Death of a Wish is a gloomy combat masterclass

At Eurogamer Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Review, Chris Tapsell had a lot of fun picking out the ways in which various action games feature genre-standard mechanics, such as parrying. “In God of War, everything around you slows, warps, and your shield returns the blow with an almighty springy snap,” he wrote. “In Sekiro, a parry is a little chip on the enemy’s position gauge – Sekiro’s true health bar – one of dozens of quick, perfectly timed strikes you might have to land just right. ”

Death of a wish Developer: Melessthanthree Publisher: Syndicate Atomic LLC. Availability: TBA for To smoke And Itch.io

I love video game reviews that dwell on naughty little details like these. The most popular games rely heavily on a fairly small collection of commercially proven concepts and themes, making it easy to navigate the delicate touches that set individual works apart. Sometimes these little tweaks and flourishes are more functional and contained – a touch of slowing down your parry, to make the combat system slightly easier to master than its closest competitors. But in the right hands, they can give you the soul of the game.

Death of a wish by Colin Horgan, aka Melessthanthree, feels like such a game, a hack and slash that retunes the core mechanics of combos, dodges, and parries to advance a story about toppling a steamy metaphysical world. This is the sequel to Horgan’s LUCAH: Born of a Dream, which I got embarrassingly overworked about back in 2019.

Based on an hour-long game, Death of a Wish continues Horgan’s explorations of religious or filial guilt and the journey to queer self-acceptance. It tells the story of a child tearing apart the cult that raised and subjugated him, and is set in an angry underworld of mortified bodies and quasi-Christian symbols.

Appropriately, the fight feels like a whipping, with arcs of energy rolling around the participants and giving the game a more decided visual pace than you’d get from simply swinging a sword. Impacts register as fizzy cracks and slaps, not thumps and booms – you can feel the main damage provider here is torque, rather than raw muscle power. There is a beautiful contrast between the almost dismissive and overwhelmed depiction of the characters themselves and the scale and flamboyance of their movements.

The fight is also a cautious act of violence against the environmental art, which is composed of stark but choppy outlines and the suggestion of solid objects – rocks, trees and people flickering like candle flames in a breeze. . These sweeping strokes seem to cut through the shifting substrate of the game, as if the landscape itself is a half-embodied ghost you’re trying to exorcise – or perhaps shape?

Open the menus and you’ll find a familiar but labyrinthine suite of upgrade options and positions beneath it all. There are drone-like creatures you can equip for ranged attacks that slice the screen in a variety of ways: the default laser cuts through mobs unceremoniously with minimal windup, breaking the tempo a bit in a way that I find it intriguing. There’s also a corruption bar that links skills to self-preservation in a less obvious way. The more skillfully you fight, the less your character, Christian, will succumb to the evil influence of the setting. Let the bar fill to the end and it’s game over.

Death of a Wish is shaping up to be a wonderful reminder that atypical “arthouse” games can tick the same boxes as Capcom’s finest creations, while pursuing their own sensibilities and themes. I often feel intense sympathy for any indie developer working specifically in hack and slash – the giants of the genre, Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, seem unattainable in terms of spectacle and finesse. But Horgan’s work is proof that you don’t need a full motion-capture operation and an army of animators to stage battles that snap and sizzle.