RAVE: Tainted Grail Conquest

     To the sound of a death march, you triumphally strike down the tree's (!!) arms and it crumbles to the ground. To your awe and dismay, it becomes a 'lost soul' and proceed to strike you back even harder and your character collapses to the ground. DEAD. All your progress lost. You sigh. You nod. You say 'One more run'.

    While the above paragraph describes a boss battle in 'Tainted Grail Conquest', it also describes many roguelikes/ roguelites specifically deck building roguelites and the appeal they hold for some people like me. Going up against nearly unsurmountable odds however as you play the game you improve yourself and your deck of action cards, then those odds become less unsurmountable but doable and before you know it, you are now steamrolling bosses with the strongest deck imaginable and nothing beats that feeling when you have that 'God' run where you feel un-touchable.

    For the people who mostly visit this blog for it 'Learning Anime Fighters' series of blogs, welcome! The main core of this channel is a series of blog/ reviews which we call RANTS and RAVES. RANTS are reserved for things we do not like, like atrocious tracers (not artist) like Greg Land and believe it or not those are rather uncommon. I try not to be a 'hate baiter' or a 'reaction farmer' it is just not in my nature. If anything, a large portion of my reviews are normally RAVES. RAVES are stuff I really enjoy, whether it be a TV show, a musical artist or in most cases, a video game. In today's case, it is 'Tainted Grail Conquest' a deck building roguelite made by the team at Questline for publisher Awaken Realms. Also note; this is not our first time discussing this game on our blog. I previous did my impression blog about it which can be found here. Tainted Grail Conquest Impressions.

    That impressions blog was written when I had a bit of time in the game but now after 58 hrs we have beaten the game and rolled the true ending and credits and I feel it deserves to be praised so here is my RAVE review for it.

    The origins of this game, Tainted Grail Conquest, was it was originally designed to be a mode in the main game 'Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon' however the more they worked on it, they realized it could become a full game so they completed Conquest first and got it out there whilst they worked on finishing The Fall of Avalon. Speaking of The Fall of Avalon is out now and if you are into First Person RPGs ala Skyrim I would recommend checking it out. It looks interesting however First Person RPGs are not my thing however deck building roguelites definitely are. The world and lore of Tainted Grail is also based on a board game by Krzyztof Piskorski titled the same as the main line game. He is also a part of the developers of the game 'Awaken Realms', a indie Polish company.

    The game itself is designed like many deck builders. You start with a paltry deck with a couple decent cards but nothing crazy. However the more you play the game the more cards you unlock and if you are doing side-quests (which this game has in spades) you can unlock even better cards. You also open the door for more classes spread out between fighters, archers and summoners. Funny story through. Even tho there are many classes (9 in total) I have only used one my entirely playthrough. I fully intend to go back in and try some other classes but the one class I used, the default one, was the one best suited to my playstyle.

    Despite only using one class through, I enjoyed every moment of this game except in the middle where I felt I hit a wall. Each run was ending in failure and I can now correct myself from my impression blog where I said a boss stayed dead after you slay them. I was wrong. I think I was confused because sometimes you get a different boss and the game also said 'Slay the second beast' so I thought I did not have to slay the first beast again but like all roguelites, when you die, your game progression is completely reset and any bosses you had beaten need to be beaten again. This middle was where a bit of frustration kick in but I realized I was just not building my deck correctly with the best possible cards. Slight spoiler: some of the best cards are locked behind NPCs side quests. There is one specific card that once I realized its potential became my go-to starter card and well, I started completing runs after runs because of it. Speaking of, yes, in a flip on the tried and true formula roguelite, Tainted Grail Conquest has full-on RPG lite meta progression side quests. You talk to the person and they give you a long set of tasks and at the end you can 'save' that NPC. As mentioned, these are meta progressing so they persist between runs thankfully so once you find a certain item you do not need to seek it out again, just need to give it to the right person. I also say thankfully because like all roguelites the 'map' does change between runs so a certain person you might need or a location you need to visit does not show up in this run and you need to do another one and hope for the best. This, I will not lie got a bit maddening especially when you just need to met a certain NPC one more time to complete their task and the RNG won't roll you the 'map' where they are available.

    Saving these NPCs are also part of the game story and to get the 'true' ending you need to save them all and fight the 'true' boss. Speaking of 'true' boss, if you have played 'Slay the Spire' (aka THE deck building roguelite) this final boss concept is something you might be familiar with.

