Titan Souls is a boss rush game that pits the tiny protagonist and their bow against gigantic enemies in pixel art arenas.

The idea is solid - each titan is basically a puzzle, they die in one hit but so do you, so you have to identify where the weak point is and find the opening in their attack pattern. Everything is small so accuracy is tough and missing means you'll have to slowly call your singular arrow back over to you while dodging the titan's aggressive onslaught.

Gameplay is fast paced and challenging to start with but never really evolves beyond the same single mechanic. It's designed to be over as quickly as possible and while there can be a bit of a mad scramble between the start of the fight and figuring out how to deliver the killing blow there isn't much substance to the encounters other than roll-dodging for dear life.

While my instinct is to be hard on this game I have to appreciate that it came out of a small gamejam project which was polished and tidied up for steam. It feels like a small dame dev portfolio piece, but the price absolutely reflects that so just be aware you're getting what you pay for, albeit respectably polished and good for a short single playthrough.

It's immediately obvious that Shadow of the Colossus influenced Titan Souls: a mostly empty overworld, restrained and simplified controls (two buttons, used for a roll and shooting/recalling your single spirit arrow), and gameplay centralization around the thirteen boss fights are all reminiscent of Team ICO's most acclaimed work. Unfortunately, Titan Souls is nothing more than a poor man's carbon copy, because its boss designs leave something to be desired. Bosses go down in one hit, and so does the player: there's no room to learn on the fly when any hit will end the fight and respawn you outside of the arena, forcing yet another trek back. This devolves into spamming "all or nothing" attempts via trial and error: dodge through attack patterns until the boss displays its pink weak point, taking your shot when the moment presents itself and ending most fights in a minute or less. As a result, the game fails to create an engaging difficulty curve and never hits that sweet-spot, because there's just a sudden jump between struggling and breaking through, replacing the journey in-between with sheer tedium. It's the classic mistake of conflating difficulty with punishment, made even more flagrant in hard mode by simply accelerating enemy attacks/throwing out more projectiles instead of utilizing trickier and unique patterns to stratify different playthroughs.

Most importantly, Titan Souls lacks Shadow of the Colossus's ability to create a realistic feeling of presence. There's no intimacy to be found due to the brevity of fights and the absence of any other significant NPCs, and the game fails to build up any anticipation due to how condensed the overworld is (resulting in little travel time), failing to provide any cooldown or catharsis for similar reasons. After all, volume swells cannot exist if there are no punctuated moments of stillness to break up the action (something that this game desperately needs, considering how background tracks are constantly playing throughout the overworld). Ultimately, Titan Souls is yet another indie imitator that will forever live in the shadows of its influences: it appears to capture the surface appeal well enough, but fails to emulate any underlying details that would elevate it beyond a homage to something greater.