Bleak Sword DX Review

(Dark Souls Meets Atari)

At first glance upon this Lo-Fi hack and slash adventure, you might assume that it wouldn’t be able to hold your attention for long and you would be dead wrong. Bleak Sword was originally an Apple Arcade exclusive a few years back, but has now made it’s way to Nintendo SWITCH and PC with a bunch of new features including a visual overhaul

There is a definite Dark Souls inspiration to Bleak Sword with fights that require intense patience, perfect timing and parrying. Even all the way down to having one chance to retrieve your lost experience points and the rage inducing deaths. The good news is that most worlds have 12 levels and they are mostly bite sized, meaning that no matter how hard they are, you just have to overcome this one small battle to move to the next stage. Unfortunately, the pain usually starts over again but the gameplay loop of die, master the battle and then do it again is very addictive.

Bleak Sword DX starts out fairly simple with flying bats and just when you get the hang of them something new comes along and this keeps happening for the whole game. Even when you think you are doing well, the variables in this game are wild with the combinations of enemies, to the diorama layouts of the environmental effects that can play a large part in each battle from strong winds that move you, snow that makes vision harder and terrain that makes evading much more difficult. When you combine the sheer amount of enemy types, the different themed levels and the environmental effects, Bleak Sword never feels repetitive.

I never played the original on Apple Arcade but one of the major changes was the enhanced AI, which feels accurate as enemies seemed to know when I had the upper hand and backed away into self preservation mode. This led me to chase them around the map, draining my stamina and often finding myself in a bad situation.

A great feature of Bleak Sword DX is that some enemies have friendly fire but what would have been really nice is if all enemies had this feature. This would have allowed for a different play style to flourish if you were able to attempt beating the game with a passive style by luring enemies to hit each other.

Dull Edge

There is a visual cue that indicates when you are out of stamina by showing an x below your characters feet, but on some levels such as the swamp and the winter areas, this becomes impossible to see. With the fast twitch reactions required to succeed in Bleak Sword DX, you can’t take your eyes off the enemies to glance up at your stamina bar in the top left, so that indication at your feet becomes invaluable. Not being able to see it easily is the difference between winning and losing.

There is a light attack and a charge heavy attack. Considering how long it takes to charge the heavy, and that you can’t stun your enemies, you never have a golden opportunity to use it. The enemies are just too relentless. There are certain enemies that are only damaged by that but outside of the ones where it was essential, I stuck with the standard attack.

In Bleak Sword, when you rank up a full experience bar you get to upgrade one stat including health, attack power or stamina. If you die on your first attempt of a level, you will have one chance to recapture those lost experience points, similar to how you have one attempt in souls games and Hollow Knight. This system makes it very hard to level up in the second half of the game as the difficulty keep ramping up during the whole game. There are chapters and beating the final boss on the final level of that chapter should be an automatic upgrade.

Verdict

One of the best ways that I can recommend Bleak Sword DX is that the game is very hard, to the point that it can sometimes feel unfair, but even after stepping away, there is always a pull to return to the game for another attempt. Bleak Sword DX perfectly balances hardcore difficulty with addictive gameplay and gorgeous retro visuals that always feels fresh thanks to its near infinite combination of variables

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