    

    The gameplay itself is done well. Instead of a pre-determined path where you make decisions on which forks to take like most deckbuilding roguelites, each of the 3 randomly generated areas allow you to free roam to an extent. During your free roaming you will encounter NPCs, enemies (which you fight in the conventional turn based deck building style) and events. The game surprisingly gives you a lot of freedom. You start the area and you want to run straight to the boss? Go for it. You see the NPC you need to help but they are being blocked by an enemy? Go behind the enemy and you can still talk to the NPC without even having to beat the monsters. I found this was really helpful in my early runs when I was not as strong but after awhile I became so OP I would purposely trigger battles just so I could get more loot. Speaking of loot; it is plentiful. Of course you have gold but at the beginning and at the end of every boss battle you get to spend some time in the 'village'/ hub you have filled with main line NPCs like the blacksmith or the candle maker (more on that in a bit) and whilst those NPCs use the gold, each of them also accept a unique currency exclusive to them. Give them enough of this currency and you can get more candles when you start your run or more weapon slots or item slots. This progression is also kept between runs as well so building a better village also makes you stronger in the long run as well. This unique, almost base building aspect is what really kept me coming back to Conquest. Helping these poor souls out and helping them deal with their own demons and getting rewarded for it became a enjoyable gameplay loop. Another big part of the loot is 'Runestones', these special stones which you can slot into your weapon or your armor can change your playstyle from a little to a lot. At first I dismissed these are fluff but overtime and as I got better runestones I realize they are pretty key to winning certain battles so do not ignore them like I did and use them correctly.

    I mentioned candles before right? If we are still discussing gameplay, then we must talk about the 'Wyrdness'. The wyrdness is how Conquest conceals the map. The more you traverse the maps, the more the wyrdness creeps in, the more it effects the game. Of course, there is the obvious ones like you can not see in front of you and there is nothing but a strange haze obscuring your vision literally but wydrness also triggers certain 'bad' cards to enter your deck and these are never a good thing. Bad cards can be like giving the opponent a barrier aka a shield before you can actually hit them or you do less damage or have less energy to play cards, crappy things. So you want to keep the wyrdness away so you use a limited commodity item called 'Wyrdcandles'. These special items help keep the wyrdness at bay and having high light from the wyrdcandles can actually cause good cards to show up in your deck too as opposed to the bad ones. You can also see your enemies clearly and what events/ NPCs they are guarding. Generally, it is a good idea to always have high light from Wyrdcandles but no all things are done in the light and some random encounters, important encounters mind you can only be done when you have no light and wandering in the wyrdness. It is a unique concept, similar to how torches work in 'Darkest Dungeon' and I like how they implemented it... most of the time.

    Outside of the gameplay, the game itself is rather well polished for a smaller studio. Most of the main line NPCs are fully voiced for all their dialogue and even some of the lesser character in the map have voice lines too. The soundtrack is suitably moody with an occasional hard rock, almost chanty vibe. I'll share a track with you all below that best shows that.

    The graphics of the main game are passable. Nothing ground breaking but still it is not bad. The art of the cards are nice however with some really good illustrations and effort put into it. However I did have a couple issues with slow down during the game which got progressive worst during longer runs and at one point the game completely crashed on me. One of the biggest causes for the slow down is whether you 'stun' enemies for some reason that special effect always made my frame rate tank for a couple minutes. Whilst not always game breaking, it did get annoying after awhile and with the game 'completed' I do not see any performance patches coming anytime to fix it so keep that in mind. The interface is intuitive in-game and the games has multiple modes like 'Endless Power' and 'Endless Misery' as well. I muck around in 'Endless Power' and it seem its was a stripped down/ streamlined version of the game with nothing but back to back battles and no need to progress the story. I think it would be fun to muck around in but since the story/ RPG elements was the appeal of the game for me I bet I would get bored after awhile.

Pick a card mon ami

    Overall, this is a good game and a good time especially if you love this genre like I do. The game's core structure is solid based on many of the genres tried and true tropes of turn based, knowing what the enemy's intentions are and planning ahead with your deck. The storyline is compelling enough to keep you going with a good cast of characters to help and fight for. The sound design is pretty good and it looks fine. A bit rough in places but it is not horrible. Other then the slowdown/ tanking frame rates after certain actions it runs well too. It is not a masterpiece but I had a great time and I see myself still playing even through I have now completed the game. This 'tainted grail' is actually not bad for you at all and therefore gets a RAVE from me.

AV

P.S this game is currently on sale at gog.com for only $9.99 (50% off) as of the posting of this blog.

