Decay of Logos (Nintendo Switch) Review

Decay of Logos is Dark Souls. Its pointy-eared heroine starts slaying enemies the moment this begins, but she isn't really given an explanation as to why she must do so, with NPCs and pieces of lore providing tiny samples of the story. Battles are purposely slow, revolve around carefully reading the opponent to decide when to strike, with the player using light and heavy attacks, blocks, parries, and evasion moves, while also being mindful of the stamina bar. The atmosphere is also quite bleak, and the game throws you into a relatively open world, and doesn't hold your hand. Finally, the whole thing is unrelenting. You'll die, and die a lot. That's where the similarities end…

From the various soulslikes this critic has experienced throughout the years, this is definitely one of the most… well, souls-like. Unfortunately, it makes almost every single possible mistake one could make while creating such a thing. First of all, the level of unbalance is off the charts. Most, if not every single foe, need way too many hits to go down, something that makes combat more tedious than challenging. Difficulty-wise this isn't one of the toughest around, but the controls are somewhat unresponsive, evasion moves are unreliable, and the lock-on feature frequently does whatever it feels like, especially when fighting against enormous enemies, which have you moving close to their feet. Most importantly, using weapons just isn't fun.

Death brings forth a penalty that decreases your stats, with additional deaths lowering them more and more. This is easily fixable by paying a visit to the local resting point. Why have that, though? Does it make things more enjoyable? No, in practice it's a major source of irritation. First of all, going back to said resting points can take a lot of time. There's a mountable elk that follows you around, but it's not really as fast as expected, as it basically runs at the same speed as the heroine, but doesn't need to rest every two seconds to regain its stamina. Secondly, why have resting points, as well as praying points that save the game, but don't let you rest?

The next problem is the general lack of immersion and incentive. Decay of Logos is generally a good-looking product. Nothing spectacular, mind you, but the various decrepit dungeons or dark caverns, and the open fields or misty swamps you'll see are a definitely a few steps above what you normally see in Made-in-Unity Indie Game #6473. It's all too generic, however. Just a series of areas, which are pretty, but don't really have a strong sense of place. The lack of handholding is also badly handled here. Unlike in Dark Souls, where you don't know where to go, but are cleverly pushed to the right direction through its genius level design, here you simply don't know. This results in the player exploring around, and hitting dead end after dead end, which adds lots of backtracking.

There are many little issues here that could fill a whole page. In the end, though, the biggest one is simply the lack of polish. After almost two years from its original PC release, Decay of Logos remains a highly problematic piece of software, which makes it hard to imagine how much worse this was in the beginning. Apart from the aforementioned balance issues, or the clunky feel of the weapons and so on, there are plenty of bugs walking around the place, ruining what little fun one could have here.

Sword swings that don't hit their targets; hitboxes that work whenever they feel like; lock-ons that deny locking-on; simple items like doors killing you instantly because… reasons; UI glitches and freezes, and many, many more. The worst by far, was the disappearance of items stored in the elk, which acts as a small, secondary inventory. Not only because the idea of losing an item is of course irritating on its own, but mostly because of how easy it was for that bug to appear. So often, in fact, that the one writing this lost about five or so unique pieces of equipment in a matter of minutes, and essentially lost the will to keep on playing…