Code: Vein

Playtime: 14 Hours

Didn't play that much, nor get that far - stopped about halfway into the Cathedral area. I tried to make a character that looked like the Aggron cosplayer anime girl that I have as my profile pic - I think I got pretty close, but I was limited somewhat by the character creator unfortunately. This was free on PS+, so I just wanted to poke my head back into the genre at this point to see if I'm any more receptive to it (last time was a few years ago with Demon's Souls, and didn't really like that either). Turns out I don't, or maybe this game is a poor representation, but either way my interest is quite nullified again for now; I don't think I'll ever take to the core design tenets of this genre to consider any game in it good. I feel like I gave this game a fair shot though, and I did really enjoy quite a bit of what I played - just not enough to keep going.

I really don't think these games are for me. This is the second I've tried now after Demon's Souls, not counting the Jedi game because that was much easier and had much more forgiving gameplay. There's just too large of a disconnect between the gameplay feel that I want versus what this genre provides. Some of it is probably specifically related to this game, but many others are inherent to many more games of this genre - and are distracting or encumbering enough for me to gradually lose interest in them overall. What I can say is that a lot of the basic controls feel very tight, better than Jedi even. Movement and basic attacks are very responsive; twirling around in a circle is possible which says a lot about precision (no lead-brick feeling here!). This is enough to make lots of basic combat encounters feel quite satisfying, alongside the good sound design and hitstop. The game also looks pretty good in general (maybe a little low-res, because it was a PS4 game I believe), and runs perfectly on the PS5. Other stuff like sidequests, extra dungeons, and the vestige scenes were pretty interesting - but not a particular positive or negative.

Unfortunately, I don't feel like most of the combat mechanics work too well outside of the barebones basics that I mentioned above. Lots of the more advanced maneuvers just don't seem to work consistently or at all. Backstabs are terribly broken - I can't even count the number of times at this point where I tried to sneak up right behind an enemy to attack them, only to do a regular slash instead of a stab. This is right behind them in a static idle pose, with swords (or other stab-capable weapons); why can't this ever work right? I've landed a few during combat, mostly randomly, but even in those situations it seems like I'm supposed to be slashing from a very tight, specific angle that differs per enemy type and is never actually right behind the. I've got some pretty incredible clips of my character beefing completely free stabs, and I wonder how such a thing could have been missed during development. Drain attacks (which are kind of like a charge attack based on your clothing, not your weapon) are very glitchy as well. Sometimes I can land a drain attack that will animation-lock me but leave enemies free to run around and hit me, meaning I take unavoidable damage as punishment for trying to use the mechanic. Also, there is little to no tolerance on positioning here as well - one or two pixels off and you miss completely. Funnily enough, trying drain attack backstabs with a claw veil frequently had me teleport into or past the enemy I'm trying it on for some reason, which also seems like a bug. Lastly, parries also do not work; just as a reminder, parries in this game are not perfect guards using your weapon, but yet another separate action based on your veil. No matter how I try the different timings with each of the gear types, I have never been able to consistently land parries. Similarly to the backstab and drain attack, I might need to angle myself correctly within a very tight margin of error to actually land it but even that might not work. I've seen my parry claws or blades fly straight through enemies with the exact timing I'd expect to need, yet I just end up taking damage for no reason. Given the number of complaints I've seen online about these mechanics, I hardly think this is purely my issue.

All of the above being essentially broken and unusable limits me to blocking and dodges only. Both of these tend to work reasonably well (still with some issues, however), but are still subject to randomly taking excess damage with enemies bypassing guards from a straight angle (attacks from the side will naturally void your guard), or getting hit in the middle of dodging. Not quite sure how these happen, but they're uncommon enough for it to not be much of a problem usually. It does make a lot of the combat in this game kind of boring, since so much of it requires rolling to avoid all of the attacks instead of attempting a non-functional tech. Also funnily enough, some enemies have attacks that are so long or so large that your dodge I-frames will run out before the attack is over, resulting in effectively guaranteed damage. That's fun, isn't it? If they were going to implement these different mechanics into the game, I expect that they should all be well-detected or otherwise generous enough to pull off consistently, based on reasonable visual or audial cues. As they are now, most of the above are crapshoots that aren't worth trying for very seriously. As a result of the damage mitigation tech being so undercooked, a very high proportion of the damage I take in this game doesn't feel like it comes from a gameplay execution error on my part, but rather because of unresponsiveness.

