There’s a misconception that “innovation is actually in the indie scene”, this is not without some merit of course, as the triple A landscape is following what seems like the same 12 templates of what they think “good game design” is. But indie games are just as derivative and trend chasing. This doesn’t have to be a negative either, as every once in a while a game comes along that uses current trends well, in Little Nightmare's case, that amounts to a great experience.

Little Nightmares is clearly chasing the 2010s fad of indie horror games having a heavy emphasis on hiding. I personally don’t care for that kind of game play, but given this is presented as a 25.d platformer with (mostly) fixed camera angles, it peaked my interest and I enjoyed my time with it.

The game does a good job of helping you get your bearings. After a brief ten second introductory cut scene that sets up the main antagonist, our MC Six wakes up in a boiler room with leeway to explore every single mechanic. If you see a dark area, you press B to use your lighter to illuminate it, then you’ll see cans and boxes strewn about, which you can pick up with the right trigger and throw, then big boxes and pipes to climb, hide in, and jump on, and finally a long narrow hallway you can use to practice sprinting, this tutorial ends after this room and the game expects you to have memorized all of these basics. In an era where games (aimed at adults especially) have over bearing and over explanatory tutorials that tell you everything, it was refreshing to play a relatively modern game that just let you figure stuff out on your own.

But tutorials often don’t just end with the player figuring out functions, they also have the need to show what the player should expect from the game for the entire experience, or at least give them a good generalized idea. Which is why I want to highlight the first sprinting section.

The game at first makes you think you only need two quick bursts to get past three rooms, but the reality is that the second sprint is one long, continuous one, but it is highly unlikely you will get this on your first attempt. As the room you dash through is a child's bedroom riddled with tons of objects to climb, and other points of interest highlighted in the shadows, which will make you stop and try going somewhere else instead of just the (correct) straight line. This is a brilliant way of communicating to the player to be observant and on edge, which requires them to not act with out thinking, but instead to over think a little while acting, which is great for a horror game. If a developer has a player on auto pilot when playing a horror game for the first time, the level design has failed, good level design in horror games forces the player to over think, and fear making a mistake.

I am not someone who foolishly believes there are games out there with out any kind of pathing, games have always given the player some indication of where to go or what to do next. And Little Nightmares is very good at this aspect. If a surface has juts and grooves, it’s probably climbable, if an object is framed prominently, it’s most likely of some importance, if an area is subtly lit up, you should probably focus on it. None of these are gaudily presented either with some stupid detective vision mechanic or streaks of paint on already bright or lightly colored objects, the game expects you to come to these obvious logical conclusions yourself and that is (sadly) so refreshing.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though when it comes to navigation, there was more than a few times where I got stuck on a lip in floor or a jut on a wall that the fixed angles didn’t do the best job of indicating where there, as the game is more obviously focused on the giants you have to avoid and has to frame them prominently. Some clipping through these lips and juts would have been appreciated, as it would make some set pieces a little less annoying.

When not hiding from the aforementioned giants, you’ll be solving puzzles to progress, these puzzles aren’t mind benders by any means, but they do require some thought to solve and never feel too easy. What makes them fun to figure out is that they play into what ever setting you are in at the moment, you will need to push a suitcase to pull a lever to drop a hide away bed down, or place chunks of meat into a grinder to make a rope of sausages, or close a stove door to make the chef giant panic and clear a path, to list a few examples. This helps the setting of the Maw feel like a character itself that six is exploiting to escape, and makes what could have been banal and mundane in another setting feel much more impactful.

And avoiding each of the giants is mostly a competent affair. Aside from some leeches you’ll run past in chapter 1, the only enemies you will encounter in the game are the giants, and they are designed mostly well enough to enjoy studying how to get past them.

The Janitor clearly had the most effort put into his sections and sets a good impression by being the first one you’ll encounter, with his long, lanky arms, he can catch you quickly and from (mostly) any distance in the room, so you’ll need to have memorized what kind of surfaces you can climb, what boxes and furniture to hide in, and how fast you should be going, given that he is blind and can hear you the second you sprint or push an object over. If you have been paying attention to the contents of the rooms he patrols, you’ll notice he has taken many toys from his victims as trophies. When you do encounter him later, you’ll naturally pick up on the need to throw cymbal monkeys that make noise that he will run over to play with, or turn on a TV with a nursery rhyme that he hyper focuses on. This then culminates into a solid boss encounter where you have to study the movements of his arms until they form a diamond, which indicates you can dash forward and pull two bars from under a door to cut them off. It feels incredibly cathartic to have a brief encounter after spending hours getting stalked and harassed, with said harassers most prominent features being destroyed incredibly fitting penance for his over persistence.

I wish I could lob the same praise to the other three giants, but the game streamlines them heavily in favor of keeping the pacing tight. Not a bad compromise of course, horror games should be short as over familiarity will breed indifference, but I would have liked the Chef encounters to use the kitchen a little more than just closing a stove door as mentioned above, then avoiding broken plates, and finally riding a meat hook while being chased at the end of the chapter (compounded by the final area having the aforementioned annoying lips and juts that you will probably get caught on a few times and end up dying because of it). The majority of the chapter aside from the final section is just hiding from the chefs under furniture or throwing something generic to distract them, and while the great pathing and aesthetics of the kitchen make this fun enough to do, the lack of using the area’s character is disappointing.

