EDIT:

Spoilers are now open. Say whatever you like in the comments.

Original message:

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our ninth game is Trek to Yomi. The target completion date is May 30, 2022.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after May 30, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Trek to Yomi?

Trek to Yomi is a black and white samurai action game with preset camera angles that takes its aesthetic from older Samurai movies. Exploration is done in 3D and combat is in 2D

How long is Trek to Yomi?

How long to beat lists it as 4.5 hours long.

I can confirm that 4.5 hours is about right. I just finished this game recently.

Spoiler are open.

I wrote about this game previously and I don't have much to add.

I liked it and thought that the aesthetic was pretty good, but it's clearly an indie and lacks polish in the combat, especially against the bosses. I thought it did maybe the best job of any game I can think of of emulating a specific style of film (other than cell shaded games with cartoons) so that's nice, and I liked how they made even the animation consistent with that.

On the flip side I thought the story was just okay (I had no issue with the subtitles) and I thought the part where you choose love, duty, or vengeance was just dumb and detracted. I ended up going the duty route and I'm curious what others thought.

Also the final boss was incredibly cheap, and looked very stupid the way he just waved his blade up and down at you (Katanas are only sharp on one side so hitting an armored foe with the back of your katana like that is useless.) I would have much rather had a tough precision duel than whatever that was. Bad final boss, mediocre story, some jank and other cheapness but not enough to detract from the core experience.

Also as far as I can tell the game was designed in black and white so there probably are not color assets but I wish that after you beat it you could play through again with color. That would be a very neat bonus. Kind of like the bonus playthrough for The Quiet Man but, you know, not incredibly stupid.

This game was fine. I think overall I do wish the combat had been more fleshed out as my playthrough went on. I appreciate a game that adds combos during the playthrough, but it did feel like there was never any reason to actually use the combos. There's a chance that I didn't understand the combat system, but did anyone else have any issues with enemies just not reacting to your hits? I felt like there was never enough time to pull off the combos before the enemy would just sneak a stab, or headbutt, or gunshot off. I ended up bumping the difficulty down to easy for the Chapter 4 (?) boss (the four armed swordsperson) just because the combat was not the reason I was playing the game and I could not figure out a parry window. I definitely enjoyed the 3D Exploration portions of levels over the 2D combat sections. The setting of the combat portions did at least look nice, I just wish that the swordplay was a bit more responsive. I didn't die much outside of the bosses, but it's always weird to me when checkpoints are sometimes off the beaten path. There were a number of hidden rooms I went out of my way to explore, only to find a checkpoint/ammo in it. I can imagine being frustrated if I had do some of the longer runs through levels and couldn't find a checkpoint because I never went all the way off screen.

Luckily, the visuals of Trek to Yomi carried me to the finish line. I absolutely loved the look of this game. The final two chapters were especially stunning. I can remember at least one moment in each chapter where the scene change made me say some "oohs" and "ahhs." The usage of lighting in this game is some of the best I've ever seen and all of the settings felt coherent and different. I wish I had taken screenshots more, but I'm just not that type of gamer.

The choice at the end felt a little shoe-horned in. Like they couldn't decide what story to tell so they just put the choice in to let the player decide. I chose Love at the end, despite choosing the duty options leading up to the final actual choice. Can't say the story left a lasting impression on me. The voice acting was good though. And the music was nice and usually fit the mood of the stage I was on.

All in all, I think this is a good 3.5/5. A beautiful game with pretty basic combat. It is still a pretty easy recommend to anyone with Gamepass though since I think what it does is different from many modern games and visually stunning, so long as people know it looks better than it plays.

This game was fine. I think overall I do wish the combat had been more fleshed out as my playthrough went on. I appreciate a game that adds combos during the playthrough, but it did feel like there was never any reason to actually use the combos. There's a chance that I didn't understand the combat system, but did anyone else have any issues with enemies just not reacting to your hits? I felt like there was never enough time to pull off the combos before the enemy would just sneak a stab, or headbutt, or gunshot off.

This was my biggest problem with the game as well. All of progression was unlocking new moves but if you used the parry properly you would rarely need to use anything else. And if you didn't use it properly and tried the combos they could be negated by an opponent using a light attack, which was not easy to read. I think it does the Kurosawa look better than Ghost of Tsushima's mode but aside from that I didn't see much special with it. I was a pretty experience at least.

the story took to long to get to the point of the realisation of being in yomi considering the themes presented early and the title being what it is. little mention of motivations and emotions relating to each of the three 'paths' outside of the cutscenes where you choose.

the combat felt quite half baked with too few ai combat behaviours. bosses can be cheesed by rolling under them and back-attacking. also, with visual indicators being a glint of light, one would hope the glowing orb following you wouldnt try to blind you.

