Severance: Blade of Darkness is, on reflection, one of the more distinctive games released at a time when the semi-recent advent of 3D dungeon-crawling had opened many doors for inventive developers. While there were a number of RPGs figuring out how to explore a 3D space, in particular early panoramic games like The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Ultima Underworld from which the era of 3D RPGs originated, there was also another major trend-setting game series that was about descending into crypts, finding treasure, defeating hostile creatures, and evading traps and pitfalls: Eidos's Tomb Raider. I feel like the success of Tomb Raider, irrespective of its pneumatic heroine's charms, was due to how its environments had a logical construction to them - logical in the sense of a video game world, if not actual real-life ruins - and the way the design of those levels cleverly guided players through its encounters, key puzzles, and platforming sequences. Though it fails the qualifications needed to be an RPG - Ms. Croft never gains levels, though she does find better guns - it handles that one exploration aspect of a good dungeon crawler better than most actual RPGs of its period, and I suspect a lot of RPGs that immediately followed (say, the '97-'01 year range that Blade of Darkness falls into) owes it a sizable debt also.

Blade of Darkness tries its darndest with the platforming, but it isn't the draw. The pitfalls are a little more fun, especially the classic rolling boulders and the more magic-based traps better suited to a fictional universe like Severance's than the ostensible reality that Lara Croft lives in (that whole "turning to gold" thing was messed up). It also made great use of a bow and arrow that the player finds early on and becomes one of the few permanent items of their collection: so many traps and switches can be triggered from a distance, and it helps to soften up enemy archers and distant enemies too. But it's really the combat that's the star of the show here.

As I said back with the intro blog for Blade of Darkness, the combat is deliberate and tactical rather than something you can recklessly charge into and expect to walk away from unscathed. Enemy damage adds up fast, especially when you have limited healing items and some distance to go before a rejuvenating level-up or the end of the current stage, which also recovers all health for the next. Enemies have predictable attack patterns, but each one is different. Sometimes you'll even have variations in common units because of the gear they're wearing: an orc with a shield is a lot different than one without. From simple orcs to trolls to dark knights to enormous ogres, golems, and minotaurs; there's a strategy for every opponent, and even though you'll meet several of every type they'll often show up in different configurations with different conditions. A minotaur with an axe has a longer range, a minotaur on a bridge makes it very difficult to strafe-dodge around them in a circle which is one of the more effective ways of avoiding damage, and fighting two minotaurs simultaneously requires that you keep both of those enormous critters in view at all times.

However, there's sometimes room for improvisation as well as skillful fighting. Two or more enemies may damage each other if one starts swinging while another's in range, possibly causing a bit of in-fighting before they return their gazes to you. An enemy on a bridge might be knocked off with a powerful enough weapon. The distance between you and an archer can be quickly closed before they loose an arrow, allowing you a free hit or combo of hits as they change to their melee gear. As you gain new equipment, you'll find they have various special attacks attached to them that can make the game even easier, provided you can pull off the fighter game-style inputs that each one requires - flailing at an inopportune moment when you're trying to pull off a hadoken can very easily leave you open to counterattacks, as can draining your whole stamina bar after whiffing on some spectacular spinning attack move.

There's not a whole lot more nuance to the combat than that, as Blade of Darkness still comes from a relatively nascent time for 3D combat - Ocarina of Time, which really helped to establish Blade of Darkness's lock-on feature necessary for fighting enemies in melee combat in a 3D space, had only launched three years previously. It can also be said that the special attacks can quickly unbalance the game, and locking them behind specific levels doesn't really help: it just means the game is very difficult until it's suddenly not, in a jarring subversion of a difficulty curve. Even the last few levels, which throw tons of powerful monsters at you with few chances to heal, can be effectively powered through with whatever special moves your best weapon has on it - and if you're missing your character-specific ultimate weapon, the story-critical sword you end up with has a strong ranged attack that's easy to fall back on, especially against the bigger, lumbering opponents unable to reach you in time to interrupt it. Even so, it would take nearly a decade for another 3D RPG to have a real-time combat system anywhere near as tense and calculated, where you can mess up and take hits from enemies you thought you could underestimate. Even a lowly orc can whittle down your HP by the hundreds per hit in the later stages, due to the way most enemies in the game level like you do (or, at least, scale up to where you are).

I'm also not sure I gave enough consideration to the game's atmosphere last time. It has some fantastic orchestral music that not only works to build dread or instill a sense of serene beauty in some of the more picturesque areas, but is carefully designed to trigger at moments where they have the most emotional impact. An ominous musical sting when you've hit a switch and opened a door elsewhere, or some grandiose music that accompanies a 360 radial shot of your protagonist entering a site of ancient power. The sound design is equally excellent, even if I wasn't always able to identify the direction of a sound's source. Most enemies make noise, and some more than others: a shrieking orc is easy to identify once it's spotted you and is moving in for the kill, and it's hard to mistake a clomping golem or minotaur as anything else besides maybe an earthquake. The dark knights, meanwhile, happily taunt you into striking them while you're perhaps less likely to hear the mute if still creaky skeletons before you see them. The narrator does his best injecting the interstitial story exposition between stages with some amount of gravitas, even if he curiously mispronounces a few words, and each protagonist has their own voice actor - not just for the usual grunts and yells in combat but when they're required to read something off a statue or book. My amazon character had a distinctive Scandinavian accent, and I imagine the other three playable characters had accents from all over the place to signify the breadth of this world and its peoples.

While it got a bit samey towards the end and I couldn't avoid the temptation of using the overpowered special of the amazon's ultimate spear - one that defeated the end boss in about ten uses - I had a thoroughly great time with Blade of Darkness. I could've used less of the save game sass as it went from "heroic" to "cautious" after frequent pre-platforming safety saves - I blame another trailblazer of the late '90s, Resident Evil, for virally infecting other games with the concept of insulting players for choosing not to risk repeating huge swathes of the game - and any instances I saw about weird enemy hit detection and hitboxes are probably all in my head. Overall, though, it turned out to be a surprisingly well-considered game that perhaps deserved more recognition than it got. I suppose getting new audiences reacquainted with obscurities like this is what GOG does best, though.

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