And while the next chapter in the restaurant does use the area’s character to some effect, it’s not enough to make up for the annoyances of the guests hit boxes being a little too long which led me to dying a handful of times and essentially had me rolling my eyes and sensibly chuckling at basically having to know exactly where to sprint across the tables speed run style. This could have had the potential of being a good change of pace to being an almost pure reflex section if the chef’s chapter was better, but instead it just compounds how the game trims a little too much fat.

And the last chapter really exemplifies that trimming, you simply push over a vase to get a key, do a brief and easy chase sequence, and then an incredibly bland final boss fight where you hold a mirror in a direction a handful of times, with the end of each sequence causing six to fall down briefly and forcing you wait a bit. It’s a very half assed climax to an otherwise well made game.

I saved talking about this until now cause I really don’t need to go into much detail as to how annoying these kind of sections are in games. At several points through out the game, Six will be struck with hunger, which will trigger a slow walking section. These are meant to make the player feel powerless, but the game proper already does that, Six can not fight back, she only engages in combat twice through out the entire game in the boss fights mentioned above. All these sections do is serve to annoy you and pad out the play time.

The game has a rather hands off approach to story telling and I greatly appreciated it.

The maw its self seems to be a metaphor for cyclical over consumption and the livestock industry, as the corpulent guests that seem to be an analogy for the mega rich can’t help engorging themselves on the bodies of dead humans, and even have no issue being fed the corpses of their own kind to keep themselves sustained, you also have the two chefs who are rather emotionless and indifferent in feeding into this dangerous and horrifically evil hedonism and addiction, and the janitor who works rather well as an allegory for workers who openly abuse livestock due to their perceived low value of life. While the presentation of these themes will be overly blunt for some, the execution is still good when combined with the games excellent art direction and atmosphere, combine this with the fact that the game has no voice acting or dialogue, and it makes this execution all the more effective in getting the player to think about what they experienced.

Visually Little nightmares is fantastic, and it was one of the main reasons I enjoyed it more than I probably would have if it had any other setting.

The first thing that strikes you about the maw is the scale, six is the size of a mouse in comparison to most objects and creatures around her and it makes almost every room feel oppressive and weighty in atmosphere. The lighting is incredible, with points of interest naturally hidden in shadow making you want to investigate to move forward, or moments of darkness having things be outlined just well enough to make you feel even more uneasy, and even when the rooms are brightly lit, there is still several disturbing elements and decorations, macabre paintings of murder and other monsters you never see are almost everywhere, bloody tools are displayed prominently on work benches, kitchen tables are covered in the filth from severed limbs, and so on.

The textures are quite detailed, you’ll have things like patches of rust on filing cabinets, gashes from tools on tables with fine wood, fuzzy rugs where you can count each individual strand of fabric, and lovely wet sheens coating the pipework during the transitional hallways you’ll be running through between chapters.

Then you also have the brilliance of six wearing a bright yellow coat with a distinct and unique diamond shaped hood so that the player never loses track of her when navigating the rooms. It’s clear Tariser studios wanted the visuals to enhance and compliment the game play, and they do a fantastic job at doing so.

Several paragraphs ago I mentioned that the level design its self, from a functional standpoint, is fine, and in most games it would just be ok. The point I am making here though is that even the most simple level design can be made much more enjoyable to solve when developers integrate the aesthetics of the world or tropes of the genre into them. During the janitor chase sequences for example, the fastest way to avoid him is to go through the lowest shelf, but you risk tipping over more objects he has laid there for alarms, meanwhile the safe but long way is to climb up the nearby stack of books to highest shelf. They’re simple solutions yes, but given this is a horror game, where quick pacing but slight over thinking is paramount, having two easy to execute, while still having varying levels of risk, choices to make in the moment, is brilliant. Nowadays many people assume good level design just means “execution of multiple button functions for one problem”, when it’s a broad skill that can implement many approaches.

Lastly on this, it is so refreshing to play a relatively modern game that has influences that aren’t just other video games. One of the many things I dislike about modern video games is that they have seemingly forgot that there are other forms of entertainment out there.

It seems every FPS now is inspired only by Bioshock, halo, or classic doom. It seems like every 3d platformer now is obsessed with having the player just press buttons in the air mario 64 speed run style and only make worlds based on other platformer templates. I could (and will in other reviews) go on about this, but I was so relieved that Little Nightmares’s aesthetic (and story to a small degree) influences were films like Spirited away (there’s homages everywhere, like the scene where Chihiro climbs the stairs or the guests entering the resort, and the Janitor is definitely based on Kamaji) and western horror films like Nightmare on Elm street and session 9 (you will never escape the chair), As someone who counts Spirited Away and Session 9 among his favorite films, this was great for me and fans of all three that I have mentioned will get a lot out of this game because of it. If you are tired of modern games being far too cannibalistic in terms of inspiration, this will be a breath of fresh air for you.

Musically the game is passable. You have your forgettable ambient music that most 2010s video games are so found of that thankfully isn’t intrusive due to the game being so puzzle focused, which is fine as that could be very annoying to players that are stuck. And then there’s the darker ambient tracks that will ramp up in pace when being stalked by one of the giants. If you’ve played an indie horror game in the last 12 years, you’ve heard this all before, really the only impressive thing is your controllers rumble pulsing to the beat when getting chased. Other than that, you certainly won’t be compelled enough to seek out the tracks on their own.