OKAY: Ghost Song

 So since the conception of Rants & Raves; we have always had one or the other. However as I was playing and even after I completed 'Ghost Song' I came to the conclusion it could not be one or the other. I liked it but there was definitely elements of it I did not, so for the first time, instead of a RANT or a RAVE we have a brand new category. So without further ado, lets talk about our first OKAY, 'Ghost Song'

'Ghost Song' is a metriodvania developed by Old Moon and published by Humble Games in 2022. One of 'Ghost Song' greatest accomplishments is that it is a very polished game for such a small studio. It was a kickstarter darling back in 2013 and it has been a long road but the game was released on Steam and multiple consoles including Xbox Game Pass (on PC) which is how I played it. This game caught my attention when Youtuber 'Skill Up' highlighted it during one of his indie showcases which he calls 'Put this on your Radar' and when I saw it was on Xbox Game Pass (XGP) I decided to give it a go. 'Ghost Song' is one of the first games I really used my XGP subscription to play and also the first game I finished.

Now story-time. I kind of have a strange relationship with Metroidvanias. The two games that inspired it I have not really played at all. I have never played a Metroid game, not even one. It began because I picked Sega consoles as my main console growing up so I've never owned any Nintendo consoles. Heck, I still don't own any Nintendo consoles to this day. So there is a whole bunch of games I never played which were exclusive to Nintendo consoles which includes the Zelda's, the Starfox's, the Smash Bro's and the Metroid's. However, being a gamer I still know of Metroid's influences on gaming in general and I know how most Metroid games work, especially the older ones.

The other game; I can be honest I've played and it kind of got lost in the shuffle of other games I was playing and I've never gotten back to playing it, that being the seminal Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I believe I did not mind it tho it didn't enthrall me like it did so many others. Half of me wants to go back and play it again and the other half is okay letting it languish in my PS4 backlog. So it is funny that I've kind of played Metroid-vanias but I've never actually 'played' Metroid or Castlevania, the inspirations for the genre.

On top of that, one of the most popular and lauded as one of the best Metroidvanias is 'Hollow Knight' and again I've played it but it did not connect with me either and after a couple nights playing it and streaming it, I found other games to play. So it is weird that the only real Metroid-vanias I've played and really enjoyed was 'Blasphemous' and I can honestly say, I LOVE 'Blasphemous'. If I was doing RANTS & RAVES back when I was playing 'Blasphemous' it would have got a long, detailed and gushing RAVE (much like my Risk of Rain 2 one) and of course I am eagerly awaiting it's upcoming sequel. The other Metroidvania I can say I whole hearted fell in love with was  Xbox Live indie game called 'Shadow Complex' and I can honestly recommend both of these games in a heart-beat. So whilst I enjoy some games of the genre, I do not always gravitate towards the genre.

So back to 'Ghost Song', it is strange that out of all the metroidvanias I have gravitated towards, this is the first one I've played, completed and even did some achievement hunting in. However as mentioned previously, I do have to say,  that whilst I like 'Ghost Song' I can't actually say I loved it. I enjoyed 'Ghost Song' but I honestly seeing myself deleting it off my hard-drive soon so I can have more space instead of holding onto to it like games I really like. It is a good game but due to some faults with it, I can't give it a RAVE but I still think OKAY fits it.

  One of the best elements and one of the main reasons I kept playing 'Ghost Song' was its story so let's start there. You play 'Deadsuit' a mysterious amnesiac girl in a powerful exosuit. She finds herself lost at the beginning after finding herself crash landed on a mysterious planet called 'Lorian' Along the way you meet a host of people and make friends especially with another group of crash survivors. These survivors need you to find parts for their sentient spaceship so they can escape the planet and you being the only person outfitted to survive the planet take it upon yourself to help them. 'Deadsuit' and a big portion of the NPCs are also voiced which is surprising for a small indie title and they really give their all. The voice acting is very commendable and again it made the story that much more compelling. Also a very nice touch is the main creator mentioned he was inspired by Dark Souls and made it that each NPC had their own side quests and the more missions you complete for them the more you are rewarded and their stories continue to their logical endings. This is great for their lore and actually drives you to keep helping them. With the game's true ending, which I will not spoil, I really felt it took me on a journey and it was a memorable one. The story is definitely one of the best things about 'Ghost Song' and as I said, by the end I was invested and I wanted to see it to its conclusion.

Visually, for an indie game, it stands out. It uses colors wisely, characters are animated nicely, enemies are a mixture of frightful and also some are kind of cute. Areas are distinctive but at the same time it is able to merge areas into each other and still feel like its part of one world, much like the original Dark Souls. Deadsuit has a distinctive look clearly inspired by the Metroid games but has a charm of her own as well, be it in the way she is animated to always seem deep in thought and almost hurting inside but at the same time driven and determined to accomplish her tasks. As far as avatars go, I related to her and I wanted to help her achieve said goals. Again, I love the look of this game and as a fan of science fiction I enjoyed this more lofi aesthetic. The spaceships look grand but rusted, suits look worn and weathered and the world looks like it has moved on but remnants of a higher society remained. 'Ghost Song' has been described as a melancholic experience, one of self discovery and finding ones place in the world and the visuals nail it.

