#Blud (2024)

I dig the game's whole "Buffy the Vampire Slayer but as a Saturday morning cartoon" vibe but that's basically all it has going for it (ok, the animations are really good as well).

The story is serviceable, and works as a decent framework from the whole thing, but I probably won't remember anything about it in a few weeks...

The combat and enemies quickly turn into a chore you want to avoid as much as possible while you slowly jog around the map. #BLUD isn't difficult per-se but it has quite a few annoying and tedious moments that can be really hard to get past.

I liked its aesthetic and enemy descriptions, but that's about it...

I wanted to like this game, but unfortunately, I just don't. I abandoned it after the second chapter, so maybe it gets better later, but the moment-to-moment issues with the gameplay were just too annoying to deal with. Enemies shouldn't deal contact damage, the dodge roll shouldn't have a delay before you can move after finishing it, and while I understand what they were trying to do by moving you towards enemies when you initiate an attack close to them, it frequently resulted in me taking damage because the positional readjustment moved me directly into a different enemy attack.

I won't pretend that my opinion on this game is authoritative or well-informed relative to someone who actually beat it. But I can only describe my experience, which was eagerly awaiting this game's release, playing it for two and a half hours, and then realizing I didn't really want to play the rest of it. The aesthetic is killer, and I've enjoyed games with lackluster gameplay in the past because of their other qualities, but those games tend to either de-emphasize their gameplay or at least paper over the cracks well enough that you only start to truly feel the problems after you're invested in the story. #Blud doesn't do either.

Damn the last boss in this is awful, he moves about too fast and doesn't even give you an opportunity to hit him.

What makes it worse is it's multiple stages and if you die you have to redo the whole fight & his health returns to set amount at each stage so if you did more damage in one stage it won't matter.

Edit: Beat him once I figured out when the game actually let's you hit him.