It’s not often that I finish a game and stare blankly at the screen as the credits go by and have to ask myself what exactly did I just play, but after Shines Over: The Damned and now Saviorless, it seems to be coming a bit of a trend. I don’t have anything negative to say about stories that have an ending that is open to interpretation since there can be some enjoyment in having healthy debates with friends in these instances. However, I’d at least like to have a clear explanation of what happens between when I start the game and when the ending hits; unfortunately, this is something that Saviorless fails to accomplish.

The story is told through the perspective of a Narrator and his two young apprentices, with the elder putting a heavy focus on the narrator of the story as essentially being the most important part, or at least that’s how I took his ramblings. He speaks a lot, but the statements rarely form a coherent story that shift focus like he’s the first person to ever develop an Attention Deficit Disorder. One minute he’s talking about birds being sacred and then we’re on to some works and then so forth. All I know is that I spent most of my time as this young beardless Jesus lookalike by the name of Antar who is trying to stop something from corrupting the land around him while some gods lurk in the shadows. It’s entirely possible I am missing a lot of context because much like Alan Wake, there is a task of finding lost pages of the story within the game world. I honestly made a solid attempt to find all of these, but I never finished a single page in my journey, nor did I notice any pages that I left behind as I scoured the relatively linear world.

There is a mechanic in place where Antar meets a storyteller on his quest who will trade him the pages for upgrades, at the cost of resetting progress. The questions of how much progress is lost and what is gained from it still evade me.  After the absurdity of having to restart Shines Over: The Damned multiple times in my recent past, I felt it was best to just skip this mechanic since I have yet to find anything on the internet fully explaining how that works, and I really didn’t enjoy this game enough to warrant playing it over again.

The gameplay largely feels akin to Limbo, which I loved, or Inside, which I loathed. The occasional foray into combat, which breaks up the monotony of the platforming and puzzles, is spread out entirely too far apart, and aside from figuring out what exactly is needed to complete the boss battles, is also excruciatingly easy. One of my favorite aspects of Limbo was just how deadly everything was, in turn making for a satisfyingly difficult but attainable challenge. Here it was like playing on very easy mode with cheat codes on. I found it humorous that at one point one of the younger narrators even commented on how boring Antar’s story is, which summed up my feelings towards him perfectly. He is capable of taking out enemies when needed, but it asks you to do so by using the environment instead of brute strength or magical powers. I didn’t hate all of the time I spent with Antar, I just wish there was less of it, or it was mixed up just a little more as some segments of the game dragged on for far too long, such as an area where you must manipulate light beams – if we’re being honest here, that’s generally one of the worst parts of any video game I can think of. The other protagonists fair a little better, just barely, thanks to being able to dip my toe into a beat ’em up style platformer instead of one where every jump could be my last. Much like the platforming, the combat doesn’t do anything egregious, it just isn’t particularly good either. It’s mostly made up of mashing the attack button for quick two-hit combos or jumping to evade attacks, something you’d find in early NES games but with a slick coat of hand-drawn paint animating it.

The visuals are by far the biggest win this game has to offer. I loved the carefully crafted visuals that were crisp and colorful and a great juxtaposition when some darker themes or gore came out of nowhere. It was almost like watching an episode of The Happy Tree Friends or that time that Bluey committed a mass shooting at a preschool. I burst out in laughter multiple times when Antar would outright murder someone or something in the most brutal of ways, or how it felt like the developer was channeling Blasphemous at the later stages of the game. Again, this is something that I could’ve used more of and would’ve probably held my attention more than it did.

The only thing that I can really say is outright bad is how checkpoints are handled during boss battles since you are forced to sit through any animations or banter that is spewed beforehand every time you fail, and believe me, you will probably fail. Antar is a weak fellow who dies in a single hit, and figuring out each battle wasn’t especially difficult, but it was usually a few attempts before everything clicked and I figured out exactly what I needed to do to proceed. Even with about twenty or so deaths under my belt, the game only clocked in just over three hours, but I still felt like I was being robbed of those precious seconds every time I had to read through some banter that I didn’t find super interesting the first, second or third time that I read it.

I didn’t hate my time with Saviorless, but I can’t say I enjoyed myself either. I did like taking in the visuals, but good graphics can only carry a game so far when the gameplay is overly basic and the story is so convoluted. Everything else feels like it was just a means to presenting them without adding anything new or exciting to the groundwork that Limbo, Deadlight, or (it even hurts me to say) Inside did years back.

6 out of 10

Pros

• Outstanding Hand Drawn Visuals
• Its Length Respects Your Time
• Simplistic Gameplay

Cons

• The Gameplay is a Little Too Simplistic
• Respawns Don’t Respect Your Time
• Overly Confusing Narrative Presented in a Fragmented Way

Saviorless was developed by Empty Head Games and published by Dear Villagers. It is available on PC and PS5. The game was provided to us for review on PS5. If you’d like to see more of Saviorless, check out the publisher site.

 

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