Like Dark Souls but harder. I love the concept, extremely unforgiving. Clearly each battle can be won in more than one way because I've seen reviews where people claim you have to block the first swordsman, and I was able to just stab him when he charged. Haven't beaten the second guy yet, but will try later.
Reviews for "The Blind Swordsman"
Holy fuck once you get past the first 3 levels this game becomes UNBELIEVABLY FUN. It's all about cracking the timing and movement, just visualizing. Amazing concept and excellently executed!
I don't know what to say. Whether this is a real game or not, it is extremely hard. I am wearing the best pair of headphones I own and I cannot pass the first level. Even then, you didn't really specify if I was to guard then attack him, or try to attack him before he attacks me. Plus, if I attack at the same time he does, I still block. From other reviews, this is actually a game and not just a gimmicky April Fool's joke, but i'm beginning to think otherwise. I'm sorry if I am crushing a game you worked hard on, but I just cannot find a legitimate way to pass the first level. If it is truly an AF joke, then you got me good. Thanks for the laughs, and tears.
Evil-Dog responds:
Nah it's playable, I'm not gonna spoonfeed you man, come on you're a swordsman, find his opening :D
Releasing this on April Fool's Day was a huge mistake.
Come now, you have to know this wouldn't be taken seriously on this day. To those wondering, this actually is a real game. It simply has an unfortunate release date. If you (the dev) don't understand what's happening, April 1st is a holiday that isn't really a holiday where it's tradition to play practical jokes and pranks and generally just be a tremendous goofball to your pals. So uh, the game with no U.I. about a blind swordsman that is very difficult kinda looks like a joke on video games in general. If you did intend it, well, that's still pretty funny if only in a more ironic sense.
This will be part review, part walkthrough. The game is beatable, as I'm now typing after the final battle.
Now, first of all, I realize the character is BLIND but that's no excuse for a proper introduction to how the controls work. If anything, it's reason for a stricter tutorial.
For starters, and I'm not going to claim that everybody is sharing this viewpoint, the word "block" itself feels misleading. Traditionally when I "block" in a game involving swords I hold a button down and enter a "block state" where my character defends against attacks. This is more of a "parry." There is an active window the parry will work in and several frames where it will not and you cannot mash it repeatedly. I don't have accurate numbers, I don't really have accurate anything, but it felt like I had about 1 second of active parry when I pressed the button, and it felt like it took about .2s to activate and 1.5s to cooldown -unless it successfully parried something-, and therein lay another little trick to the combat. If you perform an action and it doesn't completely whiff into air, it's cooldown becomes nonexistent and you can press another button. It's a little inconsistent with what happens when you mash, but makes sense in the context of the game and a little push in the right direction perhaps with some kind of nonlethal sparring partner that ran through the motions of "parry", "parry and counterattack", and "pre-emptive strike" wouldn't have been missed.
However, that's simply a design decision. I, and it seems others, managed to fumble our way through the game somehow without it. Still, it was somewhat aggravating that my first 15+ deaths were "learning that block is a parry" and "oh wait I can attack right after blocking" rather than in actual combat. In a sense I think what's happening is that a lot of people are fighting the UI for the majority of their play and simply getting frustrated. And again, the character is blind, so really a lot of that makes sense. Perhaps my words are simply borne from angry cries of "I HEARD THE BLOCK NOISE THAT TIME."
So, in order to make the game fair, all the enemies are obnoxiously loud. They do not cease to taunt, laugh, and then straight up elephant stomp their way over to you every single time.
The first enemy you face is a swordsman, or perhaps maybe just a bandit type enemy. You have two options for these enemies which is to either smack them as soon as they stop running (meaning that because you are in range of them, they are in range of you) or wait for the grunt to parry and then counterattack right away. You're going to want to master the "parryslice" fairly quickly, as the Flail enemy is a big fan of these.
Flails are basically swordsmen you can't pre-empt, as the protagonist so obliquely states in your first encounter. You must block them, and attempt to counterattack right away(parryslice, yo.) Most, if not all, of the time they will dodge this blow, and at the time of writing they would give a fake grunt followed by another actual attack. Parryslicing that will usually kill them. Blocking the air on the fake grunt can actually help with the timing of the second block.
