I quit playing Sekrilo (Another Crab’s Treasure) because I just was not having fun with it. I may go back to it at some point, but I may not. I have decided that the game will forever more be known as Sekrilo (the protag is Kril), and I shall not be moved from it. Ian suggested I try Tails of Iron (Odd Bug Studio), also known as Rats Souls. I jokingly called it Witcher Souls because Doug Cockle, the voice of Geralt, is the narrator.
In case the name doesn’t make it clear, it’s a soulslike. It came out in…(Googles, blinks in astonishment) 2021?!? I thought it was pre-pandemic. Dang! Time means nothing these days. Ian also told me that a sequel was coming out ‘soon’. I checked out the trailer on Steam, and Doug Cockle is the narrator again. I will include the official lunch trailer for the first game below.
I had the first game in my pile of shame (backlog), so I installed it. It’s tiny and doesn’t take up much space. The first choice was which mode to play it in. Casual (for the story), Normal (how it’s meant to be played, which is nails hard), and then Hard which is for the hardcore players, I assume. The game warned me that the mode could not be changed. I chose normal and booted it up.
First the pros: the game has a great graphics style. It’s 2D, and is a grittier Salt and Sanctuary (Ska Studios). Oh, and you’re a rat. A small rat at that . It’s mentioned several time that you’re tiny, and your brothers are bigger than you. Especially your (literal) big brother, Denis. He’s the chosen one, except for whatever reason, you’re the one whho has to do all the fighting. Your name is Redgi, by the way. No idea why.
I like the parry in this game, but I think it’s because it’s very generous. You hold LT (shield) and then RT as your enemy does a yellow attack, and you automatically parry it. As long as you are facing in the right direction. Otherwise, you’re SOL. Oh, and you have to use the right stick to change directions while holdinng the shield. So the praise is for the parry itself, and not all the nonsense that goes with it.
In fact, the controls are….not great. The heal was on LB and the interaction was on X. INTERACTION ON X. That’s not a thing. That should NEVER be a thing! Not in a soulslike. Look. I know all these games want to put their own stamp on the genre, but there are a few things you don’t fuck with. The roll/dodge is one (and they got that right. It’s on B), and the heal is on X! When FromSoft themselves fucked with that (it’s up on the directional pad in Bloodborne), that was bad enough. But games that do it just for the hell of it? No.
In fact, many of tthe choices they made for combat were…puzzling. Attack on RB in fine. Heavy attack being holding down RB? Eh. Not a fan, but still fine. A for jump–good, good. But putting block/parry on LT is strange. I understand that there are only so many buttons, though. I can deal with LB being interact (even though it should be A or Y), but not when it takes three or four taps of LB to actually trigger the interaction. And you have to be in exactly the right place otherwise it won’t work.
Again, this could just be me becuse I have dex/flex/spatial issues, but I am just calling it as I see it.
The story at the beginning is pretty basic. You are a young rat, the son of the king. The younger (youngest?) son of the king. Denis is the eldest. The middle son is…ah…dunno. Can’t be arsed to find out. No idea why he’s the chef. Actually, I do knwo why. It’s so he can get kidnapped (happens very early on) and give you in-game motivation. You can give him ingerdients so he can make you food. I don’t know what it does for you because there’s a keg that fills your estus flask. Er, drinking flask. Not sure what it’s called. And you find bottles in the field that fill your estus flask (of course I’m going to call it atht) as well.
Which is fine. Except your flask doesn’t tell you how many sips you have. At least not that I could see. What happens is that you have to HOLD DOWN THE DRINK BUTTON in order to slowly refill your health. I capped that because that is wild. And bad. So bad. In the middle of combat, in order to drink your healing potion, you have to hold down the heal button. If you just tap it, you get a tiny sip. If you get interrupted as you drink, the refill is stopped right there and you have to do it again. So it’s kinda like filling a gas tank.
I cannot tell you how awful this is during a fight. For so many reasons. That’s not even to mention that you can pick up several bottles of the refill fluid, but then they all just dump into your estus flask. And who knows how many times you can totally refill your flask?
That’s not the worst part, though. I’ll get to that in a second as I continue to talk about the combat.
I have said so many times that if you’re going to make a soulslike, your combat needs to be tight. That is the cornerstone of the From games, and to not get that right is unforgivable. Part of the problem in this game is the same problem with Salt and Sanctuary–it’s hard to do Souls combat in 2D. Rolling past an enemy attack (or, worse, an attack from a boss) is always fraught. Again, this could be my spatial issues, but I have a hard time knowing when it’s safe to roll and when it’s not. And, no, it’s not the same as it in in From games. I can’t exactly explain why it’s different, but it just is.
The combat itself is enough to turn me off the game, but there are some other things that make me so fucking frustrated, too. One is that you cannot skip squeaking from the NPCs (everyone squeaks) no matter if you’ve heard it before or not. This is especially painful when you have to talk to an NPC before a significant fight, and the NPC takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to say what they have to say. In reality, it’s probably less than a minute, but when you’re trying to do a hard encounter, it really rankles. What’s worse is that there’s a save point right before this encounter, but saving after talkikng to the NPC doesn’t matter. If you die (which I did several times), you have to go back and talk to the NPC again.
I do have more to say, so I’ll leave it here until the next post.