Little Nightmares is a good of example of less being more and taking into account just how much richer and more fulfilling video games used to be, and still can be, when they take influence from non gaming sources. In the hands of other studios, you could assume the game would just be taking cues from nothing but the resident evil remakes and outlast. But that thankfully isn’t the case. It’s a well crafted 5 hour experience that wears its film influences on its sleeves with pride and integrates the character of its world aesthetics and the tropes and needs of its genre into its level design to the full benefit of the medium it’s in. Poor music, the awful slow walking sections, and the over truncation of the last two chapters aside, it’s one of the better modern games I have played in a very long time.

8/10.

Luigi’s mansion 3 is a game that made me take a good look at the modern industry as a whole. In an era where it seems developers in every region are all following the same 10-12 game play templates cause that’s what they think “good game design” is, or bloating the hell out of games with garbage filler content due to consumers constantly whining about “value for the dollar”, it’s beyond refreshing to play a game that is reasonably short enough to not overstay its welcome and is mostly brave enough to not bog down the experience with said garbage filler content. While being mechanically refreshing.

Since this is a post 2013 video game, there is some unfortunate heavy hand holding in the beginning. What starts as a funny, non intrusive tutorial on how to use the poltergust by showing how polterpup reacts to the breeze, turns into an annoying series of lectures and pop ups during game play to explain how mechanics work. I can somewhat forgive this given the games all ages appeal, but I can imagine younger players getting annoyed on subsequent playthroughs by this as well. The first game had the right approach by letting you play around in a training room until you got your bearings. That would be welcome here, as the game actually has some very visually appealing references in the menus in regards to the controls. It’s not as if the series has ever been mechanically complex either. These heavy handed tutorials aren’t worth anyone’s time.

And the combat certainly isn’t any better in that regard. It seems that Next level games is afraid to let the combat require a little dexterity to be fun, as the dumb super suction prompt from dark moon is back, but made even worse this time because it’s now a multi hit slam AOE that mogs other ghosts. I’m sure for a very young child this would be cool, but I greatly miss the slightly technical dexterity the original game required. It added a psychological edge to the combat. Luigi’s Mansion has never been a difficult series, I am not making any declaration of that here to be clear, but it really did not need this aspect watered down even more than it already was in the previous entry.

Enemy variety is also the absolute worst it has ever been in the series, with only 4 mook types you’ll be fighting over and over again (and one gimmick door ghost that shows up once in a blue moon), expect to fight the basic blue ghosts ad nauseum for almost the entire play through.

It’s not all bad on this front though. The stellar boss fights from Dark moon are back and mostly a great time. All of them have gorgeously over telegraphed attack animations and require you to use your brain to a reasonable degree to proceed. From the gardener needing you to cut his vines with a buzz saw, the pianist needing you to study his shadows and use the size of the massive arena to properly dodge his attacks, the pharaoh needing you to blow away her seat made of sand with wind as you would naturally expect, , and the eye on the prize mechanic that you deal with from three different bosses that somehow never gets old. Every boss is mostly smartly designed and a joy to fight.

I say mostly cause the final boss fight against King Boo is slightly frustrating in his final phase. You have the same eye on the prize mechanic (The game wants you to pay attention to which one tosses the correct bomb, instead follow my advice and focus on the one with four teeth, he’s the real one, you’ll thank me later if you do play this), but it’s hard to hit him if the real one is at either corner of the arena, due to the pillars at those corners causing the bombs you throw back at him to go flying elsewhere. I had to wait around until the RNG spawned the right one in the center to beat him. Other than that, he was just as well designed as the other bosses and another joy to fight.

For some reason boss fight cutscenes are unskippabble, but the game over cutscene is. So if you happen to die you’ll have to sit through a rather long pre fight scene again and this can get obnoxious fast.

There is unfortunately a broken safety net in place in the form of gold bones. They only cost one thousand coins and will spawn you right back where you died if you have any on hand. In a game that is already incredibly easy as is, this is completely pointless. The slam already does enough damage when dealing with each phase of a boss, and the game is very generous with health hearts later in the fights given how hard the bosses hit anyway. At most if you are struggling with a boss you’ll get them on your third try. Having this is dumb and is something I posit (that I also mentioned in my Dark Souls 3 review) is only in here to get people through the game as quickly as possible so they can post “highlights” on social media, when the design of the bosses should speak for themselves.

Lastly on the combat front, if you’re playing in co-op the combat will be busted wide open, as enemy AI is only designed to deal with one player at a time, and both Luigi and Googi’s slam AOEs stack and they completely break the pace of boss fights as a player who knows what they are doing can do borderline speed run tactics to take away any sense of psychological satisfaction from the puzzle aspects of the encounters.

On the level design front, the game is excellent.

You start to notice just how good it is early on, The new plunger adds a nice tactile feeling when getting objects out of the way with some weighty slams and pulls, using the plunger to pull switches or rip objects of a wall (and sometimes a weapon out of an enemies hand) is immensely satisfying. The burst jump makes for some fun novelty moments involving waves/lazers and other dangers coming at you when dealing with traps and stage hazards.


Floor 3 is a very good tutorial for how gooigi works, You have to constantly move him through specific store grates in a mall, one of them even requiring you to use both characters to open a door, making this a great primer for what most of the puzzles will consist of. The green house has a great sense of vertical scale as you slowly climb your way up the plant stalk, chipping away gradually through each densely packed plant heavy room. But far and away the best floor was the movie studio.

