Every so often, a game comes along that I don’t particularly care for but feel strangely attached to anyway. Puzzle-platformer Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials is one such game; I found much of the gameplay to be frustrating in a bad way, with plenty of cheap shots and unclear mechanics making the questionable momentum even harder to deal with, and yet I kept playing after unlocking the bad ending. I even kept playing after obtaining the normal ending, spending several hours slashing at random walls in search of the secret switches that have to be activated to get the best ending. Why? The easiest explanation is that the characters—most of whom start out as joke-and-sarcasm dispensers—had grown on me to the point that I wanted everyone to have a good ending. Despite all of my gameplay complaints, Batbarian has a surprising talent for growing on you.

Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials does some interesting things with its characters

You play as a nameless barbarian who travels with a bat companion/friend named Pip. After being wrongly accused of theft by some ogres and improbably surviving getting knocked into a mysterious cave by their leader, the two have to overcome numerous rooms full of puzzles and tricky platforming in order to leave. Of course, Batbarian bills itself as a “snarky action-adventure puzzle game with a good dose of humor,” so the barbarian’s possible dialog options almost always give you the opportunity to spew random non-sequiturs or get distracted by a companion’s phrasing. That doesn’t mean that there’s no seriousness, but it’s balanced out by a steady stream of weirdness. Take Batbarian‘s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time-esque framing device, for example: the entire game consists of the barbarian telling a stranger the story of what happened (with some companions present for the story), so you can be yelled at between deaths for mentioning your death in a story that you clearly survived to tell.

More than anything, I came to love how little I was able to predict about the story. An early wizard companion named Drai Lez only sticks around for a short time before being replaced by a thief named Twigs, so I expected companions to come and go regularly, but Twigs sticks around for far longer than I anticipated. I can’t say that everything that happened in the story made perfect sense, with the pit’s layers of history making it difficult to pin down how some things are connected, but the likable characters are the glue that holds everything together.

Batbarian does suffer from a small number of typos and mistaken words—”picked” instead of “piqued” and some other roughness of that sort. This bothered me in the early-to-mid game but stopped being an issue once the uniqueness of the storytelling became apparent.

The puzzles are mostly great, but it’s a drag that so many things are hidden in the walls

Batbarian‘s gimmick is that the pit is dark and Pip emits light. By throwing fruit to lure your bat to certain areas, then, you can activate light-sensitive crystals and damage enemies who are harmed by light. You eventually end up with two alternate modes that allow Pip to freeze and melt/burn nearby objects, too, and when you need to quickly freeze some water droplets and then switch to Pip’s fire mode in midair to nail a near-perfect throw, the gameplay clicks for the most part. The puzzles are always initially daunting but perfectly solvable, which is rare for an indie passion project like this. Batbarian tends to fall flat when it relies on action instead of puzzles, though; piecing together a way of moving a block across a large room is rewarding, but spending a minute dodging a ton of projectiles and enemies who appear out of thin air and give you no breathing room isn’t.

For one thing, some rooms take control of Pip away from you, which means being unable to control where your sole light source is shining at any given moment. Many enemies are also unbeatable until you unlock a Pip element that works against them (and even then, several enemies are either entirely invincible or require spending one of your rare consumable “pungent fruits” that cause Pip to attack something).

And running out of consumable items is always a problem for obvious reasons. They should replenish at save points instead of being replenished through rare enemy drops. Or hell, just be endless like normal Pip-directing fruit is. Having to manage a limited inventory of fruits reduces the number of things you’re willing to try in some rooms for fear of running out before you truly need them for something.

Being unwilling to experiment in Batbarian‘s rooms can be a problem of its own. You deal very little damage and take a great deal of it from enemies by default, so finding hidden items that boost your offense or defense can be crucial. Yet most of these hidden items are lodged in little alcoves that are identical to the unbreakable walls around them. The only way to find several hidden items is to slash at every wall you can reach. There are many hidden areas (according to the end, I found 72.5% of them) but they could stand to be a little more obvious. Of course, being able to throw an endless number of pungent fruits at suspect walls would also speed things up quite a bit, so that would probably be the better fix in the long run.