Another area where it does it so well is its subtle but haunting (pun intended) soundtrack. The composer of the album Grant Graham (funny how I now have 2 indie music producers I've enjoyed with first and last names that start with the same letter; the Chris Christodoulou blog is coming next! I promise) provide the perfect soundboard for this experience. From the opening intro to the softer introspective moments when traversing to the driving beats when you face off against a boss, each song really draws you into this dark, mysterious, tragic world filled with brief moments of light and laughter. Some of the sound effects can get a bit grating but nothing horrible with the exception of you used your 'sprint' too much sound which needs a better sound then a squeaky door. Unlike my last indie review for 'Indies' Lies', I had the soundtrack playing at full volume every playthrough and it still sticks with me to this day. Audio and visually, 'Ghost Song' is a RAVE.

However, it is not a RAVE and now I will begin to explain why it is not. 'Ghost Song' game mechanics are solid. Like all metroidvanias you character starts weak and as you explore you find places you can't access yet. Places you need air dashes for, or double jumps or the ability to stick to walls. 'Ghost Song' does this competently and like many games like this, they are some simple restrictions they put on you based on your level. So the more levelled you are, the most 'perks' you can have equipped and some of the most important perks are permanently added to your suit which is the way it should be.

Combat is also unique and in its own way a nice little micro-game. You have 3 main ways of surviving the harsh word of Lorian, you have your long distance gun, your special gun and your up close melee weapon. You can aim your gun to shoot certain parts and whilst its cool feature for precision aiming, it is anything but, it feels un-natural and a bit loose and wonky. I rarely relied on that. The game had a ton of variety of special guns too but sadly I only found myself relying on 2 to 3 gun types (out of multiple choices) because some of the extra gun add-ons felt like fluff. Also to equip multiple gun types, it'll draw away from your suit's power core which even when you are highly levelled is a limited resource and you are better investing it in the above perks I mentioned above. The melee weapons you can only have one at a time (which is a strange restriction) even tho again you were given multiple choices and those work in different ways too. Do you run with the heavy sledgehammer or the discus of death that you throw and it comes back at you like a boomerang. Do you rely on your big robot fist add-on and go all in or play it safe and jab them with a spear from a distance. This variety is also enhanced by one of 'Ghost Song' main innovations which is what I like to call 'Heat'. Using your gun causes it to heat up and your shots get slowly get less effective and drops off faster but if you switch to your melee weapon whilst your gun is overheating, your melee weapon will do much more damage because the heat has been transferred to it. This little back and forth brought some innovation to just shoot or slash, its a nice mechanic I appreciate to make the combat its own thing however sadly on the other side when it comes to getting attacked I feel the game really falls apart and it shows it flaws.

'Ghost Song' is a hard game but not in its like Dark Souls hard (which it was clearly inspired by). In Dark Souls, enemies have tells and very obvious ques when they will attack and give you adequate time to defend or to roll out of the way. If you get squashed, 90% of the time it is user error. 'Ghost Song' enemies have ques and tells too but here is the issue, you can't block in this game, there is no parry so your only really course of action is to use a 'slide' through as your dodge or jump and air dash out of the way. Both of these abilities have invulnerability but the window is so small it is barely noticeable. Early on, I found a perk for my suit that gave me more invulnerability for my slide and even then it was not enough and I felt myself still getting hit by multiple things and this cost me my power core to equip. I never un-equipped this perk because I could not see myself playing and enjoying myself with the provided slide.

This slide that never did want it was supposed to do lead to many cheap deaths and respawns at far away respawn places especially when it came to bosses (whom some are the cheapest of the cheap). Speaking of, quick aside, spawn places that a very, very far away from the boss arena are a thing of the past and should stay the past. From Software, the innovators of super long salty runback have even recognize that and both Elden Ring and Sekiro (their most recent games) now have you spawn almost directly outside the boss arena and that is the way it should be. When it takes up to of 4-5 mins to get back to a boss whom can kill you in 5-10 seconds, that is not fun game design. This was all compounded when I hit my first wall in this game, of the first most important parts was being guarded by a very aggressive boss who attacks constantly pegged me whilst I sliding through their attacks and sometimes one or two shoot me and then caused me to spend 5 + minutes to get back to do it all over again. This boss and another boss whom I'll go more into detail later are half of the reason why 'Ghost Song' gets an OKAY because fighting them was not fun at all. Normally a highlight in games are boss encounters, another thing Dark Souls has mastered but 'Ghost Song' every boss felt like they were over-tuned and most importantly made out of adamantium.

