Review: Eldest Souls

Developer – Fallen Flag Studio

Publisher – United Label, CI Games

Platform – Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows

The comes a time when playing a difficult game where I ask myself a few questions. Was the difficulty worth it? At the end of a difficulty fight do I feel like I learned something? Is there enough behind those epic fights to keep me invested in the world itself? Or does the game just pile on difficulty through artificial means? Do I feel more happy that I’m done with the game because I feel like I accomplished something, or because I’m just glad to be done with it? Well, while the fights are so frustrating, the combat is fun and fluid. It made me want to beat the game even more and just “get good.” This game isn’t for everyone!

Eldest Souls is a game that is described as “Fast-paced and brutally challenging, Eldest Souls is a unique Boss-Rush soulslike experience. In a final act of vengeance, the Old Gods have unleashed a great Desolation upon the world. Mankind’s only hope lies with a lone warrior… and his greatsword of pure Obsydian.” It definitely is fast paced during the boss fights and brutally challenging. The Boss-Rush portion is accurate, there are 9 bosses in the game, each with their own unique styles and attacks. These bosses are all that there are in terms of enemies, much like Shadow of the Colossus without the grand scale of the world. Then we get to “Soulslike experience…”

The factors that are outlined for a Soulslike game I found at Codex Gamicus and I think at least this is the best list of factors that make a game a “Soulslike.” I’ll let you decide if you consider this one, but I do not. So don’t go in expecting this or you will most likely be disappointed. I’ll break it down below…

• Higher than average difficulty – Check, no quest Eldest Souls has this down.
• Experience and leveling – Check, every time you beat a boss you get a skill point to put into the tree
• Stamina Bar – Check, you can dodge three times and the bars refill over time to refresh your dodge.
• Loot – Sorta, there are no additional weapons or armor to equip, but you do find items that are for mini-quests.
• Well designed maps with shortcuts – No, the map itself is fairly straight forward. You can go to pretty much any boss at any time.
• Mysterious story, with lore found within the world itself – The pieces of story besides the intro cinematic are told through letters and characters in the world.
• Penalties for death – No, there are no penalties outside of starting a fight over again immediately.
• Death run – No, when you die you respawn at the boss until you decide not to.
• Challenging bosses – Check, this is definitely accurate.
• Combat focused on reading enemy patterns and adapting to difficult situations – Kinda, I’ll talk about this below.
• Character creation – No – At least not outside of choosing your skill tree abilities.
• Item customization – Kinda? You can equip gems to your skill tree that effect your abilities with your attacks. No weapon choice.
• Backstab/sneak attack – No, the combat relies on you just swinging your sword or charging your attacks. No bonus damage from attacking from behind.
• Multiplayer integration – No, no way to PVP, or PVE co-op.

Let’s focus on 99.9% of the game, the boss fights. These fights are so chaotic, projectiles are flying everywhere while at the same time the boss is swinging at you. While some of the bosses just seem absurb, there are some really nice examples of boss fights. It’s satisfying learning the attack patterns and learning the puzzle of the fight. On the more chaotic fights, it felt like there needs to be opportunities to learn the fight and highlighting tells of an attack. When you crowd the fight with so many attacks, you are so focused on avoiding those that you lose the overall focus of the fight… It becomes a game of agression not tactics. Doing as much damage as you can to heal yourself through the chaos is the best tactic that I found.

As the game goes on you win more easily, which was a weird juxtupous. It wasn’t because I was learning patterns or something new in the game, but because I got better skills that increased my damage and healing abilities. Eventually, the fights got to the point where I was learning what damage I could take and skills to ignore to focus on powering up my abilities so I could heal past anything.

You will easily die over 50 plus times against a boss. Sometimes it feels like the boss just didn’t damage you enough to kill you with the slew of attacks and you healed yourself because of the spacing of attacks that attempt. There are no iframes (invincibility frames) to take advantage of, so you can easily just get hit 3-4 times during a single attack and die instantly. It a crushing but satisfying experience to those that seek this kind of gameplay.

Outside of the boss fights, you travel through the world which is honestly very lacking in terms of content. I love the art-style, so its nice to look around for the lore in the world by finding notes or an item that someone is looking for. The problem is, these things don’t really provide anything worth while. The lore is just not memorable, only one character you talk to multiple times is a Bard and he is the most interesting thing about the game for me in terms of lore and exploration.

Many of the characters you meet offer a line of dialogue and once you find their item they offer another line of dialogue and that is about it. I would have much rather preferred them to give upgradable gems or skill points in the world to give you a motivation and reward to exploring the world. At that point, they could have just made the Citadel a series of rooms where you just fight the boss and you would have mostly the same experience.

It’s not all negative though, the combat is extremely fun and fast paced. You can charge attacks and use abilities that you unlock, and those attacks provide a nice omph to make it worth fighting the bosses. The skill points that you receive by killing bosses allows you to customize your character’s abilities by providing more healing or damage bonuses or protective buffs. You can change these skills at any time and there are TONS of viable combos. You will definitely feel the urge to continue on with the game because you don’t want to have the feeling that “I can’t do it!” I also haven’t cursed a game while playing it like I did this one in a long time.

By the end of the 6 hours of playtime, I felt a few things could have made the game so much better. If they gave the world more meaning, added some iframes to taking damage, and maybe added some better tells on boss attacks the game would feel much more balanced. The game might only be 4-5 hours then, but it would probably feel like a better overall experience. One note to add is that Eldest Souls does provide new game modes after completion such as New Game+ and Arena for those looking for additional challenges. I definitely think Eldest Souls has an audience and I can see why many people would love this type of game. If you are looking for a boss rush game with incredible difficulty and skill trees that each feel unique to test your combat prowess, definitely pick this up as you won’t be disappointed.