No Business like Souls Business.
The Soulslike genre casts a wide net of games both big and small that are looking to offer their own take on FromSoft’s beloved formula. Dark Souls, and especially that of Elden Ring, have crafted worlds that are begging to be explored, bosses that are majestic and yet horrifying, to mysteries that require you to put the pieces together to grasp what is before you. Shattered: Tale of the Forgotten King is the latest to take on the mantle of being yet another Dark Souls clone, one that is filled to the brim with ambition and inspiration, but sadly just doesn’t measure up.
Redlock Studio’s release has all the hallmarks of what is present to be considered a Dark Souls clone. You have a wide variety of interlocking shortcuts to discover across its many environments, increasingly difficult foes that will see you mastering the dodging and parrying systems, to its story being rolled out through obtuse lore entries of convoluted descriptors across a wealth of mysterious items and objects. There are also the notable rest spots that replenish not only your health but respawn the threats that lurk all around you. You’ll also have a hub location to return back to that will see you upgrading your weapons and leveling yourself up to become faster, stronger, and better.
First and foremost, Shattered: Tale of the Forgotten King is simply gorgeous. Its open world is just as dark and moody as it is colorful and awe-inspiring. I lost track of how many screenshots I took because I was so in love with what this game does visually. I do wish I could gush more about this game and what it executes on, but sadly, that is where my high praise ends because, simply put, Shattered feels incredibly unfinished, unrewarding, and empty.
The story that is present is largely incoherent and rarely engaging. Now, it’s presented fine enough, with gorgeous art as you interact with various characters, but there simply isn’t much here to really grab onto or at least written in a way where it pulls you in. You’ll hear talk about some disappeared King and a class of beings called the Demiurge, which you’ll encounter at various points, but so much of its story feels like a five-minute concept spread far too thin. Maybe it’s the writing or maybe it's the translation, but it’s hard to know as there are a few passages that feel as if it was written by someone who doesn’t fully have a grasp of the English language.
The game sets you on your path as a wanderer, one who has lost their memory, embarking on a journey across its broken and corrupted land to track down the titular forgotten king in order to make sense of your origins and discover just who you are. You’ll meet a wealth of characters all around you, including one that hitches a ride upon your back and is essentially the lore explainer for your character when it requires you to know certain things. All of these characters give you bits and pieces of a much larger picture as you interact with them, even if each character feels as if they are speaking from the same voice. There is rarely a difference in their personalities to differentiate between the lot.
Leading up to the game’s finale, I just wasn’t invested whatsoever and simply pushed ahead to see if that would change. Sadly, it simply didn't. Even my ending was unsatisfying; a visual comparison of the infamous IT Crowd scene of “Turn it off and turn on again”. It made sense narratively, or what I could make of it anyway, but was so incredibly abrupt that I was in shock at how it just.. ended. I’ll make note that there are a few different endings depending on performing different tasks, as well as a joke ending that can see the game’s credits roll in about an hour that I may or may not have accidentally stumbled across.
One of the game’s biggest departures from the Souls formula is that Shattered has a great deal of platforming, something that wouldn’t really be a thing until Elden Ring. On occasion, the game will shift to a side-scrolling angle, which was really cool until it wasn’t. The platforming can be a bit unwieldy because of how floaty your jumping and maneuvering can be, and the camera angle that turns the game into a sidescrolling adventure can often have you nearly jumping off a cliff when it transfers from one perspective to the next. This angle can also feel limited in what you can see and feels almost too zoomed-in at times, but thankfully, not always. Had jumping had a bit more weight to it and the camera pulled back in some places just a bit to give you more room to see what is around you, then I think there could have been something here as several games adapting the Souls formula have succeeded as a side-scroller before. I do have to give the team credit for trying to combine both types of games here, even if it is to limited success.