One particular boss, his name is etched in my memory was 'Elsom the Ogre' this particularly badly design 'boss' had you fighting in sludge which restricted your movement. spawned unlimited minions who all do big damage or slow you down if you touch them, they also put you a very small room and he used a weapon with a hit box the size of Texas. To top it all off the bullet sponge nature of this boss caused him to absorb hits that would have killed multiple enemies and he could kill you with 2-3 hits even with a maxed out life bar. He was a exercise in frustration and I ended up beating him by just face-tanking all his damage and going with a super OP weapon that was permanently overheated. No strategy, no well timed oh and ahs dodges/ slides and when I killed him I was not even that elated. I was just happy I never had to do that again. However this bosses ability to absorb obscene amount of damage is passed onto every enemy honestly. Every enemy felt they took 2 or 3 more hits to kill then it was supposed to and this was even after I had sufficiently over-levelled 'Deadsuit'. This confusing game design of making you as fragile as snowflake and all your enemies icebergs in the Antarctic is why I can't wholly recommend 'Ghost Song' to most people because I like dying in video games, its part of my slogan but even I was a bit over it after awhile. I see from a lot of other reviews from fellow gamers say that the bullet sponge enemies really are a problem with this game.

The bad game design unfortunately continues post lack luster boss battles too. Once you defeated bosses you normally get one of the parts you need to fix the getaway spaceship however the game decide that once you have one of these 5 parts, it will artificially inflate the game time for you by disabling the fast travel option so you need to make your way all the way back to the crash site camp and sometimes the part was found 20-30 mins away from your final destination. Along the way it'll purposely throw some of the most annoying regular enemies at you too and they come in droves. Die on the way back and most of the time you will because you exhausted all your healing items on overpowered bosses and well you better hope you were close to one of the rather sparse save spots. Doing this runback/ drop off once or twice might have been a change in your game plan and made you go, this is a challenge but making you do it 5 times was just un-necessary and a slight against the player and disrespect of their time. It truly felt like a way to make the game longer and it has been used before in other indie games, Mortal Shell comes to mind but in Mortal Shell, the runback was shorter, you had to do less of them (3 to be exact) and the challenge wasn't as hard because unlike 'Ghost Song' you could actually dodge things and not die. Yes, in hindsight, this oversight and design choice and some of the other things I will mention really took 'Ghost Song' from a RAVE to just OKAY.

More contributing factors were certain side quests did not have decent pay-offs for the time invested in them (going back to Elsom, killing him did not even give you an important part but just a perk for your suit WTF), some of the achievements seem half-baked and un-inspired and 'Deadsuit's overall clunk-ness when you were traversing really drags the game down. In Metroidvanias you need to nimble and be able to make and time perfect jumps and cross ledges and 'Deadsuit' would sometimes be aiming and jumping in the wrong direction and certain jumping challenges were very frustrating when that happened. The first 2 are kind of nit-picky I won't lie but the last one is very important to the feel of the game and it just made you feel clunky and took away from your enjoyment.

In conclusion; I enjoyed 'Ghost Song', the fact I played it for free thanks to XGP definitely contributed to me giving it a chance and playing it for as long as I did. Its atmosphere, the music and the narrative are all top notch and the fact it was made by such a small team is commendable. You could tell this was truly a passion project and the fact it took so long to come out showed they took their time with it. However it gets so many of the fundamentals of a good game in this genre in this game wrong. No matter how strong you make your character, you still die to small hits and the enemies on the other hand are overpowered. It would be cool if despite being weak you could still avoid said life stealing attacks but the game is clunky and un-responsive to the point you need to un-matural reflexes, spent a lot of time playing it or just plain luck on your side. Half of the fun in a metroidvania is growing stronger and traversing to new places and even the traversing feels restricted and you truly do not feel like you are in control of your character. If you could play it for free like I did, I would say definitely give it a go especially if you enjoyed these type of games but for a lot of people I'll say, definitely do your research before investing in it. I even recommend playing the game at a 'easier' setting so the enemies might not be as tanky. I picked the default difficulty and I won't lie, 3/4 through my playthrough I wish I did not. 'Ghost Song' is a haunting, beautiful sober journey and it wears it inspirations proudly and at its core it is a good game but not all will enjoy it and honestly even through I finished it and enjoyed myself, it was just OKAY to me.

AV