Dagger girls are a little trickier. They have a bad habit of running circles around you, which means at this point your concentration should actually be more on making sure your alignment is correct and that parryslicing is more of an automatic action now. They grunt on their initial attack as they come on, but because they're maniacal and sneaky their second attack is often preceded not by a grunt but by some kind of taunt or laugh instead. Presumably what's happening is they're very close to you and are just slipping the blade towards you instead of swinging it forcibly- but the cue is still an audio cue, and be careful with the alignment inbetween the two blocks. The sequence for me was always Parry, Turn/Wait, Parryslice. Maybe you can catch them earlier, I'm not really sure.
And yes, I'm going to keep calling it Parry.
The archers I'm kind of sad about. They are a huge difficulty spike, and there's a lot of them in one of these levels. So the thing is, I'm not really an expert on how fast arrows fly. You really just have to get a sense of exactly when to press the button following the arrow release. It's generally a half second or so after the arrow flight noise begins to play. You need to do this 8 times total, changing alignment every single time and noting that the last 4 will be fired from slightly closer range (but only a few steps closer, so the change is in fractions of a second.) After that they essentially become swordsmen you have to block first- listen for the unsheathing, and then for the charge forwards. Parryslice all 4 melee attacks.
The next levels are basically just combinations of enemies from previous levels. At this point it's less about learning how enemies work and more about execution.
The knight level was absolutely infuriating. Here, I'm going to explain how this actually works and what you should really be imagining on this level. Now, I know that the idea that a man on a horse that you can clearly hear galloping gets 12 seconds worth of 6+ attacks on you in one go is completely absurd. If the horse is still moving, he should only get one attack. Ever. When you ride on a horse towards someone you're trying to use the momentum from the animal to boost the attack and I do not hear the footfalls of my own character who would have to be running sideways as fast as a Charger. Unless this suddenly became an episode from a Shonen Jump series there's no way he should be getting multiple attacks. So actually, what you should do is go watch Monty Python. Reference the skit where the knights are walking down a path and clapping coconuts together to create pretend horse noises. That's what you should imagine- you're fighting a knight from Monty Python, and the clopping is just there to distract you. What he's actually doing is walking up to you and constantly swinging while walking sideways. He's circle-strafing with his sword. You need to balance a series of parryslices with also keeping up with where he's aligned with you. If you get lucky, you can actually get him on the first pass. I think. It took me a lot of attempts. They're all kind of a blur.
The warlock was also very depressing. I really loved the style, I loved that he summons crows to screw with you, I love that you have to gauge the block timing from how far away he sounds, but killing him by windmilling my arms and flailing wildly when he teleports around feels extremely anticlimactic and silly. Why would he ever teleport close enough to get hit? Again, I'm not hearing my own character moving. Am I just imagining this wrong? Well, whatever. Just block the fireballs and mash attack when you hear him pinballing around the room. Something happens eventually.
So, overall, I really loved this title. It's a great attempt at taking games in an entirely different direction, but without the heavy and somewhat suffocating layer of political and social stigma that a title like You Are Disabled has. I absolutely love the straight-faced version of this. You're simply a blind swordsman. You have stronger hearing than usual, but other than that this is generally a huge problem for you and it's your main driving motivation behind the entire plot. Mechanically speaking it was very anger-inducing the hear the block startup and get hit anyway, but some of those might be attributed to misalignment. You see, that's the one change I would make. I'd like to know WHY I died sometimes. Did I get stabbed in the front? The side? Was I blocking at the time of death? It's a little frustrating dealing with that by using headphones. Volume level and echo shenanigans do a lot for helping the illusion of full circle hearing but really it does sometimes fall short because the real thing would be an actual surround sound where you had multiple speakers in a circle around you. I felt cheated out of a lot of the blocks when they simply didn't work. And to be honest a lot of the time -it stopped being about reaction time and improvisation- and more about timing and -pattern solving-. It sort of felt like once you played a level enough it became the equivalent of a game of Dance Dance Revolution as played by someone with their eyes closed in that learning each note is a huge pain in the ass but if you have the entire thing memorized you can do it without looking. I really enjoyed the panic moments when things fell out of sequence and I had to actually decide on the fly whether or not I just got blocked and if they just swung again or were in the jingle-jangle beforehand that if you react instantly to THAT instead of waiting a moment you end up dying. And I'm actually kinda sad because at least in the story mode there's no smart enemies. All of them are stupid and loud. I would have loved a battle against somebody that knew what I was doing and was purposefully stepping very lightly and carefully and trying very hard not to make noise when they attacked. But maybe that'd be unfair to a blind guy, eh? I mean really, all the archers had to do was circle -around- me and/or fire at the -same time-. And again, why is the warlock getting up in my face? He deserved to die.
