#ELDEST SOULS ALL ENDINGS UPGRADE#
Dispatching gods earns upgrade points that can be placed in one of three skill trees, which favour speed, aggression or counterattacks, and sometimes crystals which bestow unique abilities – such as a hookshot type attack – or can be linked to specific moves, like your dash or bloodburst, to augment those. The preview build also hints at much greater depth to these systems later in the game, providing the tools to shift between contrasting play styles.
#ELDEST SOULS ALL ENDINGS FULL#
With no means of instant healing, there’s something extra rewarding about building back from an early mistake to a full health bar with some patient offensive work. The life steal mechanic is the obvious standout here, against foes that can take you out with a few strikes. A charged attack thrusts you across the screen towards your foe, and fills a ‘bloodthirst’ bar if it connects, allowing you to move quicker and hit harder for a short time, ‘life steal’ lost health with further strikes, or trigger a damaging ‘bloodburst’ that exhausts the bar in one. The main character’s laboured walking speed is offset by a speedy dodge roll, which is tied to a slowly recharging stamina bar, unless that is you successfully roll through an enemy attack, which partially refills it instantly. Dark Souls veterans will relish the tension and the little risk-reward gambits in these encounters. The boss battles will make or break the game, in other words, and judging from the first three that appear in the preview, it’s got the balance right. But mostly Eldest Souls wants to ferry you from one god to the next, with a little sightseeing en route. Each of these characters – speaking in the vague riddles you’d expect from a Souls game – has their own optional questline, which can lead to rewards or different endings depending on how you interact with them, generally by choosing to hand over key items. Between epic confrontations, you’ll embark on brief stints of exploration around the ruins, absorb scraps of lore, collect the odd item and chat to a sprinkling of NPCs. Yet as in Titan Souls this is a compact, empty land where the only things to kill are the gods themselves. Indeed, while Death’s Door takes a much less serious path, Eldest Souls’ decaying citadel of imprisoned gods and buried rituals at times feels like a project to redraw Dark Souls in sumptuous pixel-art. And it’s a mantle that Fallen Flag seem to have assumed intentionally, rekindling that word ‘Souls’ in their debut title almost as a statement and a self-challenge to meet standards set not only by Titan Souls but the majesty of Dark Souls itself. In a way, then, it feels like we’re getting to see a fresh revival of that previous legacy and a new direction all at once. Fallen Flag Studio’s Eldest Souls feels like an expanded spiritual successor to 2015’s boss rush title Titan Souls, yet the developer of Titan Souls, Acid Nerve, is actually responsible for Death’s Door. There’s an added twist to this quirk of fate, too.
#ELDEST SOULS ALL ENDINGS PRO#
READ MORE: Bob Burnquist on being Tony Hawk Pro Skater’s original ‘Player Two’: “It was crazy then, and it’s still crazy now”.By an accident of scheduling, they create a kind of yin-yang, light-dark complement to one another, which has only helped me like them even more. I’ve been alternating between preview builds of both for the last week, appreciating the base similarity of their measured dodge, slash rhythms – thankfully, they both share the same core controls – and also how they diverge from that foundation in highly different ways. The second half of July sees the release of Death’s Door and Eldest Souls, a couple of indies that have been showing promise since they were first unveiled. You wait ages for a new top-down hack and slash game then two come along at once.
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