And while it too won’t be winning any prizes for originality, the revelatory discovery of a short-cut and subsequent unlocking of a gate or helpful lift is never too far away either.
Eldest souls physical upgrade#
Smaller fountains for example, though lack the ability to upgrade one’s self, still serve as a means to recoup one’s maximum amount of healing items. A couple of annoyingly-distant placements aside, the game is generally charitable when it comes to providing welcome respite between the ongoing struggle. Killing foes nets you with currency that you can spend on upgrading stats at one of many large fountains dotted about the map.
It’s a small inclusion, but a welcome one that encourages players to keep actively engaged in combat rather than playing things too passively. Fill up all icons and you enter a temporary period where your stats gain a slight increase. There’s slight nuance to this formula, coming in the form of a frenzy-style trigger initiated after striking enemies a select number of times as indicated by a select number of icons at the bottom of the screen. You have your standard attack, dodge-roll and optional magic attacks - all of which governed by the recognizable staple of three bars at the top-left of your screen indicating health, stamina and mana. And that eventuality is at first down to the rather standard form of real-time combat in two planes. A game (amateurish mistakes and head-beating boss battles included) you can complete in around seven to eight hours and feel confident a second look isn’t warranted. But if nothing else, Juxtia undoubtedly nails both the basics as well as its own sense of scale and self-importance in crafting a game that is atypically Souls-like, perhaps to a fault. Even if you’re the type - coming off the back of a game like Blasphemous for example - to happily indulge in this well of self-imposed heartache. On paper, that prospect may already sound off-putting. Enough to denote Actual Nerds’ interpretation of real-time combat an easy look-in. To get straight to the point, it’s hard to argue the case The Tarnishing of Juxtia is doing anything new, original or even wholly exciting here, or at least providing anything of substance that breaks enough away from the expected norm. Then there’s the actual gameplay and meat of its core loop with a myriad of weapons, armor, items to equip - interspersed by frequent trips to this game’s rendition of that coveted healing/regrouping spot in the form of water fountains. A semi-vague narrative calling back to some prior, harrowing apocalypse of sorts a world infested with all manner of physical, magical and at times technological macabre. The latest action-platformer by developer Actual Nerds, at worst feeling more a checking-off of all those same familiar traits you’re no doubt aware of, if not already getting tired of seeing repeated. In many ways this is a perfectly-amalgamated summary of The Tarnishing of Juxtia and one you needn’t require any more elaboration on, for better or worse. And with it, the perilous journey to overcome the eventual challenges pitted in one’s journey. Hollow Knight, Salt & Sanctuary, Blasphemous - games of distinctly different artistic flair, scale and gameplay complexity, but one universal trait binding them all, is of course that dark, fantastical mythos of its setting. Indeed, call it an inevitability or perhaps instead some other form of deep-seated nostalgia for the 80’s and 90’s brand of challenge, but even the broad and continuously-populated genre that is the action-platformer has itself found a fair few efforts to inject the dread and the depravity of former into that of two dimensions. And not just limited to that of the same real-time action RPG template the Souls moniker is largely associated with. Having tapped into what seemed like an unparalleled zeitgeist at the turn of the previous decade, it’s no surprise to find the undisputed legacy developer FromSoftware have left on video games would be one many an imitator and inspired contemporary alike would hope to replicate.