Titan Souls (2015)

Played it for a few bosses.

I kind of like the idea of the simple combat but the one-hit-kill is an issue with learning. The game doesn't feature that feeling of incrementally getting better, learning the patterns, getting closer to victory. It's just, bash your head against the wall with no change until you either figure out the gimmick or get lucky and win.

This title is a minimalist action-adventure game developed by Acid Nerve and published by Devolver Digital. You explore a mysterious, open world to face 19 colossal titans, each requiring precision, strategy, and timing to defeat. The game’s combat is built around a single arrow mechanic, making every shot critical and each encounter tense and rewarding. Every boss fight feels like a unique puzzle, emphasizing pattern recognition, careful observation, and reflexes.

The game’s 2D pixel art style and evocative soundtrack create a hauntingly atmospheric world, full of solitude and mystery. The environments are sparse but carefully designed, encouraging exploration while keeping the focus on the titans themselves. The minimalist approach extends to storytelling, which is deliberately understated, leaving much for you to interpret and imagine. And this is strong point if you like this kind of thing, as much as it is a downside if you don't like this kind of alternative approach to story-telling.

Despite its strengths, this title can feel repetitive over time due to its limited set of actions, shooting and dodging. The difficulty is deliberately high, with both the player and enemies able to be defeated in a single hit, which can lead to frustration for some. The lack of checkpoints adds tension but can also make progress feel punishing. I'd say this is a very niche and tailored game for people who enjoy difficult games, with limited protagonists, so no power-phantasy or making your character strong enough in order to make certain sections a breeze.

Instead, it really makes you feel as small as the character on-screen seems to be, especially when it comes to the massive boss encounters, this is where this game really achieves what it is trying to convey. Overall, Titan Souls offers a memorable and challenging experience for players who enjoy tactical, skill-based combat and minimalist game design. Its unique mechanics, atmospheric world, and tense boss battles make it stand out, though its steep difficulty and sparse narrative may not appeal to everyone.

Taking a break from console madness to focus on my PC/mostly indie backlog and evergrowing wishlist (it's pretty old hardware). Started by beating this game! Pretty fun run. Great concept and cool vibes with the setting; a few of the bosses are mechanically very similar, which makes them a bit easier once you realize it. A handful of standouts personality/design-wise, and a couple that make great use of the mechanics. But all are pretty varied and the fast pacing helps. Lots of extra difficulty modes but those aren't for me right now. On to the next :)

(My favourite thing in this game is how understated killing a boss is - no fireworks or loud sound effects following a precise and desperate shot, only silence and gray colors. It's a good vibe.)

I had to disable High DPI scaling override to play this. This was especially frustrating because Alt+F4 doesn't work so i had to use the mouse to close the game the first few times i tried to fix the resolution problems.

Titan Souls is a game in which you fight against bosses. You shoot an arrow and make this arrow come back to you like that guy from Guardians of the Galaxy. Except you have to stand still to retrieve it which basically kills any dynamism this game might've had. Hard pass.

I did it! I beat all 19 bosses! I'm so proud of myself now. Can't say I enjoyed all of it though, at the end I was really ready for it to be over. But it felt fucking good to land that killing blow on the last boss! Very frustrating, requires patience and a very high tolerance for repeated dying. (My death count was over 800, half of which came from the last three bosses. I'm not great at games though, so a more experienced gamer will probably have a lower number.) Will not replay, but I wear completing this as a badge of honour.

Here are some pros and cons about the game itself:

+visual style was cool

+music was really awesome

+challenging and rewarding

+lots of player freedom, absolutely no handholding

-sometimes it was really hard to see where I was, or where the enemy's attacks were going to land. This game is hard enough without these kinds of issues.

If you want a challenge and don't mind dying a lot, I totally recommend this!

I feel slightly bad writing this review considering I didn't finish the game, only got about a third of the way through before giving up. This type of game isn't my style but I thought I'd give it a go anyway. In the game you kill bosses, there is no story that I could see though I assume one develops later on. The movement controls are fluid and responsive though the aiming of the bow would've benefited from mouse control. The game has a very clean pixel art-style and a very good soundtrack.

Gameplay

The game consists of boss battles only, which is interesting and actually quite cool. The early boss battles were very enjoyable and I liked trying to figure out their weak spots. Unfortunately the later bosses became more confusing, mostly because I didn't know where their weak spot was (the only way to damage the boss). This resulted in me dying over and over again missing the entire point of the boss and then I'd just look up what I'm supposed to be shooting at online, I thought this problem might've been limited to only a couple of the later bosses but it seems most are like this. I didn't really want to look up what I was even supposed to do for every boss.

I found the movement controls to be fluid and responsive, however to sprint you need to roll first because they're assigned to the same button. I don't actually see any reason why this is but it's a small complaint. The main thing I dislike about the controls is that you cannot use the mouse to aim, as someone that doesn't use a controller all that much this just made the controls frustrating and inaccurate. Most of the difficulty felt like me just trying to aim the thumbstick.

Presentation

The game features a very clean pixel art-style. Unfortunately it seemed to really lack detail, mostly in the environments. I don't particularly like this art-style to begin with and Titan Souls did nothing to convince me otherwise. The music is really nice and does not get repetitive which is important for this style of game.

This is a fairly simple game it almost feels like some contemporary soulsified version of Adventure for 2600 (where you just slay dragons?) but I can easily see some people getting nuts over it, and this game will hit their buttons right because it's unique and there are settings for increasing difficulty on additional playthroughs if you are into some serious business about your difficulty and dying.

The game really has some rather nice boss battles, and its a good experience especially/at least in the beginning, where it's mostly a matter of trial and error a bit of patience and figuring out your enemies weakness. This gives it a classic Zelda-ish type of feel. Early game one indeed feels triumphant on each boss slaying. And really this is what boss slaying ought to feel like as they feel quite satisfying.