I really enjoyed helping Morty make his movie, from the rather clever puzzles requiring you to use your logical thinking skills to memorize portals to get a bucket of water from one set to a well in another (Which is a funny homage to the ring), then growing a plant on another set and then getting a torch lit on the next set, then finally getting his megaphone back on the final set. It all wonderfully culminates in you helping Morty make a kaiju movie. The kaiju suit the other ghost is wearing always glows differently depending on the attacks it throws, showing how well telegraphed and crafted it all is.
The puzzles are overall challenging enough to be satisfactory for all ages while not feeling brain dead easy. My favorite was the weighted scale puzzle on floor ten, where you need to use precise amounts of sand and weighted vases to solve a combination lock. It was one of the best examples of intergrating physics into game design I have seen in a long time, many games have physics engines just to have them, so this was incredible to see.

The game has generally good pacing, as you’ll have a series of shorter floors after one large one, but the game unfortunately shoots its self in the foot four times, once where you need to find a mouse who steals your button on floor 3, then two awful hunts for the polterkitty when she steals your elevator button, then you need to backtrack down a few previous floors (in a row) and when you find her, wait for her to slowly walk behind you before you flash her with your light and then slam her, before going on your way. And then there’s a macguffin hunt where you need to rescue a toad and get a poltergust upgrade part back (for a one time set-piece that feels tacked on), then take the long way around from a floor you already explored, constantly getting stopped by monster closets where you engage in the boring mook combat until you get back on track.

Said monster closets become a major issue on late game floors. As they are far shorter to finish with far fewer puzzles to help the game not feel bogged down, but as I just mentioned said monster closets do exactly that, it got so bad that I knew after solving a puzzle I would encounter another eye rolling, mindless combat section blatantly placed there to pad out the length in the next room or back in the hallways.

There isn’t any psychological edge to the level design, dark moon lacked it too and the original had it in spades. You just go through the motions each floor and while I did enjoy my time in most of them as I gave examples above, the hotel really doesn’t feel like a hotel at all, but instead a series of theme parks from a “world template checklist”. The constant back tracking in the first game through similar yet different enough rooms got you intimately familiar with the mansion, it made the game feel extremely cohesive and made the mansion feel like a warped outlier in the mario franchise, and while I understand the criticism of the boos being mandatory, that game gave you more than enough hints to go after them while back tracking and punished you heavily late game if you didn’t. These “I should have done that” or “I should have thought of that” moments are defining aspects of the medium that make it unique and compelling. This could have been mitigated some what if after a floor was cleared, it would look like an actual floor, but alas that doesn’t happen. Ghosts respwan when you revisit making your progression feel a bit moot and it doesn’t lead to a conclusive sense of satisfaction.

The game does feature online multiplayer modes, and just like dark moon they aren’t very good. Scare scrapper is interesting for about half an hour before you’re going through the same 4 bland objectives over and over again. Engaging in the boring combat and just sucking up money or pressing X to find toads in the same few bland rooms. Scream park fairs slightly better, as you have Luigis using the mechanics in creative ways like using Burst to put hockey pucks in a net, or collecting coins while working around the games impressive physics engine, but once you’ve played every mode, you’ve seen everything this tacked on feature has to offer. Multiplayer has always gimped single player focused games in some way, and it would be vastly preferable if developers used those resources for a more polished single player experience, a good game will have replay value simply on the virtue of being good. You don’t need bloat like multiplayer to encourage re-playability.

And on that note about bloat, the boo hunts return in single player , as well as the gems from dark moon. But they are pointless to go after as the rewards you get are very underwhelming cosmetics. Getting all boos (who don’t even feel unique this time, you capture them like any other ghost) gets you a boo themed flashlight, and a diamond nozzle for the poltergust. These tacked on fetch quests would be a bit more tolerable if the rewards meant anything, but they’re just your standard modern game “value for the dollar” bloated garbage that damn near every game is plagued with now.

The story is nothing to write home about, for what it’s worth the plot never ventures into being any sort of bad, at best and worst it’s an inoffensive kid friendly story. The cutscenes do a good job conveying that Mario charm and cuteness the franchise is known for, but as someone who adores the original Luigi’s mansion, I take heavy umbrage with the “Mario” part of that direction.

The original Luigi’s Mansion was unique among the vast Mario IP because it had almost no cutsey sillyness. Sure, the portrait ghosts did some goofy things here and there, but for the most part, it was a PG horror style atmosphere where the ghosts acted like actual monsters rather than the school yard bullies enemies in other mario games act as. Luigi’s fear felt real because he was out of his element, with his desire to save his brother pushing him forward in spite of the other worldly danger he had to face.
With 3, the unfortunately goofy ghosts are back and even more obnoxious at points. The first game feels like a genuine outlier tonally now, as the light horror has gone into full fisher price horror, the mook ghosts are constantly shown goofing off, breaking things they accidentally drop, making silly faces, and other such child friendly things to appeal to fans of the Mario IP. It makes sense for Luigi to be scared by actual monsters that act very animalistic and destructive, it makes less sense for him to be spooked by what equates to spectral preteens with attitude.

Even the most simple stories can be enjoyable with the correct atmosphere and visual story telling, and 3 is heavily lacking in this regard.

