Indie Game of the Week 482: Doomblade

I've got a giant stack of exploraction games here and probably not enough time left on this earth to play them all (I'm not dying or anything; there's just a ton of them) so let's get on with reviewing another one. All I knew about Muro's Doomblade going in is that it had a grimdark setting befitting its name and, well, you know me: my soul is as black as a mug of coffee at midnight. Hella goth and shit. However, the first real hint I had that something was awry was that the title screen suggested "best played with a keyboard and mouse" and I thought, man, that ain't sensible. Not for a 2D platformer with precision jumping at least. Turns out there's a very good reason why you'd want to go into this old-school M&K style and that's due to the way Doomblade's combat functions.

So many targets, so much blood to satiate my blighted blade. Now this is what I call a point and click game.

Upon lifting the Doomblade aloft after prying it free from its nefarious niche you learn why mouse controls are important: the sword will quickly kill anything your cursor points and clicks at. You can still get hurt on the way there if there's projectiles or other enemies and hazards along the path, but your attacks are lightning fast and can be repeated as quickly as you can click (assuming the enemy doesn't have an invulnerability period, and a few do) and it's the easiest thing to chain multiple enemies together and quickly mash everything in the vicinity to viscera. This also factors into the platforming, as you might expect, with plenty of strategically placed plant enemies growing out the walls and ceilings that you can effectively grapple towards with this attack system. The genre-typical traversal upgrades help out here too, with additions that include passing through walls and breaking everything between you and your target, as well as those more focused towards combat (though still often having some secondary role of acquiring items previously out of reach).

To balance how fast you can obliterate a screen of enemies, the game has something akin to Hollow Knight's very strict number of hits you can take and exacerbates this further by making health recovery opportunities relatively sparse (some enemies drop hearts but not commonly, and you receive none at all from destroying objects like vases and crates in the environment). This makes the game somewhat punishing when it comes to mistakes, and it occasionally feels like the checkpoints are placed too few and far apart. We're not messing around with corpse run mechanics here either: upon death all progress is wiped back to the last save, including map data. This teaches you very early on not to go absolutely hogwild with the Doomblade slashing and instead adopt a more judicious approach of striking when the moment is right and otherwise using your speed advantage to anticipate enemy attacks and evade their projectiles. You'll find health upgrades to make that finite stack of hearts last a little longer as well as a few other collectibles that contribute to your status (or, more often, your wallet; though that in turn is so you can afford more upgrades available in stores).

The sheer audacity of making the first upgrade you find the map. Admirable, in a way.

I have a real fondness for the music in this game but I'd struggle to pin down exactly what the genre is. Sort of a mix of gothy sci-fi Doom industrial with the soothing, atmospheric bridges you might find in the Donkey Kong Country games; it's not quite the eldritch orchestral soundtrack I was expecting from the aesthetic but there's some variety to it (I particularly like the mechanical area's theme, almost sounds like a Baranowsky jam) and it's been very palatable to listen to as I run around backtracking. Visually we're also taking after Hollow Knight a skosh, which is to be expected from the new market leader for the exploraction genre, with cutely condensed characters with otherwise grim backstories being put up against many-eyed and -tentacled monstrosities from beyond the edge of reason. The protagonist almost feels like a Hornet or a palette-inversed Ori: she's lithe and spindly and animates well when moving around, wielding a sword easily twice as tall as she is, while the other playable character (the spirit possessing the sword) doubles as the player's mouse cursor. The protag is silent but the sword certainly isn't, frequently piping in with exposition and keeping the parameters of your revenge mission clear (or, rather, his mission that he's foisted upon you). The backgrounds are almost detailed enough to be a detriment, given how fast the game moves and how much it requires you to concentrate on everything around you, but it doesn't quite cross the line into obfuscating. Overall the presentation's kinda slick if just a little bit familiar given recent exploraction trends and there's something about the setting's bleak social Darwinism, its dark sense of humor, and the mix of alien ecosystems and choking industrial grime that recalls Lorne Lanning's Oddworld series.

Doomblade presents an electrifying, rapid combat system and then reins it in with its harsh difficulty, adjusting to find the proper balance for its many challenges between full-screen boss fights, wave-based arenas, and platforming gauntlets, and ties it together with a forbidding setting that has plenty of secret passageways and other esoteric curiosities to find. The cursor-driven format is the most distinct quality it has, but since it factors into both combat and traversal it's a significant switch up from most games in this genre. I've not yet decided if this is an all-timer but I've definitely been enjoying my time with it so far, at least when it hasn't been kicking my butt. And even then, sometimes. Plus, you gotta love any game with a title that sounds like it was invented for The Simpsons. Buy me Doomblade or go to hell, indeed.

These turrets whizz around so much on these tracks it can be hard to predict where they'll fire from. Of course, you've also plenty of targets to grapple onto to avoid anything they shoot at you.

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

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