Day Nine

• Game: Titan Souls (Acid Nerve).
• Release Month: April.
• Source: The Steam Explorer Sale.
• Quick Look: Here. (Alex/Vinny)
• Started: 06/12.
• Finished: 06/12.

Titan Souls is a curiosity, even among Indie games, because of how it began. The product of a 48-hour themed Ludum Dare Game Jam, the earliest incarnation of Titan Souls resonated so well with people that the developers felt compelled to it a little and release it as a full game on Steam. The theme of that Game Jam, incidentally, was "one shot, one kill" and that's the philosophy behind each of Titan Souls's boss fights: the player, as a tiny human, will be instantly killed from an attack by any of the colossal titans they're trying to face down. Their enchanted arrow, however, only has to find the enemy's weak spot once to destroy it. What ensues is a "first to bleed" game of cat-and-mouse between each boss and its diminutive challenger; albeit, the sort of game of cat-and-mouse where the mouse has a needle full of cyanide and the cat is armored everywhere except the tip of its tail. Hey, I never claimed analogies were my forte.

Titan Souls also has a wonderful sense of stark imagery. The graphical style is a pixel approximation of one of the game's two biggest and clearest inspirations: Fumito Ueda/Team Ico's gorgeous Shadow of the Colossus. Even in their scaled-down form, the graphics of Titan Souls do an admirable job of recreating SotC's large and chromatically-limited empty spaces, the immense and awe-inspiring opponents and the melancholy feeling of abandonment for each of the locales, and garnishes its world with so much incidental geography purely to establish the size and the desolate nature of the Titans' forbidden lands. The soundtrack's equally faithful to the lugubrious ambient music of SotC, which either laments the player character in their self-destructive quest for who-knows-what (the game keeps the protagonist's motivations secret) or the fates of the Titans themselves, as each is slain in succession and their lifeless bodies left to decay.

I'm making the game sound more morbid than it is. Titan Souls doesn't offer a whole lot besides boss fights, and even those are conceptually simple: the player has one arrow, which they can mentally recall with the same button used to fire it, and a dodge roll. No experience, no upgrades, no nothing. These bare essentials, as well as the player's own wits, are all that are needed for defeating each of the game's nineteen Titans. Some require ingenuity, others pure reflexes, but a good battle can last anywhere between a couple of seconds to a handful of minutes, contingent on how quickly the player is able to find a moment to plant themselves for the split-second needed to draw back their bowstring and nail the briefly-appearing weak spot to end the fight. Death is inevitable, but there's always checkpoints placed near the caves and lairs of each Titan.

Despite a lot of frustration - I think the loading times are far too long, though I suspect that's an issue with my limited hardware - I can't fault the game's singular focus. I might be able to fault the game's short running time considering its asking price, but that's another factor that's entirely subjective on the wallet of the beholder. Nineteen boss fights is probably plenty for most, and it's not like you'll breeze through the game on the first playthrough. I did defeat one Titan on my second try within seconds, but there were a few more where it took almost half an hour to get the execution down. There's an achievement for beating the game in under 20 minutes, but I think realistically an average player is looking at 3-5 hours at least. It's an easy recommend, if you're up to the challenge of its reflex-intensive bouts.

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