Unfortunately i dropped this before reaching first hour. I love good melee combat, however here it's quite abysmal. I don't understand why they aren't using vibrations to help with feel of impact and overall basic things like that.

It's style over substance in my opinion and that style even sabotages the story, because i can't read white subtitles on black & white background. What were they thinking...

I'm glad to see others liked it though!

I played about an hour of this last night and decided I dislike playing it. I didn’t get anything out of the exploration segments, and the combat felt… off. Not unresponsive or anything, just a highly unusual parry window that I didn’t vibe with in the slightest. My experience with a given string of encounters was either I died pretty quickly or waxed the whole lot of enemies, and I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference in my actions.

I won’t write off playing more of the game entirely, but CHORVS just came to Game Pass and it’s likely I spend more time and energy with that game in the future.

I don't have much to add, or anything really to contribute that is all that elucidating: this game was not fun, never felt good, and I fell off of it very quickly. Overall, considering how awesome it looks, this was a massive bummer to me.

I started a second playthrough on Ronin difficulty and noticed they patched the “Back + Heavy, Light” stun close to the beginning of the game instead of the end which trivializes much of the game. Also found a secret ending where I beat the Chapter 3 boss and it rolled credits without having to go to Yomi.

I still enjoy this game despite the shallow combat. It reminds me of the NES games I played a lot as a kid like Rush N Attack, Kung Fu, and Kid Niki where there was endless fodder coming at you. But I agree that it’s way too parry dependent. There’s a missed opportunity to take advantage of 2D high/low attack & defense a la Viewtiful Joe.

I'll likely finish this given how short it is, but I decided to spend money on this game as it was knocked down to $15 on PSN and I'll admit that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. I was hoping there might be a bit more exploration and toying with the camera angles than there's been so far. I guess I'm halfway through the game after just over an hour and change unless the later chapters are a bit longer, and I'm playing on the Story difficulty just based off what I'd heard during the Nextlander "quick look" and offhand remarks from other pods. Finally opening this thread, seems like I made the right choice.

One thing that I'm interested in but obviously can't confirm from a single playthrough is it seems like at least once or twice so far there've been some pretty significant branching paths? Specifically the segment in the mines and then later when you've returned to the town and are searching for Aoki. At two specific moments it feels like you're in this larger centralized hub space (if you've played Kena: Bridge of Spirits, think how the home base branches off to the other three areas of the game) yet both times I attempted to take what felt like an alternate path and it led me down long sections towards a boss fight. Makes me wonder if, because the game is so brief (and has an unlockable ultra hard difficulty) they expected the combat to go over a bit more smoothly and people want to play the game over a few times?

Like pretty much everyone else, I do love what they've done with the camera and coloring, I was not a hater of the Kurosawa effect in Tsushima in the slightest but it helps to approach black and white with the initial intention of being black and white, for sure. I just wish the combat felt better. I'm spamming the reverse light combo pretty exclusively because, at least on Story, it seems like the one attack enemies have no interest in blocking but it's also just not always the easiest to read what's coming if you try to take the combat on its own terms. Tsushima suffered from this problem as well, thanks to its cues for parries and dodges being turned from blue and red to bright white flashes...with a lot of either high contrast whites flooding the screen! Rough!

Lastly, I wish they'd have pulled back a bit on the combat sequences in order to spend some more time polishing up the cutscenes and putting some flair into them. If anything could've helped this game stand out against Tsushima it would've been to have a much more pronounced directorial flair in the cutscenes to match what's going on in the exploration sections, but unfortunately whether it's plot or animation this seems to be where the budget title nature stands out most.

I'm happy I've played / will finish this at some point this year, but when it was first revealed I had some hopes this might be an easy inclusion on the lower end of my game of the year list. Instead, it's just a sorta neat piece of art I guess I'm happy to have supported with a bit of cash to make up for all you Gamepass heathens.

@nodima: I explored some of the alternate pathways and generally they don't lead to a whole different branch of the game or story as far as I can tell. Generally they will just lead to an optional collectable or a different way of moving forward. You can end the game early by defeating bosses you're expected to lose to (I believe) and there are some dialog options that lead to a different ending but I don't think there's a huge amount of branching content.