A remaster of Severance: Blade of Darkness
Blade of Darkness is a hardcore fantasy action-adventure with unique combat mechanics and role-playing elements that pioneered the “soulsborne” genre. Pick one of four characters to hack and slash through a gory quest to save the world from the forces of Chaos.
Released on
Genres
Reviews View More
It took me a long time to beat Blade of Darkness, almost a year of playing off-and-on. I had a lot of ups and downs with this game, but overall I liked it quite a lot. I beat the game as Tukaram the Barbarian.
The game is a mix of Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, and a little bit of Tomb Raider, and in the case of the Souls games, it precedes all of them.
The story of the game is fairly simple: an evil sorcerer is wreaking havoc and you have to go map top map following the trail of destruction to stop him. This isn't a bad thing, in fact I think it is a strength. The worldbuilding and overall story (and the games cover) are clearly inspired by sword-and-sorcery: Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta in particular. The world is at once familiar in terms of its architecture with Egyptian, Indian, European, etc. aesthetics. The game never overwhelms with mass amounts of lore, but rather sprinkles in short sentences that drop the names of places and people you will never see. It helps to make the world feel larger than it is. That being said, the story-telling was a bit wonky. Voice-over with descriptions between and at the beginning of levels was mixed very quiet and could barely be heard over the music/sound effects, and subtitles proceeded much faster than the audio.
The level design was overall very good, each area felt unique in both art and architecture, and layouts felt somewhat sensible for their purpose, i.e. a fortress felt like a fortress and a temple felt like a temple. Levels were fairly compact, with lots of verticality. Exploring these levels reminded me of Tomb Raider and Legend of Zelda, with platforming, secrets, and ancient locations. Sadly the platforming doesn't match up to Tomb Raider's, the controls had a tendency to fling my character in a random direction when I tried to jump about 10% of the time. Platforming was nailbiting, but more so because I wasn't sure if my character would jump/walk off in the direction I wanted. And admittedly, by the end of the game it felt like there were too many levels, and I very much disliked a couple of them (looking at you Forge of Xshathra). I think it would have been nice to make more levels unique to different characters, instead of just giving them individual starting levels. This way there could be more incentive to play each character and less fatigue.
Now the game's main attraction: the combat. Blade of Darkness has some very satisfying PC action combat. I would even put it up their with the Jedi Knight games. Each style of weapons has a general moveset: one-handed swords, two-handed swords, spears, maces/clubs, etc. and then each unique type of sword or spear has its own unique attack. It plays almost like a fighting game, with different attacks being a combination of directional inputs and/or the attack button. More powerful attacks have longer animations that you often cannot dodge out of, so you must play strategically or you'll take massive damage. Healing items are sparse throughout levels, you may get some that enemies drop (if they don't end up using it themselves while you fight them). I definitely had a couple of times where I just gave up, not wanting to restart the level, but not being able to go on due to having no health, so I ended up using the invincibility cheat. I don't regret it, I don't think I would've beaten the game at all, and would've just been stuck at certain points forever.
If you like sword-and-sorcery or if you want interesting combat, and have a tolerance for older janky games, then I can recommend Blade of Darkness. It is a shame the studio behind it shut down, I would've loved to see what they could have done with a direct sequel or another game in this style. There really isn't another game like this.
The game is a mix of Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, and a little bit of Tomb Raider, and in the case of the Souls games, it precedes all of them.
The story of the game is fairly simple: an evil sorcerer is wreaking havoc and you have to go map top map following the trail of destruction to stop him. This isn't a bad thing, in fact I think it is a strength. The worldbuilding and overall story (and the games cover) are clearly inspired by sword-and-sorcery: Robert E. Howard and Frank Frazetta in particular. The world is at once familiar in terms of its architecture with Egyptian, Indian, European, etc. aesthetics. The game never overwhelms with mass amounts of lore, but rather sprinkles in short sentences that drop the names of places and people you will never see. It helps to make the world feel larger than it is. That being said, the story-telling was a bit wonky. Voice-over with descriptions between and at the beginning of levels was mixed very quiet and could barely be heard over the music/sound effects, and subtitles proceeded much faster than the audio.
The level design was overall very good, each area felt unique in both art and architecture, and layouts felt somewhat sensible for their purpose, i.e. a fortress felt like a fortress and a temple felt like a temple. Levels were fairly compact, with lots of verticality. Exploring these levels reminded me of Tomb Raider and Legend of Zelda, with platforming, secrets, and ancient locations. Sadly the platforming doesn't match up to Tomb Raider's, the controls had a tendency to fling my character in a random direction when I tried to jump about 10% of the time. Platforming was nailbiting, but more so because I wasn't sure if my character would jump/walk off in the direction I wanted. And admittedly, by the end of the game it felt like there were too many levels, and I very much disliked a couple of them (looking at you Forge of Xshathra). I think it would have been nice to make more levels unique to different characters, instead of just giving them individual starting levels. This way there could be more incentive to play each character and less fatigue.
