An homage to gaming and Dark Souls 1, The Last Hero of Nostalgaia is a souls-like set in the titular Kingdom of Nostalgaia, a rotten, decayed husk of its former glory brought to ruin by the hero’s of time past being unable to let new adventure-ers and stories take the reins and blaze their own paths.

One of the main draws of the game is the remembrance system, it adds in new gameplay importance to the classic souls storytelling convention of learning tidbits about the world through their item descriptions. This usually consists of finding a weapon/armor set based on another video game and going to an area of the overworld that also goes with it, granting a buff to its stats and a cool new awakened 3d form factor. The player also gets small stat buffs from this, and while being a nice addition I don’t think it’s major enough to matter too much if you’re stuck on something.

Speaking of getting stuck, I came along two major roadblocks during my playthrough. The acrobatic, Smough cosplaying moogle named Gnom is probably the hardest thing this game has to throw at the player. With really short windows to punish most of its swings along with longer than normal delay on its big attacks, it really felt like I was fighting something taken straight out of Elden Ring. While it is a bit of a design curveball from the rest of what the game has, looking back on it there’s a lot of fun to be had in learning its patterns and finding out how to get that big hit in.

Enemies are varied and run the standard souls gamut of creepy creatures, husk men, and monsters. They all feel like they would inhabit this world and actually dwell here and rot while I'm not around. The sheer number of enemies between each respite from combat can be a tad too much at some points and the amount of times you’ll get ganked can feel like ds2 at points, but at no point did the enemy placement feel straight up unfair. The other boss fights in this game really do give more of a normal dark souls vibe and I enjoyed each of them quite a bit.

On the other hand, the level design can be just a little too confusing sometimes and lead to confusion on where you need to go to progress. There were multiple times where the way forward is very easy to miss and led to me spending a bit too much time being lost. That’s not to say the level design is bad though. You can tell the team really put a lot of love and effort into making these areas and having them “feel like dark souls”. From the snowy hamlet beneath the castle, to the soft blue glow of the forest area, these areas look great and I appreciate the detail put into each one. They also did a great job of interlocking their areas together and the thought out placement of bonfires results in the game giving the feeling of having a couple mini hubs that everything kind of branches from. The lack of free fast travel is supposed to highlight this, but the long trips to and from each zone is still too long for most players probably. The alternative for this is that the player can tether themselves to one bonfire and teleport there from others but it's a one way warp and not useful enough to take away from backtracking tedium.

Even with the games’ faults, I couldn’t help but want to boot back in each time excited to see what fun reference or cool boss they had in store next. The Last Hero of Nostalgaia is a genuine and heartfelt love letter to the genre and an experience worth having.

and please remember to max your endowment for my sake. We need more boobs in this world.