Some of the voice acting was a teensy bit stiff. Perhaps cheesy. I was snickering at internal comparisons to what you'd hear a lot of from a game like Neverwinter Nights and I was outright laughing at one point trying to combine the voices. "I'll carve you up!" "Hiyaa!" And I swear to god one of the guys near the end would make an amazing VA for Bobby Fullbright. "What ho! The blind swordsman! Justice awaits, men! Charrrge!" It really made me laugh.
Now, on the other end of the spectrum, the dagger girls were TERRIFYING. I dunno how they made their voices echo, but that creepy laughter in my ears was really intense. The little giggles once they got near me were awesome, if a little disappointing that I had to cut them off (literally.) And I loved the Warlock's voice at the end. Shame about his weakness to random flailing. I was expecting him to do more unusual stuff.
I'd love to see straight-faced titles like more. There are so many ways to expand upon and add more to this kind of game. Such a simple concept could seriously turn a lot of generic concepts games take for granted upside down in a heartbeat and make them fun in ways that are unusual. It's an aggravatingly hard title for sure, but maybe it was meant to be that way. And it sure felt satisfying to beat every level, even if the last one was a 20 second cheeseball of mashing attack, enough so to surely come back to it later. So, bravo! I appreciate that you've taken a chance on such an absurd title.
And now I see there's a 360 mode. And apparently the default was 180. Ugh. Could you TELL US THIS BEFOREHAND please? I was under the impression it was 360 the entire time. You're telling me I could have safely HELD left/right in a lot of cases? Argh. Seriously, that's a great example of fighting the UI right there. That's pure game mechanic right there, our world generally involves all 360 degrees so if you're going to alter that part of reality you should probably inform us. But still. I'm for sure coming back if/when medals get implemented.
Awesome game all around. Much <3
Evil-Dog responds:
Wow, that's a crazy long review haha
First of all, the release date is unimportant, people playing today won't think twice about the release date, won't even check what date it was posted on, most people don't know Segway of the Dead was an april fools prank. This being an actual game, I don't think it matters. Besides, it kinda is an april fools game, started as a joke where you'd be blind and couldn't do anything, we decided to push it much further and make it playable. And come on, who doesn't know what april fools is...really...
We didn't feel the controls needed explanaing, the controls are shown when you play, should be enough. I think I agree with the miss-use of the word Block, might change it Parry indeed, thanks.
The numbers are 1 second cooldown, 0.5 of active blocking/parrying, we didn't want the held block mecanic and you can't spam it to block everything, gotta be timed a bit.
Dodges, deflects could have been nice indeed.
The horseman actually circles you from upclose, by lack of time, I didn't have time to integrate the horse "walking" sound. So he either charges with 1 attack or gets up close and launches 10 attacks while slowly turning around you. I'm working on an update that will have that walking sound and possibly less attacks, or more spaced out attacks, not sure yet on the tweak I'll do to him beyond the more reasonable horse sound when he's circling. His openning is after the last attack in the series before he gallops away
I might also increase the "angle coverage" of your attack/block to make it a bit more forgiving.
You bring forth a good idea, knowing what killed you, how it killed you.
And yes, ultimately it's pattern solving. Otherwise would have been much more complex and long to program, didn't have time.
We had an enemy that was cut, sirens, magical beings who would do weird things and stuff. Cut by lack of time.
I think the VAs did a fantastic job and I'm glad they were part of it. And yeah, I love Sapphire's dagger bitch! She really portrayed my writing of her well!
Every sound in the game were 4 sounds, front close, front far (echoed and EQed), back close (flipped channel, EQed), back far (flipped channel, echoes, EQed some more), which all combined allowed me to position the sounds fairly well. Well enough to be playable.
I don't think informing you of the 180 mode is useful, you're only complaining about fighting the UI in retrospect, you didn't think about that before, you played it just as well as if it was 360, yet not needing to hear BEHIND you. 360 has an extra thing where you really need headphones, speakers won't cut it. To hear BEHIND you is entirely different than left and right. And I don't see how holding any direction would have helped you, it wouldn't help you bringing them center to face them.
Thanks for the lengthy review, I usually hate those as it usually comes with an undertone of "I know everything and I'm a douchebag" but you didn't have that tone so cheers to you. Glad you liked the game and put that much thought into reviewing it.
very unique game, very fun