What it isn’t lacking in is visual prowess. The series has always been a technical showcase for the platform it’s on, and 3 is no exception. It’s a mostly gorgeous game. Real time reflections are near flawless, gorgeously detailed shadows are abundant, and textures show incredible depth like stitching in clothes to scratch marks in gold doors.

And while I do have an issue with how the “theme park template” leads to a less cohesive feeling world, I won’t deny that the art direction was incredible. Each floor’s visual aesthetic clearly has a ton of effort and care put in to try an immerse you in that floors theme, from swashbuckling pirate treasure coves and medieval dungeons filled with traps, to pristine and clean gyms and a claustrophobic pyramid. It’s highly likely you’ll have at least one floor you’ll love based on theme you like, as Next Level games did an admirable job in trying to appeal to a wide range of subjects. As an old man the lack of cohesion to me is disappointing. But if you have a young child they’ll probably have a few floors they’ll really love as there’s bound to be one with a subject that is line with an intense interest they have.

The physics are a joy to play around with. Objects react realistically to how far away the vacuum is and fly away or toward you accordingly, smaller soft objects will even warp inward when being sucked up and objects you shoot out from the vacuum will change how much they bounce of walls depending on how far away you are. I was so impressed with how the sand reacted when sucking it up on floor ten that I spent a good 45 minutes just playing around with the sand physics there. The engine never stopped impressing me.

Unfortunately there is some ugly as hell bloom at the start. When you first enter the hotel you are blasted with such a powerful blooming glow it’s genuinely laugh out loud worthy, even the blooming text early on has bloom and it looks god awful. Thankfully once the ghosts reveal themselves, this ceases to be a problem.

The UI is very nice looking and inspired, with the main menu being an actual virtual boy, so you get some deep warm reds and sharp blacks to give a very other wordly vibe. And while I do dislike the goofy tone that has taken over the series as I mentioned previously, I do always like that Nintendo never pretends that the virtual boy never existed despite being a massive failure and always gives funny self deprecating homages to their coolest failure every once in a while. These small jokey homages are perfectly fine so long as they are done sparingly and not made over the top. Which is the case here.

The switch is more than capable of making some beautiful games (every system is), so it’s nice to play a game as beautiful as this one with such a well crafted physics engine under neath.

Music is the weakest aspect of the game, and always has been for the entire series, I doubt you’ll find even the most ardent Luigi’s mansion mega fans able to name a track beyond the main theme. You have your spooky whistles and string sections as you’d expect, and fast paced horns for combat sections. Really the only track that stands out is E.gadd’s shop theme. As it sounds like something you’d hear in an anime licensed game from the 2000s, with its fast paced warm and welcoming midi instruments and comfy synths.

While it’s a heavily flawed game with the modern trappings of bloat and extreme easiness that contemporary games are plagued with, I enjoyed Luigi’s mansion 3. The level design is a satisfying series of strong puzzles and boss fights in spite of the boring combat, the visuals are outstanding and the music is unoffensive. The fisher price horror atmosphere carrying over from dark moon is disappointing, as well as the cheap tacked on multiplayer and pointless boo and gem hunts, topped off with some annoying blatantly padded macguffin hunts. Despite that, it’s refreshing to play a solidly made, fun game that isn’t following the same 10-12 “good game design” templates that every game of every budget seems to be doing now, even if it’s a new entry an established franchise.

I’m no fan of the series becoming more and more kid friendly with each entry, but at the same time if you have younger relatives like I do, a game like this would actually be very good for them. The puzzles require moderate amounts of logical thought, the floors will probably appeal to an interest they have, and the very simple combat is flashy enough to make them feel cool. A child could be playing something far worse and less appropriate for their age group, so at the very least, a parent would have a good option in this game for something that might challenge their child in a decent way.

7/10.

The legacy of mediocrity reaches its grand finale.

Before I begin I need to address some things in case they are brought up in the comments, as I have had genuine idiots start fights with me on my previous souls-borne reviews over the dumbest capital G gamer shit. I will number these points and I have taken care to truncate them to be as concise and brief as possible, if you wish to skip on down to the review proper, control+F to “Dark Souls 3 was one of the most bland”. I understand that my reviews on this site are incredibly long as is, but I have to bring these up.

1. I have been accused by Souls fans on here of “Not explaining things” because the explanations I give are not to their personal satisfaction, just because someone’s point isn’t something you would like to digest, does not mean they did not explain something. When I say things like “Ranged Magic and Co-op break bosses cause they only focus one player cause their AI is only built for one player”, that is an explanation. I do not need to do animation by animation break downs of every single boss or regular enemy. That would make this hundreds of paragraphs long and that is ridiculous to expect.

2. I do not care about your personal play style or about how you played the game. This is a review. I have to take a different approach when playing the game for that reason. I have to test what mechanics are well made and which ones are poorly balanced and broken. I can not “just ignore it”, a flaw in a product does not vanish by just not paying attention to it, it is fair game to criticize it for existing as that is what a review does. I am giving the game an EXAM, this is not an ADVERTISEMENT.

3.Reviews and advertisements ARE NOT the same thing, a review tells you the pros and cons of a product, from a THIRD PARTY. An advertisement only tells you what the company trying to get you to buy the product wants you to think the selling points are. I am not here to validate your preconceived opinions of a game you already like (or dislike). If you like these games, that’s fine, but if you come at me, I will defend my position. If I have already debunked something, I am not going to waste my time (or yours) arguing against it again. Think before you respond.

