Steam Curator

A soulslike is a hilarious genre to pick for your post modern self-aware narrated adventure game about player agency. The Last Hero of Nostalgaia uses iconic video game symbols like blue shells and buster swords as carrots on sticks to move you through a world that’s fundamentally soulsian with a sprinkle of Stanley Parable.

That blend isn’t always perfect: a narrator who doesn’t even try to keep up with your exploring prevents the satire from being as biting as it could be, and an inelegant “souls at home” combat system gets a little tired by the end…but Nostalgaia has wheat for its chaff. It manages to squeeze beauty out of its intentionally low-fidelity aesthetic in surprising ways, and it has the courage to look at its inspirations and successfully identify some cool new ways to play with them.

It’s never quite the timeless classic the games it’s sourcing from are, but it creates fun in its own way.

SoulsLOVE might be a more appropriate term for this one than soulslike. From Dark Souls It doesn’t just borrow some key mechanics and a tough but fair difficulty, but wholesale lifts animations, a selfish selfless binary final choice, and even literal locations. There’s near 1:1 recreations of both Firelink Shrine and the entrance to the Demon Ruins here.

There’s an earnest admiration for the games that cane before here in a way that’s more transparent than you’d usually expect; I’m the first to roll my eyes whenever “it’s dangerous to go alone, take this!” Appears as a ‘gamer cameo’’’…in a media landscape that’s increasingly cross-promotional, more and more games are coming out of the least glamorous third of a media centipede.

I had my hesitations about a game within which referential humor and nostalgic pandering were the driving force, and yet “the last hero of Nostalgaia”, sold me on the idea because it did so in a way that’s mechanically significant.

What unifies all of the games disparate Easter eggs and reference based equipment is the gamification of Dark Souls lore text. Every item and weapon you pick up is both an homage to some classic gaming hero but also a riddle to be solved. Open up your inventory and read the associated description to find a clue that prods you towards some landmark out in the world, the association to which will grant that item a visual upgrade, some bonus stats, and even progression towards a character wide unlock system that benefits you beyond that individual item being equipped.

It’s not the only mechanism that handles your power ups but it is the most interesting, and for me it was damn effective. It serves a few different purposes, not the least of which is an extra bit of diligence I had while exploring: making mental lists of significant places that seemed to be the lock for a key I didn’t have yet.

But it was also a fun way to play with the intertextuality of gaming. If you pick up a crowbar and recognize it not just as a tool but this emblem of gamings past, you’ll have a leg up in playing the association game it asks of you.

It’s a method of handling Easter eggs that allow those who are plugged in to be rewarded with more than just a smirk, but also an exploration meta-game.

The Last Hero of Nostalgaia is fun for as long as that meta game entertains you, because outside of that it doesn’t give much reason to not play one of its muses instead.

Combat is never anything more than exactly what it looks like: it’s a servicable and blatant homage to Soulsss…, and any enjoyment you extract from it can be owed to the formula itself rather than anything meaningful Nostalgaia does with it.

A self aware narrator who taunts you and postulates about whether you’re going to be a jerk or a not jerk when you reach the climax didn’t add to the game as much as I thought it would, partly because of how static he was.

For as self aware as his writing is and as much as he seems to chirp endlessly about player agency, he seems to lack awareness to respond to you exerting it. Wander off the beaten path and you’ll typically just be met with silence, get stuck on a boss and the narrator will lose his tongue until you eventually beat itt…rather than using the opportunity to jeer you.

For better or worse he’s also a compass. Don’t know if you’re going the right way? Keep trying random paths until the commentary returns, then you’ll know.

It’s never a truly gripping satire for this reason, because for as much as it seems to verbally encourage you to break the chains of game linearity, sometimes literally, it seldom felt like it was responsive to that happening.

It’s not without its moments though: the premise of bringing Nostalgaia back to its nostalgic peak involves some cool visual flourishes, like the world shifting from pixels to 3D and sometimes the gradient in betweenn. Strong art direction and lighting even manage to give you the butterflies of coming up on a new vista, despite an art style that doesn’t exactly lend itself to powerful imagery.

It also manages to nail the interconnectedness of its world, albeit with some needed budget shortcuts to make that happen. A long series of tunnels and elevators run parallel to and underneath most of the levels, acting as a ‘backstage’ to the main stage that is the game and support rapid transit and shortcutting. The overusage of the same elevators as opposed to more organically themed shortcuts can make it easy to forget which one leads where, but there are otherwise plenty of distinguished visual landmarks that make navigation without a map possible.

But really Nostalgaias biggest hurdle to overcome is something it may have unintentionally borrowed from Dark Souls 1: a dip in quality at the halfway point.

The Last Hero of Nostalgaia doesn’t backload blatantly unfinished levels, but it does run out of steam: the halfway mark was right around the time the basic souls-template combat got boring, which is also right around the time levels started throwing in copious backtracking and cheesy traps that are oblivious to how stiffly the game controls, which is ALSO right around the time the game had like 2 fake out endings and kept dragging itself on.

I was surprised to see that my end hour count after rolling credits was only 15, it felt like way more and not necessarily in a good way.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t recommend The Last Hero of Nostalgaia: I actually found it quite compelling, just maybe not as compelling as it’s multiple climaxes demanded. Among games that involve circle strafing and fishing for cheesy backstabs, you’ll find titles with both grander scope, and tighter execution…even if you deviate from From Softwares catalogue.

But you’ll find few that commit to a novel gameplay idea quite as hard as Nostalgaia does: one that rewards your curiosity and encourages you to look at your environment in new ways. It’s at times inelegant, but it is worthwhile for its own reasons, and it gets all the easier to recommend if you’re willing to engage in one of the most profound acts of player agency possible: putting the controller down when you get bored.