While some of the nine levels have minions, the crux of your spars will be with the titular jötunn who plague the five main areas, and it’s consequently my theory that Thora’s attack speed was dropped for the sole purpose of artificially propping up the magnitude of these encounters. After all, what better way of concocting the illusion of making a big bad seem even bigger and badder than by decreasing your avatar’s damage output and subsequently drawing out the battle?

That’s not to say there isn’t any strategy involved, but Jotun feels very 90s in the sense that bosses come down to having a single discernible pattern that changes in Phase II once their HP drops enough, with the added effect of becoming quicker as well. While their base speed is decent on its own merits, this boost has the consequence of rendering your heavy swipe (already at a disadvantage if you can imagine how languid it is when the “fast” attack is considerably torpid) less optimal as a tactic.

That leaves dodging, and unfortunately the evasion key is hit with the same defect that hurt Darksiders II, which is a delay between tumbles. Anyone who’s played a 3D Zelda game will know how fun it is to do roll-after-roll-after-roll to quickly get somewhere. Disappointingly, you can’t do that here since Thora will take a small break to recover from her spin. To reiterate, the only excuse I can think of for why this limitation was implemented was to hollowly extenuate the jötunn brawls by preventing you from easily sidestepping their strikes.

And what of these God powers? Well, to be honest, I am unable to say much on their efficacy due to me not even realizing their existence until the very end! Part of me is honestly proud, having beaten all but the last boss with only the initial healing ability (and even then almost besting him!), but I can’t deny they would’ve been quicker had I had access to the rest of the arsenal. You acquire them via finding shrines during free roam, and they give you some decent tools to summon, from the aforementioned healing to decoy creation to a strength boost and so forth.

Regardless, in terms of affecting the combat, these blessings would’ve hid the problems, not resolved them. What it comes down to is fighting is just not fun - and considering you’re playing as a shield-maiden equipped with a giant hatchet, that’s a big issue.

To be fair on Jotun, such dustups are, more-or-less, half the focus. The rest of the time you’ll be exploring the deific ennead, whose portals range in quality. Some have you simply moving from Point A to Point B, others completing puzzles of sorts, and while my opinion may vary depending on the level, the overall package is lackluster. Again, to circle back to my initial claim, the idea of traversing the Nordic Cosmos was fascinating; however, it required a larger playing field to operate in that Thunder Lotus Games just wasn’t able to provide. These places are so simplistic that their little gameplay variations fail at being appealing. And while exploration is, in a strict sense, rewarded by way of the aforestated altars, it’s still hampered by two detractions: one, the dedicated minimaps, which are confusing to read and don’t even show your character marker relative to the overworld; and two, the fact that there are a lot of aimlessly elongated pathways. Seriously, you can spend the better part of a minute simply crossing a bridge, and it’s so irrelevant to anything going on anywhere. To propose another conspiracy theory, they seem to have been thrown-in every other place to simply pad out the runtime.

Graphically, Jotun has its boons and banes. While I haven’t read enough Northern Germanic texts to acutely imagine how those tribes visualized the roots of the Yggdrasil, Thunder Lotus mostly opted for natural biomes in their adaptation. That is, while you do have a few cool zones like astral clouds or a dwarven pewter city, you’re primarily getting your basic swamps, ice zones, and magma fields that have already appeared in countless video games, and they aren’t any different here. Texturing reminded me a lot of Arkham City’s redux in the “Back to Arkham” remaster in the sense that you get detail counteracted by uncanny smoothness. You’ll see surfaces of wood, stone, metal, and earth contain elementary grooves, but it’s more like they were impuncted on a glossy sheen than formulated as part of the original Unity object creation.

Rest assured, plenty of positives exist. There are several instances where the camera zooms back to reveal a glorious vista in the background, and I really came to look forward to these moments due to the bird’s eye view of Jotun otherwise limiting any scope of the horizons. Seeing the developers actually animate a facial expression for Thora as she charges up her batter swing was also a nice touch. The jötunn themselves are beautifully-constructed, being mutated behemoths with muscular frames and scrawled countenances evoking fear: these are entities that could have definitively challenged the Gods of yore. The only drawback to them are certain animations- they were a bit too choppily smooth, reminiscent of Adventure Times’s usage of Toon Boom, Maya, and Harmony suites.

Sound effects are very weak. Right off the bat you’ll notice that Thora’s weapon emits the same exact noise no matter the exterior it crashes against, whilst every other sound, from grunts to stumbles to strafes to movement, all sound like cheap foley. And though footfalls differentiate depending on the ground material, they’re very soft spoken; even when audible, they join the class of other collision dins that are eerily reminiscent of someone crunching some crispy delicacy: not even close to what you’d expect from a celestial environment.

