Oblitus Review (PC)

I like action platformers and I really wanted to like Dark Souls, so whenever I find something that looks like a combination of the two, I understandably get excited.

When I first saw Oblitus in a handful of screenshots, I was hooked. The art style looks a bit naïve, but it has a lot of personality, and it seemed to offer a ton of exciting action and some intriguing mechanics. Also, a giant bear boss to fight.

Two-dimensional indie platformers are abundant to say the least, as are procedurally generated top-down roguelikes, which means that the good ones are unfortunately drowned out in a sea of noise.

This being said, let's see now whether Oblitus deserves to float or whether it will sink to the bottom with the rest of them.

Story and setting

First of all, I should clarify why I said that I really wanted to like Dark Souls. It's the kind of game that sounds great on paper, but when you really get down to it, it's contrived, it has a horrendous control scheme with horrible animations, and plays nothing like a World of Warcraft arena with telegraphs, which means that it mechanically fails.

The story is almost non-existent, laughably bad at times, and it all feels very contrived. You can't kill or torture old women that behave as if they knew something about your condition even though you have no idea who you are and would, therefore, prioritize your own self-interest over their smug safety.

I mean, if I were an old lady who knew something about the soul of a confused adventurer, I would expect him to put his sword through me when openly taunting him about it. The magic was gone.

In a similar way, Oblitus draws you in without telling you what to do or why. You simply begin the game, beckoned by a spirit that waits for you in a secluded location. You don't know why you're there and where you're going.

The cryptic storyline approach is, in my opinion, the same type of lazy cop-out that storytellers sometimes use in movies, where they don't want to make a commitment to a certain clearly defined narrative that some people might not like, so they leave out some ambiguous clues so that everyone can piece together a different (and often contradictory) story.

Boss battle

Gameplay

Oh well, I guess I can live without a narrative to offer me motivation, at least provided that the gameplay is good enough to carry the action. You start out armed with a spear and a shield, and during your adventures, you are able to gather a number of random upgrades, such as extra moves, poison spears or a bigger health pool.

You can use the spear to either jab or throw, and it will regenerate after a couple of seconds. You can parry blows, do dodge rolls, so there are plenty of interaction and strategy to fighting.

The mechanics are fun but a bit flimsy from time to time. Raising your shield can protect you from incoming attacks and projectiles, and combat has a certain deliberation to it, you don't simply spam the attack key.

However, you often run into collision detection errors or the controls simply don't work as you would expect them or like them to, and that fraction of a second of fiddling can cost you a significant portion of your health.

That in itself would not be such an egregious issue, were it not for the fact that you don't have a lot of health, there's no way to regenerate it, and once you die, it's game over and you have to start all over again.

Yes, dying boots you to the main menu, where your only option is to shed some tears and start all over again. All those random powerups that you find scattered around the levels gone, all the progress you made erased.

“You can use the spear to either jab or throw, and it will regenerate after a couple of seconds. You can parry blows, do dodge rolls, so there are plenty of interaction and strategy to fighting.”

Which brings me to another problem: were it not for the lack of a proper waypoint or save system, the game would have been quite short, since you basically pretty much learn every nook and cranny by heart after a couple of playthroughs.

The procedurally generated levels aren't exactly created on the fly, but rather assembled from a handful of big parts, like oversized puzzle components, that don't really change that much, as you have pretty much the same layout in the end.

The lack of a save system is at its most annoying once you face bosses, which lock you in for some reason, so you can't run away when things go south and retrace your steps to the last health-restoring power-up in order to get a second chance.

The bosses don't have obvious weak spots, it's a hit-or-miss affair for the most part, largely because you don't have enough time to study them, since you have to start over once you die in one-to-two hits.

One of the first boss fights really puzzled me, since I was able to finish it with two lucky spear throws on one occasion, due to having found two spear upgrades, while five other times I didn't even know whether I was doing damage or not.

There are a handful of tiny misgivings regarding the way the game is put together, and they start to get a more concrete contour with every playthrough. Oblitus could have been a good game, were it not for its numerous faults, some of which are pretty glaring.

The way it stands, it's downright frustrating at times, especially since finding the right random powerup can mean the difference between winning and losing. If you have to quit the game for any reason, be prepared to say goodbye to your progress.

Oblitus' mysterious guide

The permadeath thing is a very, very cheap way of adding additional play time to the game. There are a ton of great ideas, but for every good one, there is an equally bad one to compensate.

When you enter the final world of the game, you constantly lose health, until you die. That's a neat concept, because you have to kill a boss in a prior world in order to gain a buff that renders you immune to the effect.

The bad thing is that you have no way to exit once you enter it, so if you just stumble upon it, you'll just die. Furthermore, once you do get in there with the proper protection, you can still die out of nowhere when you fall into the lava at the bottom, if you make a leap of faith and you happen to be unlucky enough to miss one of the ledges below you.

Sound and visuals

The game has a weird aesthetic that sometimes borders on amateurish, but it looks decent enough and even good, at times.

There is plenty of variety in the graphics, and there are several interesting designs, and the overall layout makes for a pretty interesting playthrough.

However, there are some issues with the resolution, which seems to be fixed at around 720p, which means that you're going to have some problems when playing it on a big screen.

The music is very fitting, having a sort of mysterious undertone, but it gets a bit repetitive after a while, due to the unforgiving nature of the gameplay.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion