The Myth of a Godslayer
Razin' Klain
The Myth of a Godslayer [which is a mouthful, and will be referred to as simply Godslayer for the remainder] is a top-down action RPG inspired by Beyond Oasis and its sequel. You play as Klain, a Divine Warrior of the God of Destruction, Norphis, sent to the recently discovered New World to stake your clan’s claim on exploitable territory. After massacring an indigenous settlement and committing a little light murder back home, he gets his hands on a few ancient divine relics, and begins his pursuit of conquest and vengeance.
Most of the game takes place in the New World, consisting of a large overworld split into distinct biomes, each riddled with caves and secrets, each with a large dungeon to open and complete, and each with a teleportation arch that allows fast travel between regions and back to the hub city of Pandora. Control of the arch is what determines territorial claims, and your primary goal, dictated by your tyrannical God-boss, is to seize every territory of the New World and drive out the forces of the two other divine rulers of Pandora.
But, as you might expect, even getting into those other biomes isn’t as simple as it sounds, and your path is obstructed in ways that mere mortal humans can’t overcome without help. Luckily, as you explore, you eventually make contact with the now-exiled former god-rulers of the city, who offer you a taste of their elemental powers in exchange for an oath to depose your evil sovereign. The stele that let you draw more divine power from the old gods are generally found in the deepest parts of the regional dungeons, and so your two main goals are woven together – invade and conquer a region, scour it for resources and uncover the next stele, letting you expand your skill tree and grow strong enough to press further.
Godslayer’s progression hinges mostly on special artifacts doled out throughout the adventure, but it’s unlike a typical Zelda structure in that you don’t find these artifacts midway through a dungeon. You usually receive it before, and then spend the entirety of the dungeon using it for puzzles. Godslayer’s artifacts are also extremely useful in combat. The very first one you get is a simple paralyzing jolt that remains handy throughout the game, and later powers give you a frost clone, a charging shoulder tackle, even the ability to stop time. Some enemies are especially weak to certain elements or attacks, and using the right artifact on them can make them temporarily vulnerable, a state where they take double damage from all attacks. Artifacts are chosen from a radial menu, which keeps the menu fatigue to a minimum even when puzzles require a lot of swapping back and forth.
Instead of the artifacts, your mid-dungeon rewards are all special elemental moves, which tie in with the combat even more directly. The basic combat itself is surprisingly robust, with your standard combo augmented by a dedicated dodge and a handful of special attacks performed with almost fighting game-style inputs. A double tap in any direction before an attack gives you a piercing lunge that emits a shockwave from the tip of your sword through a line of enemies. A full circle followed by an attack gives you a powerful 360 spin that knocks most enemies away. The most important is back-forward-attack, which performs an uppercut that launches enemies into the air, causing them to become vulnerable just like an elemental weakness, and staggering them so you can finish them off quickly.
The elemental moves found in dungeons overlap with those special inputs, unleashing even more powerful effects, in some cases massively shifting the course of a fight. The water-elemental lunge incorporates a wide spin that poisons any enemy hit, for example, while the lighting variant of the throw attack obliterates anything within several paces in front of you with a chain of explosive bolts. Both artifact uses and elemental moves draw from a pool of stamina, which constantly regenerates but has a lengthy cooldown if you deplete it fully, a system that encourages you to use both regularly to spice up and simplify encounters but not spam them mindlessly. Finally, using those elemental moves gives you charge tokens of the corresponding element – collect three, and you can do a spin attack to unleash a massive, screen-wide ultimate, like crashing meteors or a healing siphon reminiscent of Symphony of the Night’s Soul Steal. If you have one of each element, you combine the old gods’ power into a devastating whirlwind of elemental damage.
It’s good that the combat ends up being pretty consistently engaging because there’s a lot of combat. As you roam around the overworld, not only will enemies and resource collection points respawn, you’ll occasionally encounter random events like buffed or debuffed enemies, traveling merchants, bands of elite warriors from rival clans. Some of the events are optional challenges – miniboss variants of regional enemies, invading hordes streaming through portals, and so on, and if you succeed, you’ll earn a few reputation points, eventually improving your rank within Pandora and unlocking further access to shop inventories and crafting services. At about the midway point in the story, you also get access to the Arena in Pandora, which has a respectable amount of extra challenges and rewards for you to grind through, including tougher boss refights and duels.
