Bleak Sword is a top down, level based action game with a simplistic, yet in my eyes, beautiful visual style.
The game presents itself inBleak Sword is a top down, level based action game with a simplistic, yet in my eyes, beautiful visual style.
The game presents itself in only black white and red, a color scheme that always works for me, and its great mood setting soundtrack does wonders to make you really glue yourself to the screen. The game is divided up into several different areas all with their own visual theming, music, enemies, and gimmicks culminating to a boss blocking your way to the next section of the game.
The basic premise of bleak sword dx is your are a dude with a sword, and you are working your way through diorama-esque levels killing a wide range of enemies with solid and easy to learn dodge roll-sword swinging combat. There are pros and cons to the simplicity of the combat, pros its easy to learn and pick up, basically roll away, get your sword swings in, parry an enemy or two for big damage, rinse and repeat. The cons being the moment to moment gameplay, at least from the perspective of player control, stays the same from start to finish.
The variety in the gameplay really comes from the enemies and their individual move sets as well as whatever different overworld gimmicks the world you are in happen to have. I call this a con because I do like to have some opportunities in game for player expression as to how they want to play the game and build their characters. The only player expression in this game is through choosing what stat to improve when leveling up, hp attack or defense, and picking a couple held items, but the challenges put in front of you do a pretty good at providing an experience that builds on itself and doesn’t feel stale making up for the lack of meaningful change on the player side.
The enemy layouts are always changing, level to level, world to world and each enemy feels distinct. Seeing new enemies can be intimidating when you don’t know their move set yet, but once you experience an enemy a few times and learn their attack patterns you start to take them down almost on autopilot. Certain enemies can be parried easily, some need to be baited into attack and rolled dodged away to safety opening up an opportunity to strike, some can just be bum rushed to kill before they start spamming projectiles.
The game turns into a sort of dance where you the player go from one enemy to the next trying to dispose of the nearest threat before the next enemy can spawn and overwhelm you. These moments made me feel extremely powerful and like I constantly learning and improving. The game can be demanding, it is not super easy by any means, but if you do get to a level that just isn’t clicking for you, you are free to go back to previously completed stages and grind up some levels to improve your damage output and survivability and try again as an all new more powerful you.
The base game has you completing stages to advance through the story areas covering castles, swamps, snowy fields, and burned down towns, but bleak sword dx also includes a boss rush mode and arena you can hop into if you just want to test your skills and just kill a few minutes. There is a full bestiary with detailed descriptions of each enemy you come across that I loved going back to and reading, and a fun page of statistics that shows you how many times you died, how many enemies you took with you and so much more. The game has cutscenes to bookend each area, all kinda of setting the mood for what to expect in front of you and setting up boss enemies. These cutscenes were short and to the point but did a great job setting the tone.
There is also a quality or performance mode option, but I always stuck to the performance mode. I am not sure if this was a Nintendo switch thing, or a game thing, but the extra effects on the quality mode, which did look pretty cool, were not worth feeling like I was wading through mud which was an unfortunate side effect. I wanted that smooth clean experience that performance mode offered, and the game still looked great thanks to the unique art style and level design.
Bleak Sword is a great, easy to consume and be consumed by, action game I think more people should try out. While the overall gameplay loop can be seen as fairly simple, the game takes that simple setup and executes on it very well through great level design, fun varied enemies and monsters, all presented through a great retro looking art style and a soundtrack that will eat its way into you and have you tapping along with it while you kill everything in your way.… Expand
