A gladiatorial challenge made mythical by operatic crescendos and the ancient craft of serrated pixel art.Įldest Souls. It feels traditional and old, but in a good way. As a boss rush game, it’s laser-focused on the intimidating presence of the long red line, and the Herculean effort to destroy gods who throw everything at you to stop it depleting. READ MORE: ‘Samurai Warriors 5’ review: repetitive, predictable, and relentlessly playableĮldest Soulsunderstands.

Even better when their life bar stretches ominously across the bottom of the screen, increasing the hope of victory as it reduces chip by chip, and the sense of pressure as the goal draws close. No minions, no QTEs, just the power and intricate patterns of a formidable opponent against my skills and learning capacity. You’ll be using a combination of dashes, basic attacks, charged attacks and your super powerful “Bloodburst” attack to stay alive and even restore health to yourself while in combat-all in all, making for a very aggressive game of tag.I’ve always appreciated the purity of a good boss fight. While the game doesn’t include much in the way of content outside of the boss fights, it does have a skill tree allowing you to customise your combat style, and it even allows you to remap your points at any time, meaning you can change up how you’d prefer to play on the fly. It is up to you and your oversized sword to kill all the remaining gods and bring about peace for all mortals once more. Before long, Eksyll appeared and brought about a war and the near-extinction of all mortal beings, alongside his fellow gods. After a while, the mortals revolted and caged all of the gods in a Citadel, freeing themselves once more.

The story tells of a world where man and gods walked side-by-side until mortals found themselves little more than slaves thanks to a god named Eksyll. Killing the ten bosses took me roughly 17 hours of playtime and probably close on 17 million deaths. There are also no other enemies to fight and very little to explore, but if you think that will make the game a quick experience, man, are you mistaken. The areas, while pretty, are also tiny, taking less than a minute to run through at their longest. The game itself is little more than a constant boss rush, with very little, if anything, to do outside of the ten boss fights. While the art is still beautiful for the most part, the game is also wholly littered with assets that look cheap and bought – something I probably wouldn’t have paid all that much attention to if I didn’t constantly have to traverse the same area after each and every death. Upon actually playing it, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, though. I’ll be honest, I am a complete sucker for pixel art games, and Eldest Souls looked exceptionally pretty when I first checked it out.

the single most challenging game I’ve ever played. However, I broke my cardinal rule of avoiding death simulators when I decided to jump into Eldest Souls A.K.A. It’s for that reason why I generally try my absolute best to avoid games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne – I’m too old to have that kind of heart-attack-inducing stress in my life. What I can’t handle is dying again and again and again at EXACTLY the same spot over and over until I feel like I might actually die. And sure, you might be thinking to yourself that dying is a part of every video game, and fair enough. If there is one thing I literally can not handle in video games, it’s dying.

Eldest souls game