Severed

There are very few Vita exclusive games these days, especially from third-party studios, so it's easy to commend DrinkBox Studios for making a title for a somewhat starved player-base (although there are plenty of other things to play on Vita that can be found elsewhere as well). As exclusives dry up, and many other games lose their announced Vita versions, support for the system sadly feels like it should be celebrated, doubly so when they use the features of the Vita, like it's touch screen, in ways that most other platforms besides phones would not be able to recreate. Unfortunately, Severed brings with it some great ideas and aspirations that don't add up to make as much of a satisfying experience as one would hope.

Having recently lost her arm - hence the title - as well as her family in a vicious attack, Sasha is given a sword by some strange, cloak wearing creature I can only assume is the embodiment of Death, and sets out to find her loved ones in the wilds just beyond her home. That's about it as far as story goes, there is some other slight world-building as the game goes on, but there's never any more reason than that for what you're doing over the roughly six hour adventure. The amount of characters with actual dialogue, even counting flashbacks, ends up being a half dozen at best, and some of them appear only a scant few times, leaving the story-telling of the game to be fairly bare-bones.

While there isn't much in terms of a narrative, Severed does offer a lot of first person dungeon crawling as it's primary gameplay using the D-pad or face buttons. When monsters are encountered, however, the action turns to the touch screen, as swipes and gestures are used to attack and block the various creatures, and it's here that the mechanics start to get in the way of the fun. To properly attack and block, it's pretty much impossible to use your thumbs on the screen as you hold each side of the device with your hands, which caused me to take a more "claw" mentality and hold the Vita from the back with my left hand (being right-handed) and use my right to swipe and trace, thus having to resort to the face buttons to navigate. With the frequency of combat as it is, it seemed pointless to switch back to holding each side in my hands between fights, so I ended up basically holding my Vita in this way at all times while playing, which gets uncomfortable quite fast. I rarely played for more than forty-five minutes at a time, maybe an hour at most, and even more rarely did I play more than one sitting in a day due to this discomfort, causing the game to feel longer than it actually is.

As well as the actual physical limitations of operating the game, the touch mechanics often felt unresponsive. Whether it was not quite hitting the EXACT angle the game intended, or just plain not detecting my input, there were dozens of small instances where I could see my attack land on target for a block, only to be told I had missed. When you're already being put out by how you have to play the game, seeing it not work right became frustrating rapidly, and this often added to my desire to quit playing after small stretches.

The aesthetics of the game are also neat but flawed in their own way. While at first the game is very colourful and stylish in a very similar way to DrinkBox's previous offering Guacamelee, it soon became clear that this was pretty one-note, with a dire lack of variety permeating throughout the whole game, both in it's environments and in its enemies, which featured a lot of re-skins and palette swaps. As well, you may not even be noticing the world around you as much as you should, as there is only the one perspective to play in, and with the walls and surroundings all looking so similar no matter where you are, I often found myself looking only at the mini-map in the top right side of the screen. As it was the only way to navigate around to where you wanted to be going through the twists of the paths, a fast-travel system would have been appreciated, especially for the latter parts of the game, as the abilities you learn would often allow you to explore hard to reach rooms in previous areas.

There's a lot to like about Severed from the outside, and even at times within. The combat can feel extremely engaging when it was at it's best, as well as being quite challenging at times. Each enemy type has it's own unique way of attacking and being blocked, as well as the methods for your own offensive against them, and the upgrade skill tree lets you build out Sasha how you'd like her in the early parts of the game (before you soon have enough upgrade material to have them all anyway). The problem is you'll pretty much know every enemy in the game by the time you're halfway through, and the amount of small variations found in the later forms of these enemies aren't enough to stop the game from feeling like it's shown everything it has to offer.

The puzzles and navigation were often clever enough to be interesting, but the world design fell flat long before it was over. The combat was often enjoyable at a mental level, but it too soon feels like padding as you make your way to the final boss. For every good thing, there feels like there's at least one knock against it, if not more, making Severed a hard game to recommend after my experience with it. However, the physical discomfort almost assuredly does not apply to everyone, and it's possible that the fun parts of the battles can outweigh the tedium of moving around the world in the late stages of the game, so for anyone who wants a stylish action-puzzle game on their Vita, Severed is at least worth checking out. There just aren't a lot of things like it out there to discount it entirely.