The overworld itself is just the right size and has enough design features to avoid getting lost or help you know where to look next. Also, it looks and feels pretty cool: Ruins, vines, forgotten runic cave carvings/ancient languages, orchestral neo-folky type medieval whatnot music as you comb your way to find the next ancient boss to slay. Everything feels like a classic Greek epic in this game. You only have one arrow which you retrieve after each shot, and this gives your slayings a strange 'kill it with the last shot' type of grand epic feel, which seems to maybe why they went this route rather than say a spear (which would make more sense) The game has a perfect aesthetic that especially shines with it's minimalist look and no UI elements at all.

The boss only premise is fine. The bosses themselves work well enough, some of the bosses i didnt much care for. Others were just impossiblly difficult. Not just hard but impossible! I dont like it when games through things that are unreasonably hard. This had a few of that imo.

The Achilles heel of this game is in the controls. (While you can try) it's fair to say that this game cannot be played on a keyboard, with four movement keys and no mouse input/aim, that means you have 8 cardinal directions with which to aim/move via keyboard. That is a joke in this game. Ths game clearly warns you to play it on an analog joypad starting up. I understand and accept it but this is something i just dont like. WASD move and mouse input would not make a game like this too easy imo, it's plenty hard. One boss took me 10 minutes to land a shot with godmode, lol.

With joypad it's plenty tough to aim with precision, and this gets more apparent mid and end game. A lot of your shots are going to be at the most range you can get between you and your target. I found it very frustrating to know what i was doing, get my timing right but not be able to input a shot correctly because i can't visually see where the thing is aiming, or have the ability to steady my aim. Just like in an FPS when you send a .338 straight through a camper's brainbox Landing a shot you simply know would be the killing blow would feel very epic indeed. And the game is completely missing that element. Ugh, it's crucial to what's being done here!!

The good thing is, the mapping work great as they are out of the box. All the buttons are mapped with alternate buttons too, so I can use the dodge/roll and fire with multiple bindings on every button on my PS2 analog. (This is just the way I like it.) So at least the joypad settings (imo) come as best as they could be. Unfortunately if you dont like it, or have some issue with your hardware, you dont seem to be able to remap it, and you can't switch to another input method.

In some ways this game is very pure, and (the premise) is worth exploring futher. By just focusing on aesthetic and good boss fights it is a really interesting concept and it plays nicely, but I find the controls to be a bottleneck in the experience, and I would think some improvement could have been done there. Mouse aim/input and a keyboard, as all as remappings would feel a bit like hotline miami type playstyle, provide satisfaction of landing shots, and likely still be plenty difficult. IF you love joypad games, or get your rocks off on challenge, none of this will be a problem for you perhaps, but if you're a snipey-snipe PC Mousejockey you are going to feel impaired.

Titan Souls is an incredibly simple game: a series of boss fights separated by a vacant overworld. The protagonist is only armed with a bow and a single arrow that must be retrieved after a missed shot. All battles are a matter of one-hit kills, for both the player character and the enemy.

Since boss fights are really all there is to the game, there's a decent number of them (19 in total) and most of them involve figuring out a specific trick to exposing the enemy's weakness and delivering the kill-shot. The game is unforgiving, probably the hardest game I've played this year, but when I managed to pull of the perfect shot, killing the titan and surviving the battle by the skin of my teeth there was definitely a smile on my face. However, there were some battles where I somehow killed the boss by accident; I'd fire off my arrow in the general direction of the boss and apparently hit the enemy's weak point before I had even determined where that vulnerable spot was. In other cases, I would die dozens upon dozens of time trying to land a shot in the narrowest of openings, often being pushed to the very limit of my patience. While I never quite reached the point of dropping the game altogether, on the second-to-last boss I did finally cave in and consult a guide rather than continue to bang my head against the wall.

Outside of these battles, there really isn't much to Titan Souls. The overworld that joins the various battle areas together is a decent-looking pixelated environment, but is completely devoid of any interesting features; there are no towns, NPCs, minor enemies, or puzzles, just fairly generic forests, ruins, caves, and tundras. However, the overworld does provide the player an opportunity to enjoy this game's absolutely beautiful music. The various battle themes are fittingly dramatic, and the music in the overworld is somber yet mysterious. What's all this somberness and mystery about, though? I have no idea since the game has absolutely no plot. For some reason the hero must find and kill all the titans, and that's all there is to it.

I found Titan Souls to be extremely challenging, but felt satisfied upon completing it. The game's brevity (about 4 hours) is definitely a positive as it keeps its single gameplay mechanic and extreme difficulty from getting old. For Titan Souls I really must reiterate: This game is incredibly hard. To put it in perspective, I died 278 times before reaching the end of the game. If you're someone who can find enjoyment in finally persevering after countless failures, Titan Souls will be a gratifying play-through. However, to anyone who's ever found themselves at the brink of throwing a controller in frustration, spare yourself the agony and skip this one.

7.5/10

What It Is

Shadow of the Colossus meets Dark Souls. Difficulty of souls and the boss battles of Colossus. You run around, find Titans, and then you kill them. You only have one arrow, that you can magically recall back to you (at the expense of having to stand still for a few seconds... same with shooting it). You can run and dodge as well.

The Good

- Visual and audio design. The pixel graphics are detailed and the soundtrack is gorgeous.

- It takes strategy and good timing to kill these bosses.

The Bad

- Unfortunately, due to the limitations of both the battles and your attacks, it does get a little repetitive after a while.

- It lacks the spirit and emotion of Shadow of the Colossus. The boss battles feel somewhat triumphant but not as much as they could.