Voice acting is done in Icelandic, which is reportedly the closest living language to Old Norse, and it certainly fits the atmosphere, with Sigurlaug Lilja Jonasdottir and Atli Bollason doing excellent jobs as Thora and the Narrator respectively….or so I assume. Have you guys ever run into those weabs who chastise any dubbed anime under the pretense that the Japanese “sounds more natural”? Well, 8 times out of 10, these sinophiles don’t speak Japanese, and, in doing so, out themselves to the reality that, unless you are fluent in the native tongue, you are not going to be capable of understanding the nuances of it. We can all distinguish between yelling, crying, and other basic emotions, but dialect shifts, psychoverbal intonations, subtle emotes, and other tics just aren’t as effortlessly discernible in a non-English language without an innate or strongly-learned understanding of its vernacular.

And that really limits what I can say about the voice artistry. Yes, it does sound good, and Jotun definitely isn’t engaging in any tongue-in-cheek parlance that would make it entirely foreign; but to Icelandic natives, Jonasdottir and Bollason may have flaws in their delivery.

The music is the one objective saving grace, attributed to composer Max LL (related to Junkie XL?). It captures the feeling of an ancient shero forging ahead through ethereal grotto after ethereal grotto. It’s not that it constantly hovers in orchestral overture, but rather that it elicits the kind of piped tunes you would expect to be playing during an e-book reading of the Odyssey or other such classical voyage. Very well done, the only slight being the boss motifs being too short and consequently on a loop.

Overall though, it goes without saying that I did not enjoy my time with Jotun. Great concept, but it should’ve either been dialed back in scale or handled by another studio with more capital on hand to do things justice. Too many shortcuts combined with awful combat render this a forgettable entry in the indie market.

na época mesmo eu tinha jogado esse jogo e a minha opinião continua a mesma: desperdício :/

era só fazer uma gameplay melhor cara, não era tão difícil... tudo nesse jogo é tão incrível, menos jogar ele. e essa é uma das constantes mais tristes que eu vejo em videogame.

espero que com o sucesso de spiritfarer algum dia lancem uma sequência ou, quem sabe, uma director's cut🙏

A arte, animações e musicas desse jogo são maravilhosas, na verdade dediquei meu feriado para ele por causa disso, porque realmente é uma obra prima, mas as mecanicas e a construção de mundo por tras tem muitas falhas, o que condiz com um estudio que ainda esta aprendendo a desenvolver e que não tenha um otimo game developer, parece que so tacaram a imagem por baixo e colocaram os objetos para você andar, é como se eu não fosse parte daquele universo, é tudo muito incompativel

Eu quero zerar ele ainda, mas acabou me frustrando muito, e eu tenho um toque fodido por aperfeiçoamento, e acaba que toda vez que vejo algum game ou software com potencial desperdiçado por uma programação fraca eu fico triste, eu não sou o melhor programador do mundo mas sinto que conseguiria melhorar bastante essa parte de game developer, tipo tem alguns momentos que o jogo te fala que a hit box ta maior do que deveria, então sla, fiquei mais mal jogando do que relaxado

O jogo é bom, mas podia ser melhor, em resumo tem ótimos artistas e um game developer iniciante ou preguiçoso

E isso tudo se prova quando olharem spiritfarer que é da mesma developer, porra que jogo lindo e sensacional, eu amo aquele jogo, mas ao analisarmos tecnicamente, é a mesma coisa, os codigos e a construção por tras não é algo de outro mundo, o que é um beneficio, porque o time soube perceber suas fraquezas e contornar isso com um projeto sensacional que ele é, e spiritfarer tem a melhor animação 2d que eu ja vi nos jogos, jotun é a primeira obra de arte de um time iniciante, vai ter seus pontos de melhoria, spiritfarer é a obra prima desse time.

Bad walking simulator with lackluster combat. The hand-drawn graphics and backgrounds were pretty, but spending most of your time walking through completely empty hallways hoping to find something if anything to interact with was terrible. Your character is also very slow and the map in the pause menu doesn't show your current location let alone what each symbol in it means, so that didn't help at all.

Dwarves would either get stuck on walls or simply walk over them completely ignoring the level's boundaries and verticality as if they were floating. That was so jarring, felt like the game was in an alpha stage with bugs like those. Took me out from being immersed entirely.

I didn't recognize a clear end goal or objective to explore maps or beat the game 1 hour into it, despite that fact that there was a narrator and character monologues. I only found out you were trying to enter Valhalla after drying by reading the game description here on Backloggd (Did they really forget to put that into the game itself?)

A let down overall. Not recommended.