Soul of Darkness is a 2D metroidvania, although it is way more inspired by the -vania part especially visually where it straight up copies these games.
I’m really conflicted on Soul of Darkness. This game achieves most things it sets out to do with an asterisk, as there is just one big flaw in every facet of this game which just kind of ruin the overall experience.
Moving around the various environments actually feels really good, but the lack of coyote time and not being able to jump out of the first few frames of the turn-around animation led to a few undeserved deaths and made some jumps unreasonably hard.
When defeating an enemy or destroying an object you will collect this games’ main currency called souls. These souls can then be used to upgrade an attribute of one of your two weapons. For some reason you can invest souls into these attributes even if you don’t have enough to upgrade them, which just led to me opening the menu every time I defeated an enemy or broke an object significantly hampering the flow of the game.
Another product of this system, combined with the respawn system, was that there were moments where I just left and reentered rooms to grind upgrades, which isn’t something I thought I would ever have to say about a 2D metroidvania game and made gate flashbacks to my first Super Metroid playthrough where I had to do a similar thing before the Ridley fight, which was also the worst part of that game.
This game also had a lot of boss fights considering its length. These are all well designed and actually fun to fight, but they unfortunately suffer from the same problem the rest of the game does which is, that it is really easy. You one- or two-hit most late game enemies, if you just upgrade your weapons strength by a little bit, which you almost couldn’t even avoid if you tried to.
The best boss of the game is the Giant Worm Enemy, which spans a whole level and was also the most “difficult” section of the game for me.
Everything else is held back by the short length (about 2-3 hrs of game time).
At around the halfway point you will first encounter the mechanic of transforming into specific enemies. While a fun idea, it also only appears 3 times making it feel severely underdeveloped.
During your playthrough you also might find life-/magic-crystals hidden throughout 10 of the 11 levels, which work a lot like heart pieces in Zelda, as in they increase the amount of health- and magic in fours. These would in theory increase the replayability of the game, but (and this is just my experience with them) they are not only hidden all to well, but more importantly there are just not a lot of them in the game. My completion percentage after completing the game was 99% and I did not go out of my way to collect these gems. This means all but two are “hidden” on the main path.
But the story had to suffer the most from the games’ short runtime. The developers obviously wanted to tell a story grander than the playtime would allow as a lot of said runtime came from skipping through text boxes.
Now the story would not have been all to great anyways as the protagonist named Kale is described as (and this is a direct quote from the e-manual):”a mysterious, powerful man.”, but I think it would’ve still helped the pacing a lot if this was a 4 hour game.
My main criticism is over now, but I still want to talk about the two obligatory DSi camera mechanics.
The first can be accessed through soothsayer-huts hidden throughout the levels, which upon interacting with give you a prompt to take a photo.
The predominant RGB color of that photo then determine the quality and quantity of soul you get. This obviously didn’t work (which could be partly related to me playing this on a 3DS), except when I held the camera directly into the sun, which led to the same outcome every time.
The second camera feature might be the best camera, nay the best feature of any game ever.
When first setting up my profile, which also gives you the ability to name it for whatever reason (whatever you type in will not appear ever again), there was an unlabeled option with a camera-icon. Feeling intrigued I quickly clicked it and my 3DS without any warning quickly took a photo of me. Now this wasn’t a normal photo, but much rather the ugliest photo taken of me, ever. Words can not describe how ugly I look in it. But I just ignored it and got on with the game not thinking much about it, up until the first time the main antagonist showed up and started babbling his uninteresting bad guy dialogue.
Lo and behold as the main antagonists’ dialogue icon had been replaced by the ugly photo.
This might just be the funniest thing I have ever come across in any game and definitely made the game worth the 5€ I spent on it.
I’m really conflicted on Soul of Darkness. This game achieves most things it sets out to do with an asterisk, as there is just one big flaw in every facet of this game which just kind of ruin the overall experience.
Moving around the various environments actually feels really good, but the lack of coyote time and not being able to jump out of the first few frames of the turn-around animation led to a few undeserved deaths and made some jumps unreasonably hard.
When defeating an enemy or destroying an object you will collect this games’ main currency called souls. These souls can then be used to upgrade an attribute of one of your two weapons. For some reason you can invest souls into these attributes even if you don’t have enough to upgrade them, which just led to me opening the menu every time I defeated an enemy or broke an object significantly hampering the flow of the game.
Another product of this system, combined with the respawn system, was that there were moments where I just left and reentered rooms to grind upgrades, which isn’t something I thought I would ever have to say about a 2D metroidvania game and made gate flashbacks to my first Super Metroid playthrough where I had to do a similar thing before the Ridley fight, which was also the worst part of that game.
This game also had a lot of boss fights considering its length. These are all well designed and actually fun to fight, but they unfortunately suffer from the same problem the rest of the game does which is, that it is really easy. You one- or two-hit most late game enemies, if you just upgrade your weapons strength by a little bit, which you almost couldn’t even avoid if you tried to.
The best boss of the game is the Giant Worm Enemy, which spans a whole level and was also the most “difficult” section of the game for me.
Everything else is held back by the short length (about 2-3 hrs of game time).
At around the halfway point you will first encounter the mechanic of transforming into specific enemies. While a fun idea, it also only appears 3 times making it feel severely underdeveloped.
During your playthrough you also might find life-/magic-crystals hidden throughout 10 of the 11 levels, which work a lot like heart pieces in Zelda, as in they increase the amount of health- and magic in fours. These would in theory increase the replayability of the game, but (and this is just my experience with them) they are not only hidden all to well, but more importantly there are just not a lot of them in the game. My completion percentage after completing the game was 99% and I did not go out of my way to collect these gems. This means all but two are “hidden” on the main path.
But the story had to suffer the most from the games’ short runtime. The developers obviously wanted to tell a story grander than the playtime would allow as a lot of said runtime came from skipping through text boxes.
Now the story would not have been all to great anyways as the protagonist named Kale is described as (and this is a direct quote from the e-manual):”a mysterious, powerful man.”, but I think it would’ve still helped the pacing a lot if this was a 4 hour game.
My main criticism is over now, but I still want to talk about the two obligatory DSi camera mechanics.
The first can be accessed through soothsayer-huts hidden throughout the levels, which upon interacting with give you a prompt to take a photo.
The predominant RGB color of that photo then determine the quality and quantity of soul you get. This obviously didn’t work (which could be partly related to me playing this on a 3DS), except when I held the camera directly into the sun, which led to the same outcome every time.
The second camera feature might be the best camera, nay the best feature of any game ever.
When first setting up my profile, which also gives you the ability to name it for whatever reason (whatever you type in will not appear ever again), there was an unlabeled option with a camera-icon. Feeling intrigued I quickly clicked it and my 3DS without any warning quickly took a photo of me. Now this wasn’t a normal photo, but much rather the ugliest photo taken of me, ever. Words can not describe how ugly I look in it. But I just ignored it and got on with the game not thinking much about it, up until the first time the main antagonist showed up and started babbling his uninteresting bad guy dialogue.
Lo and behold as the main antagonists’ dialogue icon had been replaced by the ugly photo.
This might just be the funniest thing I have ever come across in any game and definitely made the game worth the 5€ I spent on it.
FallenGrace
1 year ago