You also have to do a little combat gauntlet both to conquer new territories, and to defend currently held territories that are under assault. I say ‘little’ but this is the one point in the game where I think it does start to wear out its welcome a bit. I don’t mind the conquering part, which pits you against multiple waves of elite troops from the defending faction, alongside friendly forces, which is a cute touch, and punctuated by their own random events like enemy grenade barrages or friendly supply drops, and endcapped by boss fights against rival Divine Warriors.
What I didn’t like as much were the defenses – these happen randomly, with an alert flashing across your screen, and then you have what I assume is either a set amount of time or set number of screen transitions to drop whatever you’re doing, find the nearest portal, teleport to the region being threatened, and do another wave-based gauntlet. And another boss fight. It’s just too much interruption, too much effort required, and the only reward is that you don’t lose the things you’ve already kind of earned. Thankfully, the attacks aren’t incessant, they don’t seem to happen at all when you’re in a dungeon or the like, and there’s a certain point in the story where it satisfyingly shifts gears a bit, but it remains… if not a headache, at least the ever-looming anxiety of a potential headache, and put me off of doing too much optional running around the overworld in the mid-game portion.
Which is a shame because the side quests and variety of secrets and optional upgrades are really impressive. There’s multiple optional late-game dungeons, scrolls that buff each of the elemental attacks, all sorts of accessories that let you focus on a damage type or shrug off a status you really don’t want to deal with, and that’s without even completing the Arena or maxing your reputation to unlock the final craftable gear. Weapons and armor upgrades tend to be more than just straight numerical advantages, usually having some innate bonus attributes of their own, and then some number of colored gem slots that let you add a handful of bonuses of your own choosing for a custom build.
Speaking of dungeons, they are substantial, hold some respectably tough puzzles, and feel paced and structured to really wring out a lot of clever ideas from the artifact abilities. The demo that I played during Next Fest last year was pretty much just the first major dungeon, and that was enough to sell me on picking up the game at release.
Also worth noting is the quality of the story and the writing. Godslayer has a darker tone than most comparable titles, but its characters and style keep it from being oppressive or embarrassingly edgy. There’s a lot of swearing, for example, but none of it stands out as out-of-character or inappropriate. Characters have their own tone, they come across very well, and I ended up really liking the city and setting in general. The main quest has several worthwhile twists, and I enjoyed the denouement after the ending, presumably setting up a sequel hook.
The graphics and audio are also much higher quality than you might expect from a quick glance. The large sprites are well animated, very readable, and highly expressive. None of the music stood out to me as especially memorable or exciting but it was a consistently fitting soundtrack for the areas. Maybe my favorite part of the art were the big character portraits, which had a sort of unpolished flatness to the colors but were otherwise endearing in an amateurish way.
The game has multiple difficulty levels, and I started out on Normal, but I found the difficulty dropping off significantly by about midgame, and probably would have been happier on Hard. Unfortunately, you can only turn difficulty down mid-playthrough, and not up, so that’ll have to wait for a future replay. Part of the problem is the ease with which you can just kind of tank hits and then soak the damage back with life leach accessories later on, plus consumables, which I had a massive stockpile of by endgame from not using them earlier. But I also found that some of the late-game content felt scaled more appropriately for post-game, and doing all of the major optional stuff drove me to the level cap, after which I positively crushed the intended final dungeon. I guess it’s good that the final dungeon isn’t scaled to punish you for not doing all the extra stuff, but maybe that level cap should’ve just been a tad lower.
The Myth of a Godslayer is an all-around excellent action adventure RPG with a lot of charm and just about a perfect amount of content to feel fully-featured without edging into bloat. I’d strongly recommend it for any fans of the Oasis games, top-down Zeldas, or just action RPGs in general.
The Myth of a Godslayer can be purchased on Steam.