What makes the combat even worse is that movement and positioning is completely pointless in this game, again due to design deficiencies. With backstabs and parries not working, there isn't much of an advantage in strafing around enemies to strike from behind. To get around this, almost every enemy in the game also has a fast 360 spin that will hit you no matter where you are in relation to them, and most boss moves have massive hitboxes regardless of the visual communication presented to the player. These attack hitboxes are terrible almost as a rule - I've bit hit by so many attacks where my entire character model is entirely out of the visual range of a sweep, a bomb, or an overhead, etc. Some of these attacks have no business being AOE - why can a spear thrust hit a 10-foot wide box? To make matters even worse, lots of enemies have spammable arbitrary-distance lunge attacks or teleports - nullifying the purpose of retreating or gaining distance on enemies to recover and re-engage. Enemies being aggressive makes sense, but being able to leap and attack you no matter where or how far you are is absurd and is purely a design deficiency. Manipulating groups to corner one at a time just doesn't work, and if enemies really cared a small group of them can basically make the game unplayable - either roll-locking you or stagger/stunlocking you to death; horrible from a mechanics perspective.

To continue on, the above point also indicates how poorly recovery is designed in this game. In most other Soulslike games, a major reason to retreat is for recovery and resetting buffs - but the abundant lunges/teleports of this game means you can't ever really find safety - even during boss fights where a mid-engagement heal would be most important. In general, enemies that are mid-tier and above have attack recovery and follow-up animations that are faster than your heal animation, meaning that you can start a heal after dodging, and still suffer a guaranteed hit because they recover so quickly. Whenever enemies or bosses feel like it, they can effectively deny your heal by hitting you out of it, then stun or staggerlocking you to instant death. The same can be said about stamina management too. The above points also mean that heavy weapons, power attacks, and charged drain attacks are all but unusable in combat unless you have a lot more experience with these kind of attack patterns, and the rare gaps you might be able to actually exploit. None of it feels good to use; most of the gameplay in a blind playthrough soft-enforces you to poke every enemy and boss to death very slowly.

With these problems, the game pretty much requires a very reactionary playstyle for everything as it's very dangerous to play quickly and aggressively. This is mitigated by the companion system, where you essentially play the bait the entire game while you let your companion kill stuff instead - thankfully they have very good DPS and tend to draw little attention, so a lot of the game is still relatively smooth sailing. Most of the time I feel like I'm pretty much just spectating the actual fight between my partner the the enemies. The best theory I have about these numerous design deficiencies in this game is that it was originally conceived with the intention of being a faster action game (maybe like DMC or something), before they decided to chase the Souls trend by retooling a lot of the mechanics to be slower and more punishing, making the game quite clunky as a result. Having little experience with other games in the genre, I honestly don't know still if this could be considered a good representation, or if fans of similar games also think this one feels strange in comparison.

With all of the mechanical details out of the way, I'll just say that the rest of the game - plotline and environments - aren't bad, but probably are also fairly standard for these kinds of games. Lots of ruins usually, from what I gather. There's been some highlights, like the Howling Pit and the Cathedral, both of which stand out as particularly striking visually; the Pit also has some interesting mechanics with the water and darkness that I found fun when I was in that area. I didn't get any further than that, so I can't say if there are more cool spots or not. The plot isn't particularly spectacular or anything; being a (not) zombie is cool but that's obviously just a thin justification for the Soulslike resurrection mechanic, and there's no actual feeling of a gritty world where people scrape by to survive - the camp is quite cozy, in fact. I suppose part of it is the anime-ish aesthetic, which makes it very difficult for the developers to create people who would fit the part of a ruthless world. Everyone looks like they just walked out of a boutique (except the player...), with pristine clothing indicating some very meticulous fashion.

On another note, I'm quite disappointed in the character customization in this game. Before it came out, there was a lot of attention on the extensiveness of its character creator which is certainly warranted in some respects. There are a ton of options for lots of basic character appearance settings, and a ton of additional accessory slots that you can use to further customize your hair, or to add ornaments to your outfit. There's no shortage of posts online about the myriad of different anime characters that people have recreated with this customizer, but there are a few glaring flaws. Firstly, the clipping is terrible with many of the options - pretty much any accessory that you try to add doesn't have proper physics to flow with the rest of your character, so hair ornaments will clip through your character or just generally look awkward most of the time, defeating the purpose (outside of photo mode, maybe). Even some of the longer default hairs exhibit similar clipping, meaning that only the shorter hairstyles are usable if you want your character to appear reasonable in motion. Secondly, the much greater concern is the extremely limited clothing options; for all of the details you can pick and choose for your body, there are only about 5 or so clothing sets you can choose by default, and you can't mix and match pieces or buy new sets in the game - only enable or disable specific parts of the set (ex. gloves, overcoat, etc.). Similar restrictions exist for pretty much everything else except the hats (which are considered a head accessory) so for all of your effort in making a good-looking character, 90% of them will look the exact same as most other characters. Truthfully, all of this does matter little because the gameplay is more important, but for a game nicknamed "Fashion Souls" I expected a decent amount more in that regard.