Indie Game of the Week 479: Clash: Artifacts of Chaos

In the many years I've been playing and reviewing Indie games on Giant Bomb, one of the companies that have accompanied me on that journey is ACE Team: a group of talented Chilean miners of video game goldmines that are always on hand with something visually unique, even if the gameplay systems aren't always to my liking. It felt like the recent reboot of their first-person brawler series, Zeno Clash, kind of quickly entered and exited the discourse so I was inclined to discover why. Hence, we're playing Clash: Artifacts of Chaos this time, the tenth—and presently most recent—ACE Team game and the sixth I believe I've written about (the last actually being Zeno Clash 2, this game's predecessor).

This floating bag of bones and sinew with nails driven into him is actually one of the friendlier things in this game.

So what do you do with this circa 2010 brawler series in the current Indie gaming climate? Just turn it into a Soulslike somehow? Well... yeah, that's pretty much what's going on here. As Pseudo, a hermit who typically avoids getting involved with anything those violent knuckleheads in the city are doing, he's drawn into conflict regardless with the powerful tyrant Gemini over a bird-like creature simply called "the Boy" whom said tyrant is looking to obtain for his unusual healing powers. Sympathetic towards a fellow outsider, Pseudo instead promises to deliver the Boy to his brother's village in the mountains, even if he has to fight through all of Gemini's bounty hunter goons to do so. One unusual aspect of Pseudo, which plays into the game's equivalent of a corpse run mechanic, is that at night he's capable of telepathically controlling a scarecrow-like version of himself. Pseudo can assume this form by resting at camps or automatically if he gets knocked out, and in the latter case his "night avatar" has to go find him and wake him up to proceed. The night avatar doesn't have the safety net the daylight Pseudo has as a result, and there are tougher enemies to deal with in the dark, so if you do make the choice to roam around after hours it's always a big risk. However, as the night avatar can go places the waking Pseudo can't such as through prickly thorn barriers, the rewards are commensurate with those risks.

Beyond that, most of the complexity can be found in the new combat and character development systems. You can acquire weapons but they'll break fairly quickly, so instead the combat focuses on hand-to-hand martial arts and stances. Stances are what determine your suite of attacks, including light, heavy, finishers, evasive attacks, and sprinting attacks: one stance might improve your reach at the cost of your damage potential, while another might have slower swings but allow for devastating stuns that interrupt your opponent. You choose one of three stances initially and find others while exploring the wilderness, not unlike the weapons of something like Bloodborne. The game's environments are also full of resources to collect which can be traded for temporary weapons or permanent armor gear (I know which I prefer) and there's a stance improvement system that operates on finding and spending these little voodoo dolls lying around areas. The exploration factor feels a little stronger here than in previous Clash games just in general, with mostly open areas full of nooks and crannies to search and shortcut gates to open for easier backtracking, and of course everything looks different at night where there's even more things to hunt down (albeit with more things that are hunting you down in turn).

If two heads are better than one, I don't fancy my chances of outsmarting this chick.

The worldbuilding and especially the character designs in the Zeno Clash series have always been the highlight, and oh man do we have a bunch of weird looking dirtbags in this one. The protagonist looks like the guy from those Peperami commercials we had in the UK (his nighttime version has interchangeable body parts as a collectible set, so he'll eventually look like anything you want) and the bird boy is cute enough, like a cross between an owl and one of those soot sprites from My Neighbor Totoro, but the various villains and general grunts that pick fights with you... well, let's just say if I woke up and looked like that I'd also want to run towards the nearest living thing and kill it. The perspective is a much closer behind-the-shoulder look, more akin to a Resident Evil 4 than a regular Souls game, and that more intimate viewpoint makes it that much easier to locate fine details in the environment: this includes items but also places where you climb up, totems that confer the new stances and specials (if you defeat its guardian first; fortunately, you can fight it as often as you want), levers that might open new areas, and campsites where you can rest, upgrade the protagonist, and set checkpoints.

Some other elements are cool but feel a bit half-baked right now, subject to change once I've acquired more to work with. That includes the "ritual": a societal practice of this world in which, before fighting a hostile sapient, you can play a game involving dice and artifacts that either grants you or your opponent a benefit before the fight starts. Those bonuses/maluses might include an obfuscating fog, a time limit (which, if it ends before the fight is over, grants the wielder a free hit), or hornets that drain your health if you ever stop moving. The dice round involves rolling three or four dice then taking turns to use items to increase your own numbers or decrease your opponent's: typically, any significantly higher number rolled at the start is likely to stay the winner, but the modifiers can sometimes turn it around for you (and also for them). These debilitating artifacts can certainly help early on as most of these ruffian enemies attack you in pairs like the cowards they are, but it seems just having good combat fundamentals are ideal and since all the artifacts are consumed upon the end of the fight I've just been skipping that phase unless it's a sub-boss where I could use the assistance. It doesn't look like your nighttime alter ego can use that system at all, as if to de-emphasize it further as a gameplay element worth worrying about. The game's overwhelming oddness, as is the case with a lot of ACE Team stuff, can be both a help and a hindrance to finding your feet; there's some combat tutorials but they don't explain too much else of the mechanics, letting you get lost in this bizarre setting for a while before eventually figuring your way around. Your patience for this could go either way depending on how you approach games; you'll either be drawn in by the mystery or put off by the deliberate obtuse ugliness that surrounds you. I'll say that translating the Zeno Clash brawler experience to a Soulslike hasn't really hurt it at all, though you do have to be a lot more conscious of defensive tech like dodging and parrying if you don't want to get your ass roundly beat by half the things you encounter. There's a compellingly deep game for fans of complex fighting systems underneath all that surface-level strangeness, though, for anyone brave enough to venture past it.

The game does retain the first-person brawling but only as a special mode. You have to build up that gauge down there to activate it but it can sure win fights in a hurry.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

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