Titan Souls review: the loop

I've died what I estimate to be about 30 times in this particular fight in developer Acid Nerve's overhead, pixel-art action game, which is really just a small fraction of the total number of times I've died over the course of the game, but I just don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. I know what I need to do, where I should theoretically be aiming my single arrow. But that doesn't seem to matter, and here comes death number 31—

Except no. Not this time. This time, there's a bright flash of white on the screen, and my opponent is the one who fell. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what happened. And, again, in the interest of honesty, this fight neatly ties a bow on top of my Titan Souls experience, places it in a proverbial, one-word nutshell: anticlimax. Despite moments of real boss-fight brilliance, Titan Souls feels like waiting for a slot machine to pop just a little bit too often, and when it does, the reward is a chance to do it all again.

Titan Souls doesn't do any heavy lifting to explain its premise. You start alone in a world with just one arrow and a quickly apparent goal: to kill everything you meet. This is less sociopathic than it initially sounds, because the world of Titan Souls is mostly empty, a set of ruins that should feel very familiar in its top-down perspective to anyone with a history in eight- and 16-bit adventure games, especially the Zelda series.

As you explore the starting temple you'll find rooms with giant sleeping creatures — which, to be totally honest, don't seem like they were hurting anybody — and wake them up (by shooting them with your arrow) and then kill them (also by shooting them with your arrow).

Comparisons to games like Shadow of the Colossus and its giant bosses are unavoidable, which Titan Souls seems to be satisfied with, given the lack of any real info or context. Even the titans you come across are an opaque sort of mystery — some kind of text appears at the bottom of each encounter, but it's complete gibberish in all but two encounters I came across.

You'll notice here I'm not using the word "challenging," because I'm not really sure that challenge is the right word. For many bosses, I knew what I needed to do to beat them almost immediately. I'm not just talking about what spot to hit, either. Rather, I knew what their behavior patterns and attacks would be, and I knew what kind of position I needed to be in to kill them. The trick was getting in that position.

As it turns out, I almost always accomplished this by figuring out a specific part of the room to stand in when I woke the titan that would put me in a nearly immediate position to hit its weak point within seconds of the fight starting.

After a few bosses, this didn't feel like a challenge, it felt like a war with a random number generator, waiting for exactly the perfect attempt to make my shot, and it was far faster to die to the boss and start it over than try to avoid a few minutes of attacks to have another perfect shot.

It wasn't always this way, of course. On some titans, I never died at all, firing blind, miracle shots within seconds of the encounter's beginning. This bled out any real sense of achievement. Dying over and over again waiting for the right chance felt like a war of attrition; nailing a perfect, lucky shot felt like, well, luck.

Where's the fun in that?

But there are some encounters in Titan Souls that present a sense of exploration and discovery that the rest of the game fails to deliver.

In one such fight, an enemy shoots off blobs of poison that turn to gas when they hit the walls of the combat area. While the blobs will kill you instantly, the gas poisons you more slowly, distorting the screen and making combat slightly more difficult — until you're poisoned a second time, which seemed to make my character faster and easier to control. A third dose killed me, because of course it did.

This was one of my favorite moments in the game, in part because I had to spend more time looking for an opening, which created an extended sense of tension. There are a few fights like this, which require not just pattern recognition but give and take. Solving these little mysteries provided me with a real sense of success. This feels especially ironic given how it violates the very strong core demands Titan Souls makes elsewhere regarding machine-like precision and trial and error.