Now the game's main attraction: the combat. Blade of Darkness has some very satisfying PC action combat. I would even put it up their with the Jedi Knight games. Each style of weapons has a general moveset: one-handed swords, two-handed swords, spears, maces/clubs, etc. and then each unique type of sword or spear has its own unique attack. It plays almost like a fighting game, with different attacks being a combination of directional inputs and/or the attack button. More powerful attacks have longer animations that you often cannot dodge out of, so you must play strategically or you'll take massive damage. Healing items are sparse throughout levels, you may get some that enemies drop (if they don't end up using it themselves while you fight them). I definitely had a couple of times where I just gave up, not wanting to restart the level, but not being able to go on due to having no health, so I ended up using the invincibility cheat. I don't regret it, I don't think I would've beaten the game at all, and would've just been stuck at certain points forever.
If you like sword-and-sorcery or if you want interesting combat, and have a tolerance for older janky games, then I can recommend Blade of Darkness. It is a shame the studio behind it shut down, I would've loved to see what they could have done with a direct sequel or another game in this style. There really isn't another game like this.
I played this game ages and ages ago, it was hard to find a physical copy of it but I managed to. This is one of my favourite games of all time. When I managed to finish it, I felt like I accomplished something big because this is a hard game, it takes patience and some combat skill. Each character has their special type of weapon, and each one has their own storyline at the start - Zoe has always been my favourite character. As soon as I saw that this game got released on Steam, I felt fucking happy, legit. I've been waiting for this game to be released on Steam for years, I even signed a petition a while back, but finally, this game is here. I bought it without needing to think twice since it is a game that I love so much, and I am looking forward to reliving good memories, this time with a higher resolution and running on a more recent machine.
For my fourth playthrough I picked the Sargon, the Knight. From all the 4 characters he's the easiest to use with a good variety of both weapons and combos, although like all characters he suffers a bit from attacking at empty spaces (but that's the game having a not so good lock-on system). This time I did the bad ending since it was one of the two achievements I was missing and have to say he's a pretty good choice to fight Dal Gurak without the sword of Ianna at full power since his combos don't have insanely slow build ups or long animations. From a design stand-point he might be the best character in the game, but that said my personal rank would be:
Zoe > Naglfar > Sargon > Tukaram.
Zoe > Naglfar > Sargon > Tukaram.
My third run is with Tukaram, the Barbarian. He has some interesting combos (more than both Dwarf and Amazon combined) and him being the character most featured in the game's art makes me think he's the intended gameplay, yet so far my least liked character.
Basically, Tukaram is your classic "Muscle Character": Big, strong and slow. That said he might be the worst of that archetype that I have played since he has all of the shortcomings and barely any of the advantages. Every time he attacks he does some big swings that more oftent than not do an arc over the enemies' heads, making you wasted stamina while leaving you open for a stab (he's specially grating when fighting skeletons). Tukaram's aforementioned combos pack a punch but they have incredibly long build-ups and need to be executed with just the right distance because despite being the bulky character, any of his attacks gets cancelled if the enemy lands an attack, which also means timing even his regular attacks almost perfectly (from a design perspective he should've had the advantage of performing his combos despite getting attacked). Finally, he can't dodge at all, like sure he will perform a sidestep with the "dodge" button but he moves like one pixel to the side or back and it's the only character from the 4 heroes who cannot dodge-spam, so basically Tukaram is the game's unfair difficulty.
Despite the flack the Dwarf receives from being sort of an "afterthought" he's much more fun than this dude, has a wider variety of weapons, better magic weapons, can dodge-spam to safety and his combos while not flashy get the job done.
Justice for Nagfar.
Basically, Tukaram is your classic "Muscle Character": Big, strong and slow. That said he might be the worst of that archetype that I have played since he has all of the shortcomings and barely any of the advantages. Every time he attacks he does some big swings that more oftent than not do an arc over the enemies' heads, making you wasted stamina while leaving you open for a stab (he's specially grating when fighting skeletons). Tukaram's aforementioned combos pack a punch but they have incredibly long build-ups and need to be executed with just the right distance because despite being the bulky character, any of his attacks gets cancelled if the enemy lands an attack, which also means timing even his regular attacks almost perfectly (from a design perspective he should've had the advantage of performing his combos despite getting attacked). Finally, he can't dodge at all, like sure he will perform a sidestep with the "dodge" button but he moves like one pixel to the side or back and it's the only character from the 4 heroes who cannot dodge-spam, so basically Tukaram is the game's unfair difficulty.
Despite the flack the Dwarf receives from being sort of an "afterthought" he's much more fun than this dude, has a wider variety of weapons, better magic weapons, can dodge-spam to safety and his combos while not flashy get the job done.
Justice for Nagfar.
Could only complete like 2 levels as a child and was EXTREMELY violent and scary at times. Still great fun
Playing with Zoe, The Amazon, the game is much easier since she's a power house of jumping and dodging but ironically this made the game a bit more frustrating because the camera fucks up 20% of your attempts at attacking after dodging an enemy, to the point were sometimes you might end up doing 3 or 4 attacks at nothing while depleting your stamina bar.
Despite that, with Zoe you just breeze through the game, specially when getting her late game weapon, she's the opposite of the Dwarf, the game gets easier each level.
Despite that, with Zoe you just breeze through the game, specially when getting her late game weapon, she's the opposite of the Dwarf, the game gets easier each level.