Death's Deafening Disquiet
As the stinging sound of victory reverberates and color fades, I rip the arrow from the lifeless shell that was once a titan, feeling not satisfaction, but remorse. Guiltily, I absorb its soul and move on to the next titan, so I can feel the same way when I am triumphant once more.
Despite its name Titan Souls is unrelated to From Software’s popular Souls series, although it is similarly challenging. At first glance it looks and feels a lot like a classic top-down Zelda game. However, it bears more of a resemblance to the Playstation 2 classic, Shadow of the Colossus. It is a game of boss battles with an uninhabited world open to exploration between them.
It’s far from an original art style at this point, but the pixel art aesthetic is easy on the eyes and fits the nature of the action and exploration. The animations are smooth, and there is enough variety in the locales and encounters to warrant exploration beyond what’s expected of you.
There isn’t much exposition, but the only apparent course of action is to slay titans to acquire their souls. You are equipped with a bow and a single arrow imbued with some sort of power allowing it to kill titans, and these titans are the only obstacles in the game.
While some take more figuring than others and each is a bit different from the next, every titan will die with one well-placed shot of the arrow. Similarly the player will die should they get hit at all. This puts both the titan and the player are on the same level. The challenge first comes from surviving long enough to figure out where you need to put your arrow, and then from putting your arrow there. More often than not, the timing windows for you to land the shot will be so small you’re likely to not even believe a window of opportunity exists. It sounds like something that might be unfair, but I do not believe it’s unwarranted for Titan Souls to demand such perfect timing when one shot is all it takes.
Considering the timing required and the number of cracks taken at each boss, it took slaying more than a few titans for me to realize I ought to be feeling more accomplished when I land that perfect shot. Upon provoking a titan the music picks up, with every track providing a glimpse of the each titan's personality and reputation. When that perfect arrow finds its mark, the stinging sound of it pierces more than just your foe. The music dies with it, and the silence thereafter is deafening. After absorbing the soul of a titan, its shrunken and colorless corpse lays where you slew it, putting the suddenness and finality of death on full display.
I could not have fathomed going in what I got out of Titan Souls. To purely judge the gameplay would suggest the game is standard indie fare, but Titan Souls does more with less in a way I'm not sure was ever the intention. The abrupt finality to every encounter is more disquieting than it is gratifying and my experience could have only been lessened if it was the other way around. I would forget all about it in a couple of months, but instead Titan Souls is a game I'll be talking about for months to come.
