Eldest Souls
Eldest Souls - Another Souls-like, but woven only of boss battles
One of the oldest mechanics in games is fighting bosses. Bosses are mostly found in role-playing games, platformers, slashers a la God of War, arcade racing simulators, and rarely in shooters. Bosses serve different purposes: some check what the player has learned, some are added for suspense, some boss battles are only needed to introduce brain-breaking mechanics. Hello, Metal Gear Solid and Inscryption. One thing that is certain is that a boss battle should be memorable and make the player tense, no matter how easy the path is. Bosses are difficult to defeat, because they have high damage, a lot of health and non-standard patterns of behavior and attacks. Eldest Souls makes the idea of bossfights absolute... ...And even though this game is quite small and short, it gives unforgettable emotions.
Another gloomy stuffiness?
Over the years, the Souls-like sub-genre has acquired recognizable attributes. The action of Souls-like game always unfolds in the dark age of decadence. Gothic and grotesque, armor and dungeon gloom, despair and a courageous protagonist stoically overcomes all adversities in proud solitude. Eldest Souls was no exception, everything is present: gigantomania, protagonist wields two-meter sword, and some ancient evil awakened in the world again.
This time that evil turned out to be the gods that had existed in peace and harmony with humans for many years, but one celestial was too clever. Taking into account Lucifer's ideas, this deity conspired with the other gods to destroy the old order of the world and enslave people.
Of course, there were dissenters as well. One such dissenters will have to play. As befits any souls-like universe, you'll learn about the Eldest Souls universe through dialogues, item descriptions, and sometimes fleeting hints, looking around the bleak outskirts. But none of this matters. It was in Elder Ring that the world and its history had any meaning. The title Elder Souls is consonant with Elder Ring, but Elder Souls is not a game about exploration...
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance
More to the point, Eldest Souls has no pause at all. You have to answer a call and the boss has one hit of health points left - bad luck. Took the wrong skills, but realized only in the process - surrender or prevail. Called during the game - let the whole world wait.
Eldest Souls is so harsh that it counts the number of deaths, damage taken, and damage dealt in the menu for the player to watch and marvel: "I defeated the second boss on only my thirty-ninth attempt, and the battle took only forty minutes. I'm a cyber athlete!"
The Guardian in the screenshot above is only the second boss, but based on this bossfight, you can already tell if Eldest Souls is your game or not. If you don't like learning enemy attack patterns, timings, and endurance management, you definitely won't like this game.
Bossfights here are designed according to classic game design standards. There are boss phases, paired two-on-one battles, bosses with sacred shields, and the crippling flying projacktails all over the arena.
There are bosses that block part of the map with malicious objects and send their clones at the player. There's also a boss that sits above the map and pummels the ground with his fists, a game-design classic for all ages:
Eldest Souls is very short, and it's blasphemous to retell all the battles, as it would deprive the potential player of the first-discoverer effect. And there aren't many bosses. Exactly as many as the player's psyche can handle.
The game mercilessly punishes for the smallest mistakes and inaccuracies. Trouble has been noticed with hitboxes, the area in your opponent's strike zone where the damage is counted. Hitboxes don't always match the visuals, so sometimes it seems that the bosses have mastered the secret Shaolin techniques of non-contact combat...
Another problem of the game is the viscosity of movement. No, fortunately, the controls are not unresponsive, but both the protagonist and the bosses move as if in sour milk.
Otherwise, the gameplay of Eldest Souls is like a game of chess, with only a fraction of a second per move, but the opponent always plays the same strategy with an "English start", with an "absolute tie" or a "fork". If you don't learn the whole sequence by heart, you lose.
A few words about local character development
Eldest Souls has one more trump up its sleeve - skill builds. The developers gave this aspect a criminally small amount of time, inventing a devilishly cunning system of pumping. For each killed boss the player gets a piece of his soul, which can improve any of the skills or make him a new active skill. For example: the Guardian, which was glimpsed in the first part of the article, in the second phase releases a bunch of snakes into the protagonist's face. The snakes deal damage to the area and heal the Guardian. After killing the Guardian, these same snakes are flashed in the player's build. Shards of souls reveal differently in different slots. Shards have properties similar to the abilities of the bosses themselves.
In addition to where to shove the soul shard, the player needs to think about the preferred branch of passive skills. But here everything is classic: combat style - more damage and vampirism, whirlwind of blows - evasion and ranged combat, counterstrike - increased survivability and at the same time the most powerful branch in the game. This is not a spoiler or a guide, I just wanted to save your nerve cells if you do decide to play it...
Unfortunately, you can play with the builds only after a couple or three battles with bosses, which not everyone can handle. And break the balance of the player does not threaten. The game gives you exactly as many points as you need to pass - no more, no less.
Is Eldest Souls worth buying?
At the -75% discount, it's worth considering the game. More expensive is unlikely. Most likely, Eldest Souls will repulse you by its exorbitant complexity and poor content. But it's worth to spend $2 to get acquainted with the game, if only to appreciate the nontrivial idea. If you like Soul-like games because of boss battles, but dungeon farming annoys you, Eldest Souls, probably, will appeal to you. But to get acquainted with the genre it's better to start with Dark Souls remaster, because Eldest Souls is not the game for hollow fans of estus whipping.
