One highly emotional confrontation, in particular, demonstrates the game's capacity to implicate you in the protagonist's desperate state of mind: after dispatching one of the main villains, an insistent QTE requires you to finish her off, the boundaries between necessary violence and excessive bloodlust dangerously blurring. Instead, they're handled with elegance and a measure of humanity, so that they organically mesh with the fabric of that heathen realm.

To the developers' credit, these subplots are not exploited for their shock value. And the most memorable of these skirmishes, a fever-dream clash with a hooded figure that induces surreal hallucinations, is among the most gloriously unhinged videogame sequences I've experienced in recent memory.Īs Olle inches closer to his final destination (the brisk journey should take no more than five or six hours), the story ramps up the bleakness, ushering themes of infanticide, mob violence, ritual sacrifice. On another, a demonic violinist conjured up deadly melodies in the middle of a placid lake, as I was crouching from boulder to boulder to evade his sonic blast. On one occasion, I faced a succubus hovering high above the trees and shielding herself with the corpses of her former lovers. It's not the rote mechanics so much as the grim inventiveness of their staging that makes these rare encounters so captivating.

After Olle discovers a sphere of pure light, he employs the magical artefact not just to illuminate the way or clear the path from thorny bramble that slithers away from its radiance, but also as a projectile to strike at enemies' weak points, in a manner reminiscent of Amicia's sling from A Plague Tale. Combat fares significantly better, so it's unfortunate that it's introduced relatively late and reserved exclusively for the occasional boss fight against the Mountain King's nightmarish lieutenants.

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