Titan Souls (PC)

As you cautiously tread deeper into the entrance of a cave, you find yourself in the middle of a dimly lit room. The floor is laid out like a chess board, and in the middle of the room is a large cube whose only feature is a single, closed eyelid. You fire an arrow at the apparently lifeless object, and the eye suddenly opens as the cube springs to life, hovering menacingly above the checkerboard. Before you even have time to register this strange turn of events, it’s on top of you, and the battle is over before it even begins. Don’t worry, though – failure is the name of the game in Titan Souls, and the line between fun and frustration has never been so thin as it is in this recent indie title from Acid Nerve, published by Devolver Digital. Keep reading to find out just what we mean.

David and Goliath

At first glance, Titan Souls looks a lot like classic 16-bit RPGs like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Final Fantasy VI, and this graphics style definitely lends it a certain retro charm. From a top-down perspective, you control a nameless hero as he makes his way through a variety of different landscapes, from areas covered with snow and ice, to lush green forests and caverns lit by flames and lava – the kind of stuff you’d expect from any good RPG. But what separates Titan Souls from its forebears is its drastically streamlined gameplay; there are no items, no quests, and no experience points. And the world the hero makes his way through is as lifeless as they come – it’s like it’s not an RPG at all, because frankly, it isn’t. Throughout the whole game, the only enemies you encounter are the 16 Titans that await you in their themed lairs. These “boss battles” are the heart and soul of the gameplay in Titan Souls – each Titan is designed to be entirely unique, and the developers have done an amazing job of integrating each of them with their environment.

What makes these boss battles so intense is the fact that your options are so radically limited – your only weapon is a single arrow, which you can fire in all four directions, as well as diagonally. If the arrow loses speed or hits something, it falls to the floor, and you can either walk over and pick it up, or use your hero’s ability to “pull” it back into his hands. The problem is that when you’re doing this, you have to stand still, making it that much easier for the enemy to get you. This is where your hero’s second ability comes into play – he can roll to avoid an attack, which is a very useful way to evade killing blows at the last moment and put some distance between you and the bad guy.

Frustration's Part of the Game

Each Titan has a particular weak spot, and your job is to find out just what it is, and then to hit it with a perfectly aimed arrow. This sounds a lot easier in theory than it is in practice. Just touching the enemy once is enough to kill you, which sends you back to a nearby portal and forces you to restart the level from the top. The length of encounter will be completely different depending not just on the player and the Titan in question, but also on how things play out in the battle itself. This means that sometimes, a random lucky shot might just hit the Titan in his weak spot, ending the battle within seconds, whereas other encounters might have you gritting your teeth as you square off against the same Titan over, and over, and over again.

They put your accuracy skills to the test early on, in one of the first few levels, when you enter the lair of a giant heart surrounded by a viscous membrane that hops around the room, leaving a trail of green slime in its wake. If you try to walk through the slime, you quickly discover that it slows you down, a lot. When you hit the protective membrane with an arrow, it starts to break down and get smaller and smaller, though this also makes the heart hops around faster and faster. This is one of those times where you’re really going to have to think carefully about whether you should run over to retrieve your arrow or whether you should stop moving long enough to “call” it back – one careless mistake and you’re done. Once you’ve destroyed the membrane and the heart is fully exposed, all it takes is one last arrow (though the heart, of course!) to defeat the Titan and collect its soul. As you might imagine in a game called “Titan Souls”, these souls are really important, as you need them to unlock further areas in the game. But this is no RPG, so don’t expect them to grant you new abilities or attribute points.

Although each boss battle follows the same basic principle, and is always decided by that one, well-placed shot, each Titan must be approached and defeated in its own unique way. This is what makes the game so extremely challenging, thanks to the eclectic and creative design put into each and every Titan and lair. In the course of the game, you’ll have to test your skills against a gigantic stone ball that rolls at you at ludicrous speeds as it sets the ground on fire, a mechanical giant that tries to kill you with a constant barrage of lasers, and a yeti that rolls huge snowballs at you while deadly icecicles fall to the ground in rows, among other one-of-a-kind monsters.

A Hero and His Options

The combination of retro graphics and minimalistic gameplay means you can jump right in and start having fun right from the start, since there really isn’t much to learn. And the excellent soundtrack helps things along with mysterious and gloomy-sounding music that does a great job of reflecting the hero’s lonesome struggle against overwhelming odds. Once you’ve really internalized the gameplay mechanics and defeated your first few Titans, however, the game’s lack of depth really becomes apparent. First off, it’s really hard to form any kind of emotional attachment to the main character. We don’t know who he is, or why he’s undertaking this perilous quest. The various areas you travel through on your journey are beautifully designed and each one possesses a charm all its own, but then again the game tells you nothing about where it all came from, why everything’s in ruins, etc. I think it would have been cool if they had put some cryptic inscriptions or something in there to arouse the imagination – something other than empty ruins with no apparent connection to the hero.

The fast-paced nature of combat and the fact that you not only can, but will be punished severely for even the slightest mistake, means that this part of the game is sure to keep adrenaline levels up. But since the basic gameplay principle never actually changes, things can in fact start to get a bit tedious, especially when it takes a million tries to defeat one Titan, and you keep having to take the exact same route from the portal to the boss’s lair.

Last but not least, I should mention that the developers really recommend the game be played using a controller. And sure enough, I found that it was a much better choice while I was playing the game for this review. The keyboard is just not ideal for the quick reaction times you’ll need to beat most of the Titans.