4. If you want to play these games a certain way, have at it! But I am not here to validate said challenge runs or play styles, when I say a mechanic is pointless cause there is an objectively better option, I, and let me be CLEAR, AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO STOP PLAYING THAT WAY. I can not believe I have to clarify this to grown men and women on a video game website but Souls fans for what ever reason really struggle to comprehend this.

5. While in the last year and a half I have reviewed DLC packs and expansions as their own games, to remain consistent with my previous Souls reviews, I will integrate the DLC into the entire review proper. I will do this by using examples from both DLC packs when talking about the game play, graphics, music etc.

Dark Souls 3 was one of the most bland, designed by committee, boring jrpgs I have played in years. From soft has learned almost absolutely nothing from their previous four mediocre jrpgs in this mediocre franchise.

Now lets address the “almost” first. It took them five whole games, but they finally fixed the estus mechanic that was always some form of fucked in the previous games and ruined any kind of intended tension (Grasses, Humanities and Crystals in DeS, DS1 and 2, needing to grind for vials in BB). You can not use other recovery items this time, and you must choose between health and magic estus depending on your equipment load out. You are given a little more than enough estus to get through an area and your estus restores a good third of your health, making it actually feel important this time, rather than just another healing option that previous entries were plagued with.

This however comes at the expense of the level design. BloodBorne’s big rooms of nothing and long hallways with item nooks return with a vengeance here, you will never get lost as you just have to explore a big room’s nooks then go straight, or a narrow hallway’s nooks and go straight. It’s honestly pathetic at how under designed every area feels. There is very little if any genuine traps, with the only area in the game feeling genuinely designed being the catacombs with its arrow flinging button traps and massive bone spheres. But those aren’t even common enough in that area to feel threatening, only appearing once and twice respectively. Shortcuts also feel less like shortcuts more like regular elevators at this point, there isn’t a rewarding feeling in finding them, because the areas don’t take that long to navigate in the first place, given how much ground you cover while running back and forth.

There are some occasional stage hazards like giants and archers, but aside from a conjuring giant in the ringed city, killing these hazards eliminates them permanently and removes any further tension, the aformentioned giant isn’t even that much of a threat, as a few charged R2s from a high level weapon kill him in a few hits.

The game has completely given up any psychological aspect to the world and navigation. While DS2 and BB let you warp anywhere you have been from the start, they at the very least gave each of the bonfires in an area plenty of space to at least TRY and add some sort of tension, despite how easy those games were. DS3 has zero tension.

Bonfires are constant, take for example the undead settlement. The placement of the second bonfire in the undead settlement is laugh out loud worthy. Being right behind the first gate you stroll up to from when you arrive in 60 seconds. This is a problem all the way to the late game, after killing the Dragon slayer armour and lighting his bonfire, there is another bonfire right next to it at the entrance to the grand archives, for example.

The reason there are so many bonfires so close to each other can only mean one thing. It’s no secret that Sony and Namco use these games false perception of being “difficult” for marketing purposes, and with so many plentiful bonfires for checkpoints, you can just feel the cynicism in the design here as this is clearly made to help streamers and youtubers make quick and cheap “rage compilations” for free advertisement. If you actually play these games like the JRPGs they are however, that intended cynical design falls flat on its ass.

I will say this however, Dark Souls 3 is very good at conveying a sense of scale, due to how close the camera is to you this time and how tall the geometry is, the world feels massive. And the draw distance and landmarks of where you have been and will get too are a nice touch when at a high elevation.

On the surface it seems that from soft has tried to make ranged magic less useful and more balanced than previous games. The MP bar from Demons souls makes a return and the only way to restore it is with blue estus, and unless you start as a pyromancer or sorcerer, the bar is much smaller to compensate and try to make you use your melee weapon more. The stamina bar is also made small at the start to try and convince you to invest in endurance early to roll more often. Of course the gains to FP are quite high if you invest early on, I boosted all the way to 30 FP and had more than enough FP for boss fights so long as I took along two magic estus. And with as little as 30 endurance you’ll have more than enough stamina to block and roll your way to easy kills. With around 40 strength and 20 dex, 35 intelligence and 35 faith 100% of enemies and all but one boss in the game is a matter of when you will kill them than if.

A heavy investment in Vitality is also obviously needed to wear some pieces of heavy armour and for holding great shields that can fully absorb or mitigate attacks. And as long as you keep your preferred weapon upgraded (any weapon in the game will serve you well till the end game pretty much with few exceptions, I used an early game dark sword infused with a heavy gem for my entire run) you’ll find that the RPG mechanics of the game once again break the action parts of the advertised “tough” game play wide open once again.

You may be wondering why I listed my stats two paragraphs ago that high, and that’s due to the fact that exp gain in DS3 is very high, most likely to help along streamers so they can quickly power up and power through more of the game to make more cheap rage compilation content. A good 20 or so hours grinding in the high wall will make you more than strong enough for the endgame (most regular play throughs of this I studied had normal, everyday people, beating this in the mid 60s), hammering home just how easy these games have always been.

