Review for Dark Devotion. Game for PlayStation 4, PC, Steam, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 25/04/2019
Dark Devotion, after being released for the first time on PC last spring, finally lands also on our home consoles, PlayStation 4, Xbox One e Nintendo Switch.
Dark Devotion, developed by the French of Hibernian Workshop and distributed by The Arcade Crew, is a title that is going to be placed in a fairly trendy sub-genre in recent years: the soulslike / metroidvania in 2 dimensions, embellished with high-quality pixel art graphics.
A niche already solidly occupied by very well-placed games such as Salt & Sanctuary, the recent one Blasphemous and the most "metroidvanieggiante" Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. In short, a beautiful crowded landscape in which trying to emerge is not, on balance, at all simple.
At the plot level, Dark Devotion does not differ much from the usual plots that are easily encountered by hanging out in the genre: our hero (or rather, heroine) must try to obtain redemption by escaping from a nightmare place, populated by horrifying creatures ready to make us, often in a purely literal sense, the skin.
Even the graphic aspect in pixel art follows the usual scheme quite faithfully, proposing settings and opponents with a marked horror gothic aspect, with a very vague inspiration from the Christian imaginary, definitely much less marked than those proposed by the aforementioned Blasphemous.
In general, as far as Dark Devotion is concerned, this type of characterization works great, ending up offering us opponents (especially the biggest furniture and the inevitable bosses) charismatic and of sure impact.
The game also features some rather unusual mechanics given the genre. As in any self-respecting soulslike, even in Dark Devotion we will die very badly for a hallucinating number of times, only this time, at each of our deaths and subsequent resurrections we will get a bonus but ... we will lose all our equipment!
Yes, you read that correctly. Whenever our young Templar is brutally torn apart by some nameless Horror, upon her next awakening she will find herself without all the equipment and consumables collected up to that moment. On the other hand (and in order not to make the progression really impossible) the Gods will give her a help in the form of a random bonus, thanks to which she can try with a minimum of hope to recover what is lost.
That said, it seems that the situation is really bad in case of death. Fortunately, at least for some weapons, especially those dropped by bosses, it will be possible to recover them directly from the blacksmith present in the central hub, while for the others we will have to return to the exact same point on the map where we found them the first time. The consumables, on the other hand, appear in the chests and corpses in an absolutely random way, thus forcing us to a new search for useful items.
As already mentioned, even the blessings we will receive will be totally random (the ways of the Gods are inscrutable ...) but they will be much more consistent based on how much Devotion we have accumulated before our last departure. Devotion grows as we progress and explore so, finally, the more we go forward after each resurrection, the more "important" the blessing received will be.
All this makes Dark Devotion a pleasant digression from what has already been seen previously, a value however partially thwarted by an imprecise and sometimes cumbersome control system. The intent was certainly one of the best, trying to introduce a fast and complete combat system, perhaps a little more technical than what has been seen in the more or less illustrious competing games.
Too bad, however, that on balance we are faced, at least on Playstation 4, with an awkward and extremely unintuitive command mapping, which will really cause us a lot of "stupid" deaths, thus increasing the sense of frustration.
If to this defect, certainly not just, we also add an absolutely forgettable sound, a graphics that, although inspired and evocative, do not even come close to the competition as, protagonist in the head, is really poorly defined, the judgment of the game risks fall steeply towards mere mediocrity.
To give the coup de grace, we also add the lack of localization in Spanish, a minor problem for those who chew the language of Albion, but which affects the experience of those who do not speak it, as all the lore of the game goes extrapolated, in pure soulslike style, from dialogues and descriptions of the scenario.
Ultimately, Dark Devotion is yet another missed opportunity. A nice atmosphere and some original ideas are there, but they are sadly ruined by fairly critical flaws and inaccuracies, relegating the title to a mere sufficiency.
► Dark Devotion is an RPG-Adventure-indie-Metroidvania-type game developed by Hibernian Workshop and published by The Arcade Crew for PlayStation 4, PC, Steam, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 25/04/2019
