Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is the highly unexpected follow-up to Zeno Clash 1 & 2 after a 10-year break from the series. What was previously a first-person brawler is now a third-person action and exploration game that takes some inspiration from the Soulslike genre while still retaining its own identity.
At first, I was put off by the similarities to Dark Souls with its campfires and corpse runs, but Ace Team were smart enough to not lift its mechanics wholesale. You can rest at campsites to restore health and healing flasks, but this doesn't respawn every monster. During the daytime, nearly every combat encounter is bespoke and once won, they're gone for good. This alleviates the frustration of wanting to backtrack to heal up as you have already cleared the path ahead for your next run. You can opt to wake up from a campsite at night when enemies will always return (or be forced into nighttime by attempting a corpse run), but you rarely need to backtrack at this time unless you're a completionist hunting out every item or optional boss fight.
Combat seems simple at first, consisting simply of a light attack, heavy attack and dodge button but there's a lot of room for complexity with dodge-cancels, dodge-specific attacks and multiple stances. As your mentor tells you at the start of the game, you aren't as strong as the other creatures in the game's world of Zenozoik so you must use speed and evasion to survive. I stuck to one stance for most of the game, having already spent a lot of upgrade materials on it, but there are many to unlock if you want to switch things up. They all seemed viable with variations in attack range and strength although I didn't see a compelling reason to switch from one stance to another for different enemies.
Your basic light chain combo is enough to get by early on but very soon your opponents become much more aggressive and you'll be forced to dodge-cancel to avoid their counters while still keeping up your flurry of attacks. Striking directly after a dodge will perform different moves depending on the direction you dodged in, so keeping aware of your surroundings and which direction you want to leave open to you can be vital. Much like the previous Zeno Clash games combat never really feels great against a group with it being quite easy to be ganged up on, though the third-person camera makes this a little easier to manage. This is also helped by a type of "duel" mode you earn by building a meter during a fight where you enter a first-person camera and fight one-on-one with your target, their buddies taking a back seat until you're finished.
Before most encounters you can choose to engage in The Ritual, a strategic dice game that lets the winner force a penalty on the loser such as drinking a slow-acting poison, or being tethered to a confined area. This can be helpful for opponents that you are struggling with but the penalties are usually small enough that I tended to jump straight into combat and ended the game with a large collection of entirely unused Ritual items.
You could draw some story similarities to The Last of Us or the recent God of War games - you are Pseudo, a detached hermit who through chance is forced to protect a reviled young child who has a strange power that can harm or heal others. Clash is surprisingly good at making the growing attachment between Pseudo and The Boy feel slow and natural, despite the relative lack of conversation. The voice acting isn't naturalistic, with some characters sounding odd in a way that further adds to the game's intentionally bizarre feel, yet I somehow felt a stronger connection to these characters and this world than I do for larger budget titles with "better" writing.
The series has gradually expanded its storytelling, with Clash acting as a soft reboot and covering some of the same worldbuilding that Zeno Clash 2 did in a manner that is perfect for new players to catch up but doesn't leave existing fans feeling like they're retreading old ground. The writers do a fantastic job of trickling out lore while leaving enough unanswered to let the world continue to feel mysterious and alien. I'm a big fan of not overexplaining everything through endless exposition and just letting things be weird for weirdness' sake.
Zeno Clash is known for its unique aesthetic and grotesque creatures and that certainly hasn't been compromised here in an attempt to reach a wider audience. If anything, they have doubled down on their vision the player character being a noseless guy who is somehow both buff and scrawny, with a few strands of thick wiry hair sticking out of his body. In the previous games, you played as one of the few fairly normal-looking human characters, so the switch to someone who is the polar opposite of the traditional handsome video game protagonist is welcome.
In the ten years since the last game, Ace Team have clearly had a lot of time to hone the "punk fantasy" aesthetic that they have been working to achieve, with Clash featuring a blend of pencil sketch outlines over a world that looks as though it was painted in watercolours - not unlike Valkyria Chronicles. It looks gorgeous and I found myself screenshotting much more often than I would in games with much larger budgets.
The density of the world of Zenozoik, much like The Boy's powers, is both a blessing and a curse. Each landscape feels like a lived-in space, with fallen rocks, foliage and abandoned tents scattered about - but this also makes the areas difficult to navigate with the path forward often being obscured, or confusion in determining which small ledges can be stepped over and which are level boundaries.
A real highlight is the soundtrack, which stands out as some of the most evocative music I've heard in a video game since NieR. From a sombre chorus over gentle strings to chunky guitars that sound like Gwar are ready to appear on stage, there is an unexpected range to the music that never sounds out of place in the strange and varied areas you visit.
