Driven Out is a skill-based action game where you have to overcome 21 bosses, each separated by 2-4 equally dangerous enemies, using nothing but your reflexes and a tool that allows you to create custom checkpoints to restart from when you inevitably perish. It’s difficult to put into words just how much profanity I’ve lobbed in this game’s direction while playing, and some of the criticisms my rage-addled past self brought up are real examples of Driven Out playing unfairly. At the same time, it occupies that enjoyably bizarre realm of “so difficult that it doesn’t seem difficult in hindsight.” Many of Driven Out‘s fights are downright fantastic and don’t suffer from any problems, and it’s during these that it shines. Low points are also common, however, thanks to some awkward animations that disable your ability to block for uncomfortable spans and a bevy of minor frustrations that create some very strange difficulty spikes. Driven Out is decent fun but needs a minor rebalancing patch to be truly great.

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Driven Out review navigation (click a link to jump directly to the relevant section): Gameplay review | Bugs and issues | Visuals and music review

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Driven Out is all about learning to block and parry based on visual cues

If you’re looking for a story, you won’t find it here. Driven Out begins with the protagonist, a simple farmer working the fields, encountering a mysterious device that falls from the sky. A knight shows up soon afterward and clumsily drops his sword, which the main character uses to protect herself from the numerous nearby creatures that suddenly want her dead. The world itself is a madhouse full of werewolves, armored animals, and aliens, raising the question of why someone would set up a farm there in the first place, but the story genuinely doesn’t matter.

You have an overhead attack, a middle attack, and an upward swiping blow, and each of the three feels different. The overhead attack is noticeably faster and more reliable than the other two, though, so I found myself using it to the exclusion of the others. Apart from a couple of enemies who have to be knocked on their back with a well-timed upward strike, there’s no reason not to use overhead attacks.

When you hold the block button, the inputs that result in high/middle/low attacks instead block those of enemies. Triggering a block a split-second before a blow lands results in a parry, which impacts enemies in different ways; some opponents are stunned by parries, some are unaffected by parries, and late-game enemies can often knock you back through a block and need to be parried to retain your position for a counterattack. Learning to block and parry is crucial because Driven Out doesn’t have a dodge move of any kind.

You have three hit points, and most opponents do a single point of damage (though there’s one boss who managed to deal two hits points of damage in a single blow for reasons that elude me). That’s simply not enough to get through 2-4 challenging enemies and then beat the boss, so Driven Out gives you the opportunity to create custom checkpoints. There are two kinds of saves that you can select from when you die: automatic saves that return you to what the world was like when the last boss was defeated and custom “witchcraft device” saves. This device has two charges that are only restored by either restarting from the last boss or defeating the next one. Interestingly, witchcraft devices initially function as a cloning device. If you use up a charge and then die, you’ll regenerate without anything in the world being reset. However, the device is vulnerable to enemy attacks while it holds that extra life. If you protect the device long enough to use that life, it becomes an indestructible save that you can restart from upon death. That save restores the world to how it was when the device transformed from extra life holder to save.

For the sake of your sanity, be sure to use custom saves at sensible times

My recommendation is to drop your first witchcraft device after defeating two enemies and the second immediately after reaching the next boss. Doing things that way breaks up the number of enemies you have to face on each attempt to a manageable number. Driven Out will still be frustrating—maddening, even—but you’ll make faster progress and save yourself a lot of headaches. I also recommend only placing them when enemies are either off-screen or far enough away that it would take them more than a couple of seconds to reach you. You have no invincibility frames at any time. Worse, the knockback animation when you’re damaged disables your ability to block. The worst-case scenario is that you drop a witchcraft device and it becomes a save right as you’re surrounded, which is a hole that only flawless play and a dash of luck can dig you out of.

Unclear attack timing and tiny pixel art attack cues dampen the experience

Driven Out‘s best fights are against opponents who clearly communicate whether their attacks are going to be high/middle/low. The worst fights are against enemies whose cues for middle and low attacks look practically identical thanks to the pixel art. Really, this boils down to there not being enough frames in animations; some bosses (the primate one in particular) slide around like they’re on ice rather than their animations naturally conveying their reach and motion, and there are several bosses who move from a “preparing to attack” stance to having a sword in your face almost instantaneously. Driven Out too often forces you to react to attacks based on the tiniest of differences in your opponent’s stance.

It doesn’t help that the parry window is only open for a split-second. It’s so tight that you can take damage even when you recognize where an attack will land and press the correct buttons to parry it. Between that and missed attacks disabling your ability to block or parry for an unclear amount of time, it can be hard to piece together why you took damage.

You can get through the first half of Driven Out with blocking, so the tight parry windows aren’t much of an issue until the second half of the game. After a fakeout ending and credits sequence, you’re asked to defeat harder variants of each boss all over again, and some of these bosses can only be beaten by parrying their attacks. These fights tend to feel unfair.

Speaking of unfair, you can only block in one direction, and there are a couple of points where enemies surround you. Turning around is a clumsy affair that sometimes registers two inputs instead of one, so quickly spinning around and parrying an incoming attack isn’t always possible even when you have the requisite skill to pull it off. This is compounded by the way you instantly turn to face your attacker whenever taking damage, ensuring that you’ll periodically take damage right as you go to block, only to turn your back to them accidentally and invite more damage. Strangely enough, only midgame enemies surround you, so you end up with a game that varies wildly in difficulty. The final boss is one of the easiest encounters. If you see rams and bears approaching, on the other hand, expect nothing short of hell.

Driven Out also has enough buggy or bug-like behavior to cause a problem

The bug most likely to be fixed concerns the final boss: if you die to it and then retry from the death menu, it won’t show up to challenge you. I can’t tell if this is a save-related bug that only affects me or something universal, but having to exit out to the menu to coax it to show up isn’t exactly fun. It’s not the only boss I’ve seen pull a disappearing act, either, with the other failing to show up and then disappearing when defeated thanks to being close to an area transition. I almost missed the blue orbs that heal your health and recharge your witchcraft device because of this. Nothing bothered me quite as much as mounted enemies occasionally ignoring my blocks and parries, though. Having them phase through blocks rather than being momentarily staggered throws off the momentum of combat. This also happens with other enemies but far more rarely.

Depth isn’t conveyed well in 2D art, but I eventually got over that frustration

Driven Out uses pixel art unmarred by ugly post-processing filter effects, and I respect its look so much that I can set aside the animations that don’t have quite enough frames and some unfortunate attempts at conveying depth. I was livid at first that attack cues for an enemy with three spinning blades of different speeds were difficult to read because depth and 2D games rarely mix. However, I eventually figured out that you can wait until two blades are on the opposite side, then block the one closest to you and immediately attack to hit the vulnerable top part. Figuring that out was painful, but it wasn’t an issue once I had a strategy. That’s Driven Out in a nutshell: painful until you figure it out. I never came around to the music, though. In a certain context, Driven Out‘s soundtrack would be excellent. The problem is that all of the tracks are on the repetitive side, and listening to the same notes over and over again as you’re stuck for 30 minutes in a blind rage doesn’t engender a lot of positive feelings.

Story: N/A Gameplay: 4/6 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Driven Out review. Luck and reflex speed plays a huge factor in how long Driven Out lasts, but it took me 7 hours on the dot to complete.