Shattered’s two biggest components are its open world and its combat, and while both have their positives, and can be very enjoyable, their negatives sadly outweigh them greatly. I do feel that if one would have been far better than the other, I might be able to forgive some aspects of the lesser, but that just isn’t the case here. To get on track, let’s dive into its open-world first. A short while into the game’s opening moments, you’ll emerge from the dark and take in this bright and colorful vista that is a sight to see. Pretty much anywhere you can see, you can go. There are certainly some limits, and some teleporters that will allow you to traverse large gaps, but there is a vast amount of freedom to take in regardless. While there is a map to crudely navigate where you’ll go, it hinges on a lot of large landmarks to guide your path or various beams of light that shoot up into the sky. Thankfully, the map has a compass indicator of where you’re facing, which was a godsend.
Shattered’s main issue with its open world is that while there are places to go, bases to conquer, and dungeons to discover, you never feel that sense of discovery or are rewarded for any sort of exploration. Most open world games such as Elden Ring of Breath of the Wild often reward you for going off the beaten path, but you never once feel that here as anything you can find is often part of the main path anyway. There are also large areas that feel ripe for some sort of encounter or story-moment to take place there but are strangely barren and devoid of anything. It’s a stunning open world that is extremely pretty and wonderfully crafted in its aesthetic, but while there are places to travel to, the path there can often make its world feel like little more than a mere background that is large enough to space its locations apart than anything else. It’s a shame as this world feels perfect for moments of discovery and exploration, but there is rarely anything rewarding you to do so. I will note that the vehicle you unlock at the start of the game speeds up so much of the game’s exploration, although I do wish I could jump in it.
Apart from that emptiness, the more contained environments are fantastic. These are far similar to the more traditional Dark Souls environments with numerous paths that eventually connect in ways you likely weren’t expecting. Each themed location is often breathtaking in its aesthetic and design and I really enjoyed every single dungeon or area that you could explore here. While not consistent, nearly everything here felt like it had a point or a purpose to its design. The shortcuts would unlock a faster way back should you die and you’ll often find yourself using them over and over again, especially those that are next to the rest spots to recoup your health, or the gates that return you back to the hub location. Enemy placement isn’t always great however and showcases the inexperience of the team, and some enemy types have a teleporting attack that is abused by their placement, and this happens a lot.
Shattered’s environments consist of its large open world, the dungeons where you’ll encounter the Demiurge bosses, and then towers that feature their own mid-tier bosses as well. The defeating of these and the major story bosses are how the endings work, so you’ll want to keep that in mind. These mid-tier bosses are repeated encounters of largely the same foe, with a few additional quirks to how they operate. You’ll also stumble upon other mid-tier bosses called Strangers that feel a bit more varied but are still largely the same encounter. These are less telegraphed in where they occur, but when you step into certain rooms, you’ll be able to tell that they are nearby.
The story bosses themselves are fewer than I had expected, especially as the game dives into talking about more Demiurges than we end up fighting. There are three overall main encounters and while the last two have a very business as usual approach, it’s the first encounter that is the game’s best and sometimes worst challenge. This encounter, pictured above, has some fantastic ideas and a few gimmicks that almost gives it a Destiny-like flavor to how you need to perform certain actions in order to really push the fight along. You’ll dodge slamming hands or electrical bolts, to enemies that will spawn on each side of the arena. The problem is that more often than not, they are performing their actions so randomly that most of their attacks will overlap with one another.
I love how this boss is designed, but the execution of how it attacks makes it far harder than it needs to be when you often have to take damage to dodge something else because the randomness of it caused you to. And, during the second phase, it is very easy to fall off the center podium when jumping as the camera spins around but your character will not, causing you to fall off and restart the entire fight all over again. And, the first time I had jumped to that podium, my character hit what seemed like an invisible wall. This happened twice, making me think that the podium was not part of the fight until I tried it from the other side, something that I had to discover by watching a tutorial on the boss. I also had several attempts where certain mechanics repeated one after another to where I didn’t have a chance to even do damage to it for quite some time, whereas some tries would be nothing but damage phases.