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is an ambitious game given the small team and its flaws can easily be overlooked for everything else it has to offer. If you've ever been curious about the strange creations of Ace Team, this is a great place to start.
At first, I was put off by the similarities to Dark Souls with its campfires and corpse runs, but Ace Team were smart enough to not lift its mechanics wholesale. You can rest at campsites to restore health and healing flasks, but this doesn't respawn every monster. During the daytime, nearly every combat encounter is bespoke and once won, they're gone for good. This alleviates the frustration of wanting to backtrack to heal up as you have already cleared the path ahead for your next run. You can opt to wake up from a campsite at night when enemies will always return (or be forced into nighttime by attempting a corpse run), but you rarely need to backtrack at this time unless you're a completionist hunting out every item or optional boss fight.
Combat seems simple at first, consisting simply of a light attack, heavy attack and dodge button but there's a lot of room for complexity with dodge-cancels, dodge-specific attacks and multiple stances. As your mentor tells you at the start of the game, you aren't as strong as the other creatures in the game's world of Zenozoik so you must use speed and evasion to survive. I stuck to one stance for most of the game, having already spent a lot of upgrade materials on it, but there are many to unlock if you want to switch things up. They all seemed viable with variations in attack range and strength although I didn't see a compelling reason to switch from one stance to another for different enemies.
Your basic light chain combo is enough to get by early on but very soon your opponents become much more aggressive and you'll be forced to dodge-cancel to avoid their counters while still keeping up your flurry of attacks. Striking directly after a dodge will perform different moves depending on the direction you dodged in, so keeping aware of your surroundings and which direction you want to leave open to you can be vital. Much like the previous Zeno Clash games combat never really feels great against a group with it being quite easy to be ganged up on, though the third-person camera makes this a little easier to manage. This is also helped by a type of "duel" mode you earn by building a meter during a fight where you enter a first-person camera and fight one-on-one with your target, their buddies taking a back seat until you're finished.
Before most encounters you can choose to engage in The Ritual, a strategic dice game that lets the winner force a penalty on the loser such as drinking a slow-acting poison, or being tethered to a confined area. This can be helpful for opponents that you are struggling with but the penalties are usually small enough that I tended to jump straight into combat and ended the game with a large collection of entirely unused Ritual items.
You could draw some story similarities to The Last of Us or the recent God of War games - you are Pseudo, a detached hermit who through chance is forced to protect a reviled young child who has a strange power that can harm or heal others. Clash is surprisingly good at making the growing attachment between Pseudo and The Boy feel slow and natural, despite the relative lack of conversation. The voice acting isn't naturalistic, with some characters sounding odd in a way that further adds to the game's intentionally bizarre feel, yet I somehow felt a stronger connection to these characters and this world than I do for larger budget titles with "better" writing.
The series has gradually expanded its storytelling, with Clash acting as a soft reboot and covering some of the same worldbuilding that Zeno Clash 2 did in a manner that is perfect for new players to catch up but doesn't leave existing fans feeling like they're retreading old ground. The writers do a fantastic job of trickling out lore while leaving enough unanswered to let the world continue to feel mysterious and alien. I'm a big fan of not overexplaining everything through endless exposition and just letting things be weird for weirdness' sake.
Zeno Clash is known for its unique aesthetic and grotesque creatures and that certainly hasn't been compromised here in an attempt to reach a wider audience. If anything, they have doubled down on their vision the player character being a noseless guy who is somehow both buff and scrawny, with a few strands of thick wiry hair sticking out of his body. In the previous games, you played as one of the few fairly normal-looking human characters, so the switch to someone who is the polar opposite of the traditional handsome video game protagonist is welcome.
In the ten years since the last game, Ace Team have clearly had a lot of time to hone the "punk fantasy" aesthetic that they have been working to achieve, with Clash featuring a blend of pencil sketch outlines over a world that looks as though it was painted in watercolours - not unlike Valkyria Chronicles. It looks gorgeous and I found myself screenshotting much more often than I would in games with much larger budgets.
The density of the world of Zenozoik, much like The Boy's powers, is both a blessing and a curse. Each landscape feels like a lived-in space, with fallen rocks, foliage and abandoned tents scattered about - but this also makes the areas difficult to navigate with the path forward often being obscured, or confusion in determining which small ledges can be stepped over and which are level boundaries.
A real highlight is the soundtrack, which stands out as some of the most evocative music I've heard in a video game since NieR. From a sombre chorus over gentle strings to chunky guitars that sound like Gwar are ready to appear on stage, there is an unexpected range to the music that never sounds out of place in the strange and varied areas you visit.
Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is an ambitious game given the small team and its flaws can easily be overlooked for everything else it has to offer. If you've ever been curious about the strange creations of Ace Team, this is a great place to start.
Reviewed on Apr 13, 2023