You know what’s frustrating? Getting a Game Pass key, being politely asked to cover something new, and then being totally unable to find anything new that’s good enough to say anything nice about. It’s not like there aren’t incredible games on Game Pass right now—I gave both Bug Fables and Rain on Your Parade 9/10 scores, and Children of Morta and River City Girls both got 8/10s and are so good that I’m constantly tempted to replay them—but if there are any more keepers out there, I’ve had zero luck finding them.

Bloodroots is one of the newer additions, and I remember seeing enough praise for it that it seemed like a sure bet. This isn’t a game that’s designed to be good, though. Instead, the priority is making it “lol so random” to provide Youtube and Twitch personalities with plenty of content to make silly faces to. Bloodroots is a game where you and your opponents die in one hit (in theory, at least—there are plenty of annoying exceptions), and yet it can’t be bothered even pretending that its underlying mechanics are fair.

I know that accusations of unfairness tend to be leveled by those who need to “git gud,” so I’m going to start with the most obvious and indefensible example. The above video is one of hundreds of times I swung at Enemies, only to have my weapon visibly phase through them. Boom, instant death. Go back to the last checkpoint and hope that the caprices of the RNG god who dictates which enemies you are and aren’t targeting (which appears to determine whether you can hurt them or not) benefit you next time.

Twitchy one-hit-kill mechanics require feeling like you’re in control of the action. Part of the reason I went so hard into Nidhogg 2 was that it was fair. Every time I died, it was because I made a mistake. When the underlying mechanics can randomly take the day off and leave you swinging ghosts that phase through your enemies, though, getting killed stops being your fault. It’s all very random, and that’s great for content that involves big reactions. The whole thing is terrible from an actual game design perspective.

Problem number two? The jumping physics feel totally wrong. You ascend at a certain pace that gives you a sense that you can jump farther than you can, only for gravity to suddenly wake up and send you hurtling back to earth at terminal velocity. Could I have jumped later in the video above? Oh, 100% yes. Still, the physics feel just off enough to cause problems, and that’s not great. There’s a lot of jumping.

And if the dodgy physics aren’t enough of a problem, you also have to contend with the camera making it impossible to tell where things even are relative to your character. All of this dovetails with the fact that your movement is heavily influenced by whatever item you have equipped (and the fact that you can only attack at a certain pace) to make for some deeply uncomfortable gameplay. Bloodroots controls terribly.

There are all sorts of other problems, too. Attacking with your fists stuns you for a split-second, so you have to use found Weapons when facing groups of two or more opponents to keep them from walking up and killing you in a single blow. Problem is, all weapons have a durability that lasts between 1-3 hits. And while weapons can often be used as movement techs to move faster and/or clear large chasms, some weapons lose durability whenever you use them while others only reduce durability when you come into contact with an enemy or part of the environment. Which is which? There’s no way of knowing in advance.

Breakable weapons are a scourge in general, and when you combine them with the dodgy context-sensitive targeting prompts, you run into the same problems of the game not understanding or registering your actions. You can go to grab a nearby item in a split-second window to defeat a group of three enemies, only to grab the wrong item or have your input ignored entirely because the game decided not to target the item you were trying to pick up. And that’s if the hilariously zoomed-out art style allows you to recognize an item in the first place. I was playing at 4K on a large TV. If I can’t see what’s happening around my character, then the art style (and Bloodroots in general) has a serious problem.

That’s all miserable, but there are points where Bloodroots cranks its awkward misery up to 11 and yanks off the knob. The first boss fight (which is sort of a race) is a good example of this. You have to maintain a brisk pace to avoid being swallowed up by a wave or something behind you, and the path forward is littered with baddies and obstacles that only have one or two ways of getting past them. Even once you finally have options, you’re given a chainsaw weapon that has a slight delay, sends you careening in a direction in an area with lots of pits, and may not even target the enemy you’re running toward. And then there are the carts! I kept trying to time my jumps, and I was rarely able to avoid falling in the pit. The camera angle makes it impossible to judge height, and a mentioned, you fall much earlier than expected.

For the git-gud-ers, here’s a video of me blowing through that whole entire level without a single death. It’s possible. The problem is that it has nothing to do with skill. Instead, you have to rely on memorization and a healthy dose of luck. You have to know what’s ahead in advance and be lucky enough to avoid targeting issues to have a good time with Bloodroots. And if I have to slog through a bunch of levels for the privilege of knowing how to have fun playing them, and even then, only if the mercurial context sensitivity plays ball, then where’s the entertainment value here? Removing skill from this equation just turns Bloodroots into work. This is a “spreadsheet by any other name” situation right here.

And it’s too bad to finish, honestly. Sometimes I finish games that I don’t like so that I can put up a long review about them for catharsis, but Bloodroots is honestly better forgotten. It’s just not worth it.

Bloodroots is one of the most uncomfortable games I’ve ever played first appeared on Killa Penguin