Shattered’s combat is Dark Souls in a nutshell, with little to really make it its own thing. You’ll dodge, parry, and use stamina to pile on each consecutive attack. You’ll swing to stun enemies and use your movement to make space between you and your attacker. If you get in a nice clean shot to their backside, you’ll perform a heavy attack animation that does considerable damage. While combat is executed well enough, especially since it’s not reinventing the wheel, it lacks any sense of weight and is so incredibly floaty that you’ll never have any sense of feeling that you’re hitting a damn thing. I’ve played games before where combat lacks that oomph to make it feel like your hits are actually hitting, but Shattered takes the cake and there is no single sensation of tactile response that your swings are even connecting. If there was meant to be any sort of rumble in the Dual Sense, I simply wasn’t feeling it. You’ll sometimes see enemies flinch, but that often won’t really mean anything as several will still keep attacking through it, regardless of your onslaught.
Combat is handled through a variety of weapons, but everything you can wield is pretty much the exact same sword that feels no different than the next, with maybe one that I found that did feel a bit faster but was far weaker than the others. You do have access to a few spells, but as they were either too weak to use or only worked up close, I couldn’t find a reason to use them when my sword was significantly better. Had there been more weapon and magic variety as opposed to what is offered, then I think I’d be having a much different discussion here as what is present in Shattered feels far too minimalistic and narrow.
Part of where combat suffers as well is due to the severe lack of enemy variety. You'll have a few types that deal magic or some form of ranged attack, but they are so few and far between all the sword enemies that are just everywhere. It causes a great of encounters to feel repeated far more than they should be. You'll have a few teleporting enemies that shake up combat here and there, but I only encountered them maybe a half dozen times. I do enjoy the magical foes that lay down a purple area of attack spells since they caused a bit of urgency in how I would approach them, whereas everything else is the same slower engagement you'll find everywhere. I will say that I really like most of the enemy designs here and find what they do to be fundamentally solid, but you’ll travel to new locations and see so much of them just recycled that it starts to feel like they are just copied and pasted into new locations instead of new locations feeling genuinely new.
Whether it was exploring or taking in the game’s combat, I experienced a vast arrangement of glitches and issues. I fell through the map nearly a dozen times, as well as got stuck in parts of the environment that looked as if you can climb or explore in and around them, but more often than not you will get stuck behind something that is too high to jump back out of. I also had the game load me into a new zone ahead of a door I was meant to unlock to allow me to backtrack. I ended up having to go back through the area and reenter to let me hit the switch and nab a crafting upgrade in the process. The game locked up on me three times during the second boss, and while I wouldn’t have really cared, each of those crashes was when I would finally beat him, making me actually defeat him a total of four times across some 40 or 50 attempts. I’m not going to lie, when it crashed the third time, I took a full two days to think about even continuing. I also experienced some really poor framerate issues during the final boss that thankfully didn’t result in me dieing, but were annoying nonetheless. I had one mid-tier boss not recognize that I was even there and just stood there as I defeated him, but that glitch was pretty much welcomed in my opinion.
Shattered: Tale of the Forgotten King had been in Early Access for quite a while on PC, and checking out footage of that version, a lot of my issues now were still present then, showing that this game just didn't see any sort of polish or fixes when making its way to consoles. I think my biggest problem with the title comes from seeing its potential just not realized here. I adore the game’s world but want more out of exploring it. I think combat is fast and thrilling but lacks the weight to make it feel engaging. Its story initially sounds interesting, but never gets there in the end, or really anywhere along the journey. Shattered is a game that feels as if it’s stuck in the conceptualized state, where it’s trying to figure out its ideas and pacing, and how you interact with its world and characters. I don’t think it’s a bad game in any respect, because I did have genuine moments of fun here, but this is a game that needs its focus and vision to be realized in order to be something that is worthy to be remembered as not just another failed Dark Souls clone.
Developer - Redlock Studio. Publisher - Redlock Studio. Released - March 30th, 2022. (PC Early Access 2019) Available On - PS4/PS5, Switch, PC. Rated - (E 10+) Fantasy Violence. Platform Reviewed - PS5. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.