I said earlier that the attempt to balance out magic was only on the surface, and here’s why, enemy AI from the dregs outside the fire link shrine to the soul of cinder have no way of countering magic and pyromancies as their AI is entirely focused on on melee fighting, again, even if they don’t get stun locked when hit with ranged magic, they still zerg rush you like morons and by the time they reach you, if a regular enemy, you’ll be able to finish them off easily with your melee weapon. Even enemies that do cast magic make the effort to get close enough to you so can dash towards them, which makes them revert to melee mode, and ruins any potential solution to this classic flaw of the franchise.

Pyromanices are incredibly overpowered in the game, this seems intentional, given the massive circle jerk of fire related imagery and themes being drilled into you to drive the plot forward and establish the lore of the game. It’s not going to be an uncommon strategy to summon a helper for a boss and snipe them from afar with great fire ball and watch their HP melt. Some bosses are even more flammable solo, like aldritch, as simply having the grass crest shield, the chloranthony ring and a quick r1 finger is more than enough to kill him in less than 90 seconds with great fire ball.

The bosses haven’t improved from Bloodborne (or any of the previous four games really). They are still completely lost when you summon and snipe them with magic. And the DPS of either AI or especially a human partner is so high that the extra health they get from summons matters little. The bigger bosses are still camera devouring monstrosities that are genuinely laughable given how bad your visibility is when they get close, as the camera is not, and has never been, designed around enemies that large and it makes fighting them more a battle with the camera than the intended eldritch gods they want you to think you are fighting.


The game is also strangely obsessed with giving many of the bosses multiple phases. While this is common in JRPGs, these are more meant for skill checks to make sure the player isn’t mindlessly brute forcing their way through the game and in general are used sparingly. DS3 of course has dozens of multi phase bosses starting with the Abyss watchers all the way to the Soul of Cinder. To balance these fights out these bosses have less health than usual ones, but this makes the laughable action part of the combat even more so, because when you actually play these games as the RPGs they are instead of the circle button youtube rage compilations they aren’t. You see how poorly thought out so many aspects of them really are. As the lower health pools mean fuck all when you actually level up and equip properly.

There is one boss that is an exception to most of these criticisms. Dark eater Midir is an optional boss you fight in the ringed city, and the way you need to fight him is via casting poison magic. Since he has the most HP of any boss in the game, this means the poison will do 1K damage to him each time due to its scaling effect, which is critical to wear him down quickly, otherwise, you will most likely run out of estus due to how strong his attacks are. Co-op is a non factor for this fight as it will just bloat his health and fuck you over, and he resists magic and pyromancies. If he wasn’t huge and devoured the camera, the series could have had its first genuinely good boss fight, but alas, you should never underestimate souls games for underachieving.

The combat in general feels like it was retroactively changed to be more like bloodborne at the last minute. Enemies and bosses are much more aggressive and are more prone to use combo attacks, it’s clear that From soft has gone all in on the R1+circle button simulator jokes, as the hit boxes on boss and regular mook attacks are less about blocking and whacking R1 at the right time, and more rolling and then hitting R1. This becomes less and less of an issue the more you invest in stamina and upgrade your shields, but it’s still hilarious that from soft turned the combat into what even their own fans jokingly refer to it as.

Invasions are still annoying and immersion breaking. They’ve never added anything to enhance these games and have always been a tacked on multiplayer feature that should have died along with the 7th generation when that plagued damn near every game. Thankfully I always leveled high enough to mitigate this annoyance, but still had my fair share of them, which forced me to use the broken Alt F4 build before carrying on with the session. What’s especially funny is that the game has a separate PVP mode which isn’t available until very late in the game. Why invasions are even here anymore is baffling considering it was given its own dedicated mode that could prevent any of these annoyances from occurring in the first place.

Visually Dark souls 3 is as strong as you would expect from the series now. Stunning lighting and impressively huge level geometry are paired with detailed textures like scratches and gashes in your shields and armour, chips in your melee weapons sharp ends, and lovely cloth physics that flow elegantly and realistically. This is topped of with some amazing particle effects. Attacks feel like they have a strong effect when you see an explosion of sparks or magic dust.

Unfortunately due to the fire themed circle jerking in the story, your character pulsates an ugly and gaudy ember effect. This just bizarre to see as almost none of the enemies have this effect and look stunning regardless. We already know the player character is fire themed due to being called the ashen one, an ugly ember effect is not needed.

The animations are the best in the series so far, for as bland and mediocre as the boss fights are, the gorgeous and over exaggerated animations of the Abyss watchers unorthodox great sword swings, the animalistic claw swipes of the wyverns and midir, and many others are a sight to behold. Regular mook attacks are on the same level. With some like the tar demons pulsating pustules changing depending on the attack being an outstanding detail.

Menu UI has been fixed again, with BloodBorne's awful and unintuitive vertical menus gone. DS2’s horizontal menus return and the layouts do an excellent job of showing you where everything is, you even have dented tabs at the top this time to eliminate any possible confusion.

Musically, Dark Souls 3 is mostly quite bland.

While legendary video game composer Motoi Saukraba does return, he only does a handful of tracks this time. Said tracks are the best in the game, as Sakuraba is a master of his craft. Vordt of the Boreal Valley’s powerful horn section and thundering percussion set a strong first impression when you encounter the game’s first real boss. Then there’s Curse Rotted Greatwoods ominous strings and haunted chants, the foreboding violins of Crystal Sages, the scatter shot booming horns of Wolnir and the Bombastic fast paced tempo of Nameless King that sounds like it was ripped straight out of the Tales games. These will be the highlight of the game musically for you and don’t disappoint.