The Boots of Speed create a weird momentum that can undermine many of your jumps

When you first start playing Batbarian, you have a single slow movement speed, but you’ll have located the Boots of Speed that give you a run option within about 15 minutes. It’s pretty strange. The Boots of Speed may be a blessing at first, allowing you to clear longer jumps, but they become a nightmare after you start to realize how they work. Basically, you have about a half-second where you walk, after which you immediately pick up into a full-speed run. You can’t speed up in the air, though, so making a long jump off of a platform that’s as wide as your character is can (and inevitably will) result in a short hop that forces you to restart the room’s platforming sequence from the beginning. This single mechanic does more damage to the gameplay than any other by making jumps an imprecise, fiddly mess. Batbarian demands precision that isn’t always possible.

It’s not all bad news, fortunately: there’s an in-game menu full of assist features that can buff your offense and defense and/or slow down the game when aiming throws. During one particularly frustrating boss fight, I turned all of the assist options on and left them that way for the rest of the game. This does a great job of evening out the difficulty during the later parts of the game. You can still die with assist options on, but the cheap shots are much less capable of ruining your day.

Some of Batbarian‘s problems run deeper than its assist menu can reach. This game’s second biggest problem is the frequency with which you hit a dead-end or find something and are left to wonder, “what now?” You need only look at how many of the game’s Steam forum topics use the word “stuck” to get an idea of how often you’re left directionless. Staring at the map in search of a pathway you missed can save you sometimes, but the map tends to use a solid white wall for hidden passages, so any progression that requires finding something tricky and hidden has to rely on aimless wall-slashing instead. There were several times that I was tempted to give up on Batbarian entirely because of this.

Speaking of directionlessness, some of the mechanics aren’t explained quite as well as they should be. I can’t recall anything in the game ever explaining that Pip’s fire form can detonate flammable parts of stages when combined with a pungent fruit, and this can come in handy since your only other option is Twig’s haphazardly-aimed companion ability (which runs out after a few uses, making it very tricky to use in most areas). Given how hard it is to restore your supply of pungent fruit, it’s difficult to imagine most players figuring this type of thing out through experimentation.

Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials has a dark atmosphere and killer soundtrack

One of the things I’ve often said about games is that making hazards difficult to see isn’t a valid form of difficulty, and there are a few points toward the beginning/middle of Batbarian where you take damage because of things hidden in the darkness. For the most part, though, Batbarian avoids being too dark; the barbarian levels up as they defeat enemies, and the three level-up upgrades they receive are selected in a slot machine minigame. I could never figure out the timing to select what I wanted despite being fairly good at timing minigames historically, so this is pretty much a coin flip, which means that the upgrades to your strength, defense, and awareness (which determines how much of the surrounding area Pip lights up) will average out. Things will still be dark by the end of the game in most areas, but you won’t be making mistakes because of that darkness. However, I’m not in love with how hard it is to differentiate between platforms and background decorations. Especially during an escape sequence.

Batbarian‘s soundtrack is excellent and nothing like you’d expect from a game that takes place underground. Modern soundtracks have an awful habit of assuming that underground areas need to always sound like a hyper-realistic depiction of the space, resulting in a mess of drip-drops and creaking sounds drowned in a bathtub of reverb and delay. That’s a boring way to approach a soundtrack and I’ve come to resent it. Enter Batbarian‘s unapologetically synthy soundtrack, which sounds like a combination of Shantae: Half-Genie Hero‘s less bouncy indoor themes and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night‘s more dramatic flourishes. It’s thoroughly enjoyable and I never tired of it, even when the gameplay was wearing on my patience.

Story: 3/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 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 Batbarian review. It took me around 12 hours to get ending C, one more hour to get the B ending, and two additional hours hunting for switches to get the A ending.

Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials review – A light darkness first appeared on Killa Penguin