![]() Instead, Titan Souls lives and dies in the fights with titans themselves, and, in turn, the emotional work you may need to perform to die over and over and over again while confronting them.Įach boss has an achingly video game-y weakpoint that will almost always be immediately apparent, whether it's the orange-ish brain in the center of a gelatinous mass or the pink butt of an abominable snowman. But there's no progression, no growth outside your own skills. There's a world to explore, but it's mostly empty, absent a few rudimentary puzzle bits here and there - and, admittedly, a few neat secrets that reveal optional additional titans. You can also roll, and holding the roll button down lets you run just a little faster than usual.Īnd. ![]() You can retrieve the arrow by walking over it, or you can hold the fire button to pull it back to you with force - which can kill as effectively as a direct attack. You have one arrow, which you fire by holding a button long enough to nock it the longer you hold the button, the farther your arrow will fly. Titan Souls' limited vocabulary stretches to its basic mechanics as well. Even the titans you come across are an opaque sort of mystery - some kind of text appears at the bottom of each encounter, but it's complete gibberish in all but two encounters I came across. This is less sociopathic than it initially sounds, because the world of Titan Souls is mostly empty, a set of ruins that should feel very familiar in its top-down perspective to anyone with a history in eight- and 16-bit adventure games, especially the Zelda series.Īs you explore the starting temple you'll find rooms with giant sleeping creatures - which, to be totally honest, don't seem like they were hurting anybody - and wake them up (by shooting them with your arrow) and then kill them (also by shooting them with your arrow).Ĭomparisons to games like Shadow of the Colossus and its giant bosses are unavoidable, which Titan Souls seems to be satisfied with, given the lack of any real info or context. You start alone in a world with just one arrow and a quickly apparent goal: to kill everything you meet. Titan Souls doesn't do any heavy lifting to explain its premise. To be totally honest, it doesn't seem like the titans were hurting anybody Despite moments of real boss-fight brilliance, Titan Souls feels like waiting for a slot machine to pop just a little bit too often, and when it does, the reward is a chance to do it all again. And, again, in the interest of honesty, this fight neatly ties a bow on top of my Titan Souls experience, places it in a proverbial, one-word nutshell: anticlimax. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what happened. This time, there's a bright flash of white on the screen, and my opponent is the one who fell. But that doesn't seem to matter, and here comes death number 31-Įxcept no. I know what I need to do, where I should theoretically be aiming my single arrow. I've died what I estimate to be about 30 times in this particular fight in developer Acid Nerve's overhead, pixel-art action game, which is really just a small fraction of the total number of times I've died over the course of the game, but I just don't feel like I'm getting anywhere.
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