Most of the tracks are composed by Yuka Kitamura, and while she does a generally competent job, it’s very easy to notice she’s more or less just trying to copy Sakuraba’s style but rely more heavily on violins. The majority of her tracks start off the same way, with a big booming hook, followed by heavy use of violins. There is talent here and from what I have sampled of her Sekiro score (I have not played that one yet), she really comes into her own in that game. In the case of DS3, it seems more that she’s composing in a style that doesn’t suit her and it falls flat due to that.

I’ve saved talking about the story till last cause it’s nothing special.

In my Dark Souls 2 review I touched upon that the conclusive, makes you wonder what may happen but good enough endings to Dark Souls 1 was made completely pointless by the existence of Dark souls 2, the choices you can make in that game are also nullified by the existence of Dark souls 3, as both protagonists chose to link the flame and continue the world as is. Dark Souls 3, to its credit, does try and work with this buy having the linking of the flame become a tradition of sorts, which each successive linker becoming a lord of cinder. And toys with this tradition by having the linking of the flame not happen for what seems like hundreds or even thousands of years. The previous Lords of Cinder have gone mad during this time and it is up to the Ashen one to link the flame yet again before it is to late.

A solid premise on paper, but the execution is as expected, quite poor and under cooked. The story in typical souls fashion is presented in a very bare bones way and you are expected to get more from the lore of the world than the actual plot proper. You collect your lords of cinders ashes, and then make one of three choices that do nothing interesting with the souls formula. You become a god and subjugate the masses, link the flame and preserve the world, or let it die. All of these choices transpire in very brief cut scenes before fading to black. Given the series hasn’t continued at the time I post this, it seems that the choices are actual weighty choices now, but ring hollow with how bare bones the story is, being nothing but a quick premise, uninteresting macguffin hunt, and then rushed choices.

The side quests don’t feel fulfilling but this is to be expected, as they’ve always felt more like tacked on framing devices to get rings and spells rather than genuine side stories in a (on paper) rich world seemingly brimming with information. You will know that people like Greirat and Sirrius will die as that’s just how these games go at this point, and you’ll roll your eyes and power through to get the good equipment their quest will bring you in spite of their half assed implementation.

The lore this time isn’t even a modicum of interesting due to Lothric being Lordran several centuries in the future. DS3 is filled to the brim with lazy pandering towards DS1, like Oscars corpse being right in front of you at the start to give you your estus, Anor Londo briefly returning for cheap nostalgia claps, and the final boss fight taking place in the Kiln of the first flame which also plays Gywnn’s theme in the second phase, just to name a few of many eye rolling homages you will encounter.

The original characters for this game don’t feel interesting at all due the fact that they just contribute to the theme of cycles that the trilogy is built around. The lords of cinder for example are just people who did the same thing DS1 and 2 hero did and they’re nothing more than obstacles in your path due to how underwritten everything is.

Both DLC packs like the base game share the premise of a solid idea of a plot on paper but like the base game suffer from extremely skeletal, bare minimum execution to even forgetting the premise near the end in Ringed City’s case.

Arriendel’s premise of a magical world found inside a painting fading away due to the painting in the real world starting to rot due to not being preserved well is a very interesting idea. But aside from a few houses full of pus and fleshy walls, and anthropomorphic birds with huge rotten penises (yeah I don’t know how to parse that either), that premise is barely touched upon, and when you do finish the DLC, your entire journey feels like it was meaningless because you just accelerated what was already happening in the first place.

That leaves us with the Ringed City. Another interesting premise, the Ringed City which takes place in the same sort of dimension the Kiln is in, presents it’s self as a “Landfill of realms” so to speak. But this “Landfill of realms” is really just window dressing. Sure you’ll see buildings from Dark Souls 1 and 2 along the way, but the actual plot, if you can call it that, is about you confronting Gael at the end of the world to get a hold of the Dark soul, which he has been devouring pieces of before he returns to his niece in the painted world to save it. You then kill Gael and the hyped up “Grand finale of the soulsborne franchise” just kind of ends with him falling over, you don’t even get a cut scene for this. It makes the Ringed City feel incredibly unfinished, and given how I just described it in the entire paragraph, it probably was unfinished and rushed out.


Dark Souls 3 is a mediocre cap off to a mediocre franchise. Filled with both cynical design choices like plentiful bonfires to help along the uninformed twitch streamer rage compilation audience, to continued poorly designed boss fights, ok at best combat, under designed levels, bland music and a bare bones, by the numbers soulsborne plot that does nothing interesting with the formula. It was one of the blandest, most low effort JRPGs I have ever played and in this franchise that is saying something.

There has never been anything special about this series, its reputation as “difficult”, that comes from deceptive advertisements deliberately targeted at people who have never played a JRPG in their life, is far more anger inducing than any of the games could ever hope to be. Its mechanics it apes and takes from other series are also done much better in those inspirations. The only remarkable thing about these games has been an incredible talent at underachieving with their potential. From soft can not make action JRPGs with Zelda combat, but they can make interesting on paper worlds. A narrower, non RPG focus is something I feel would lead to a much better output from this developer, and the existence of Sekiro and Armoured core 6 at a glance feel like a breath of fresh air. Hopefully, those are better than the mediocrity this franchise has plagued the entire medium with since 2009.

4/10.