Guild of Darksteel is an interesting mix between a cinematic platformer and rhythm game that’s developed by a one-man studio. Games developed by one person are always difficult to cover because while passion projects often hit creative highs that are possible without outside interference, they’re also prone to falling into pitfalls that games with more of a shared vision typically avoid. That does lead to some interesting, unusual results, though, and Guild of Darksteel is nothing if not unusual and interesting. This is a game that gets a lot of things right—things that bigger teams often struggle with. At the same time, the game’s smaller scope results in a paucity of content/secrets and an overabundance of filler opponents who sabotage the pacing. I enjoyed my time with Guild of Darksteel, but it ultimately feels like a third of an incredible game let down by its limited scope.

Guild of Darksteel has interesting lore that left me wanting a deeper look at the world

You play as a nameless Darksteel mercenary referred to as “Sellsword.” According to the lore, darksteel is a material that’s forged into armor and gives its wearer immortality, though it can never be removed. As such, those who put on darksteel armor are cursed to fight for eternity in various conflicts. You play as one such immortal. Tired of fighting someone else’s wars, the Sellsword travels to the city of Ravenrock, which houses a Guild where immortal warriors have banded together and take on smaller jobs. However, the city houses a dark secret from long ago, and powerful forces in Ravenrock are looking to unbury it for their own ends. It’s up to the Sellsword to learn what’s happening over the course of several odd jobs.

I should probably mention right away that Guild of Darksteel only took me 3 hours to complete, and even then, I spent a lot of time fighting out-of-the-way enemies so that I could check for false walls (an NPC explicitly points one out, but there doesn’t appear to be a second).

That’s not much time for the story to build up its characters, so the heroes and villains lack gravitas, and this disconnect becomes even more pronounced because of how matter-of-fact (and sometimes awkwardly translated) the dialog tends to be. I don’t mean to make it sound like nothing interesting happens, though; the Sellsword meets a young orphan named Grisandre who’s in need of guidance, a fellow guild member named Framhilde torn between her loyalty and her mission, and uncovers a lot of interesting lore from books and NPCs.

For example, all of the world’s gods but one are asleep, and the world appears to be their collective dream. Should they awake, the world would presumably be destroyed. The awake god and an ancient king appear to have a connection to the appearance of darksteel, which is interesting. At the end of the day, though, Guild of Darksteel isn’t really about any of these things so much as they’re just added flavor. There’s a single boss fight in the entire game, and this end-game villain struggles to come across as particularly threatening because you have very few things anchoring you to the world. What’s here is decent, but it feels like you’re spending your time on a side story instead of unraveling the world’s bigger mysteries.

I didn’t expect the combat’s rhythm component to work, but it feels surprisingly natural

Wandering around in Guild of Darksteel feels a bit like playing one of the 2D Prince of Persia games. The store page explicitly lists Flashback as one of its inspirations, but all of the cinematic platformers from those days can be traced back to Prince of Persia and share the same general feel. Outside of combat, you can jump to climb platforms and leap over pits; unlike other cinematic platformers, there aren’t any puzzles/action sequences that require mastering this, but it gives the moment-to-moment gameplay a sort of weight that pairs well with the dark and moody atmosphere.

It’s difficult to tell based on Guild of Darksteel‘s store page, but its combat encounters are a completely separate game mode. There’s even a full-screen mosaic effect that’s reminiscent of an early Final Fantasy transition into a random battle. You lose the ability to move around and instead can only attack and block, with new attack combos opening up as you progress deeper into Guild of Darksteel.

Enemies attack and block in set patterns, but you can’t always attack instantly—instead, your attacks queue and then execute shortly thereafter. This allows you to queue multiple attacks, and combining these in different ways allows you to execute your unlocked combos. The final strike of some combos has a special effect, whether that’s strengthening your next combo of a certain type or simply healing you.

What makes Guild of Darksteel‘s combat feel so great is that your blocks don’t queue and can be executed instantly. That means that you can begin a four-attack combo and interrupt it to block incoming attacks. It also means that you can land a blow on your opponents right before their own attack hits, then immediately block their damage. This becomes a helpful way to speed up combat, which is important because of how many opponents you have to fight to get anywhere. Toward the end of Guild of Darksteel, you’re left wandering through screen after screen of enemies, unsure where you’re supposed to go. I ended up taking a wrong turn and having to double back after hitting a locked door, fighting respawned enemies as I backtracked to grab the key and then again to get back to the door. That’s when you’ll be grateful for the ability to get some cheap shots in.

Part of the problem is that there’s not a huge amount of enemy variance. There are bandit and bat recolors with slightly different attack patterns and some extra-durable late-game enemies, but once you’ve beaten a couple of them, the challenge disappears. That’s not inherently a bad thing (it’s generally more fun when a game is too generous rather than too punishing), but when your only deaths are the result of instant-death falls—to which I say boo, hiss—and not difficult enemies with challenging patterns, the suffocating, oppressive atmosphere is undermined somewhat.

Guild of Darksteel‘s art is a case of smaller problems adding up into bigger ones

Another of Guild of Darksteel‘s stated influences is Vagrant Story, which is one of those exceedingly rare Playstation 1 classics that I don’t have any experience with (yet). Judging from screenshots I’ve found on search engines, though, it looks like it uses an orange-brown and blue color scheme pretty heavily in addition to a tannish olive green and gray one, and you can see how this game follows suit in many areas. I don’t know if that’s intentional, but a lot of the color contrasts here are striking in a good way, while the (usually aboveground) areas lacking that contrast are buoyed by the sheer atmosphere of the heavily dithered sky and various macabre touches. That’s all great, but I can’t count the number of times I fought enemies thinking that the path they’re on was a shortcut, only to hit a wall instead. It’s weirdly difficult to differentiate between background objects and solid ones. Worse, enemies are placed in random spots where you have no reason to go. It’s easy to assume that they’re guarding something.

Guild of Darksteel‘s music is also pretty good, but it, too, is difficult to give credit for its quality because of various issues that plague it throughout; while there are some really good tracks here, 99% of fights use the same battle song and it always starts from the beginning. Since you’ll be trying to finish each combat encounter quickly and there’s very little background music, there’ll come a point when you’ll be hearing the same measure and a half of music punctuated by the relative silence of atmospheric sound effects. I much prefer the approach it uses at the very end of the game, where a different battle track plays continuously in the background as you fight several enemies. I need more variation and less starting and stopping.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Guild of Darksteel review. It took me just under 3 hours to beat, plus one more hour that I spent trying to figure out why two of the achievements weren’t unlocking.

Guild of Darksteel review – Rhythmic slashing first appeared on Killa Penguin