Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

• Game: A44's Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
• Release Month: July
• Started: 08/01
• Completed: 14/01

Still on my 2024 bullshit, at least until the end of this month (well, as far as this feature is concerned anyway), our next port of call is yet another Soulsian action-RPG: Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn by A44, the Kiwi developers who got their elongated beaks wet in this particular stylistic genre with Ashen some years previous, which I should probably get around to as well someday. It tells the story of Nor Vanek, a sapper in the vaguely Napoleonic armed forces of The Coalition which formed to fight the endless hordes of undead emerging from an enormous eerie door to "the Great Below". After accidentally destroying the last barrier keeping the Door's occupants in check, a rueful Nor joins forces with an enigmatic vulpine deity calling itself Enki to quell the now-unstoppable unliving and the less-friendly gods that spilled forth.

Though we're firmly in the territory of parry timing and corpse runs, Flintlock frequently felt like (in no bad way) a PS3 vaguely open-world-ish action-adventure game (for some reason I kept thinking of The Creative Assembly's Viking: Battle for Asgard) largely because of a much more emphasized platforming/traversal aspect—joining fellow Go! Go! GOTY '24 candidate Another Crab's Treasure in that regard—with Nor acquiring the ability to use her powder charges for double jumps and air-dashes almost from the get-go. Soon after that, she then acquires the ability to ride "rifts": little portals that essentially work as a faster means of getting around and are often activated as shortcuts back to earlier areas. The game's extremely linear, barring a few dead ends and side-quests, so you'll be seeing these shortcuts a lot as you make your way over and through the story-mandated path before you (which the map screen is nice enough to actually trace out for you if you peer hard enough) (also, there's a map, so that's another markedly less Soulsian affectation the game takes on).

The combat is frequently a matter of resourcefulness and timing. Nor uses both a sapper's axe (there's a few variants, like a hammer and sword) for melee and her pistol to deter enemies at range, and much like how my much beloved Bloodborne uses that combination the gun is frequently best employed to interrupt enemy attacks rather than be relied on too much for damage output. To balance this out, a significant number of enemy attacks can't be blocked—there's a red dot that appears to let you know if this is the case—as the game expects you to hold onto ammunition to halt the enemy in its tracks instead. Unlike Bloodborne, ammo is at least plentiful: a single bullet regenerates after every three physical attacks, giving you the sort of ebb and flow where you'll want to get in close to re-up your ammo meter between enemy attacks for that same enemy's inevitable unblockable retaliation. There's also grenades and a secondary weapon (which can be the game's sniper-esque musket with its hugely-damaging headshots or a mortar weapon with area-of-effect damage for use on crowds of unruly undead), neither of which regenerate but are instead replenished at resting spots. Last, there's Enki himself: Enki can curse enemies and that has you building up a purple meter called "prime" which, when filled, then allows you to deliver a devastating critical hit to a stunned foe. This is also paramount in removing armor from the opponents that have it, since all damage taken is minimal until it's removed. It's imperative in many fights, especially boss fights, to quickly build up this prime meter and eliminate the armor so you can get some serious damage in.

In theory, this makes the combat an exciting case of guesswork where you're constantly weighing your options and employing the best tactics at hand, which may or may not involve just jumping right in or being more cautious and focusing on some parry-riposte timing or else building up prime with Enki attacks. In practice, the combat doesn't always feel entirely right. Evasion, for instance, may well work on wishes and dreams because enemy attack hitboxes appear to exist in a dimension humans were never meant to fathom, especially for non-human enemies like the giant spiders and scorpions. This is doubly disappointing due to a really neat feature the game uses for its experience points—which, as always in these games, doubles as a form of currency for both skill acquisition and equipment upgrades and can be erased if you die and can't recover them from your last resting place—where you have the choice to hold off on "banking" them for the sake of a bigger multiplier combo. Every ability or technique Nor uses will likely increase this multiplier a little bit, but only once per: this motivates you to keep in mind all the different tactics at your disposal and to mix and match them, from firing in mid-air to using Enki's skills to falling back on your sub-weapons to getting in a parry and riposte combo, and then continuing to increase the stock XP total by eliminating foes one after the other without hitting that bank button prematurely. This only works until you get hit though: at that point, you instantly bank all the XP you've stored up but lose the multiplier. It's a neat risk vs. reward concept that is only a little spoiled by how easy it is to get hit in this game, either from a wildly swinging unblockable attack as enemies appear to lunge at you at the speed of sound, or more likely an enemy sniper standing somewhere high up and unnoticed until you suddenly get shot in the back.

There's a lot I appreciate about this game. The setting's cool, as this sorta alternative early 19th century where the French and English armies instead worked together to take down ravenous revenants emerging from the Parisian catacombs in droves. Nor and Enki, plus the few fellow Coalition comrades you pick up along the way who offer their services (and banter) at campsites, are interesting characters that have faced a great deal of hardship but are still capable of joking together, in a mostly crude gallows-humor sort of way you'd expect from beleaguered soldiers. The accents are full on capital-B, negligible-T "Bri'ish" for the most part but you can see little traces of the developers' native New Zealand take root, particularly in the ethnic diversity of its cast and the fact that some of the enemies are essentially man-sized cassowaries, which for an Australasian may well be a more terrifying concept than rapacious hordes of the undead. It's also exceptionally grim, but I guess that's par for the course with this genre. On paper, I really like what the combat does and the innovations A44 brings to what is still evidentally a format with a whole lot of new improvements and quirks to be discovered. The traversal, too, is a lot of fun with its explormer-style double-hops and the vast amount of resources squirreled away in unpredictable places to find. The game's also a looker, as I hope these screenshots ably demonstrate. The moments where I was frustrated with it because the combat felt just a little bit too unpolished really don't matter so much in the grand scheme of things, or so I'd like to purport: I suspect instead that anyone accustomed to the fine-tuning that FromSoftware deploys in their works might find Flintlock a little lacking in comparison. Its strengths are all showy and right there in front of you, while its weaknesses are a bit more elusive and don't make themselves known until you've spent some time with it. Even so, I have to admit to enjoying this one quite a bit. I even tolerated the awful coin mini-game it has, mostly. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)

Current GOTY

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
2. Nine Sols
3. Dungeons of Hinterberg
4. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
5. Another Crab's Treasure
6. Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
7. Pepper Grinder
8. Little Kitty, Big City
9. Still Wakes the Deep
10. Botany Manor
11. Magical Delicacy
12. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
13. Doronko Wanko

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