Sadly not about actual foxes, but a very compelling detective metroidvania nontheless! Though this game isn’t for the faint of heart, it’s not a horror game, but it is incredibly lovecraftian. Lots of creepy locales and tentacles amongst the stuff that wants to kill you, oh and if you’re arachnophobic, you might wanna hold off unfortunately, there is only one spider, but it’s quite big.
I usually decide on games either by scanning through storefront recommendations, or following some YouTube creators. In this case it’s the latter, I saw both Wanderbots and Materwelonz playing this game on the same day, and the video titles intrigued me, so I gave it a check out. Was worried that the top review was negative citing weird controls, but honestly I didn’t have any issues with the controls at all, at worst I encountered a few bugs (including one softlock) but the game autosaves so frequently that it didn’t really case a problem.
You play as Benedict Fox, a detective and heretic who made a deal with the devil, or had said devil forced on him? It’s kinda unclear, but you learn very early on (like, from the tutorial) that you’re not alone. You have a Voidling Companion who acts as your tentacle monster friend that helps you to traverse the world and fight the enemies. As you defeat enemies, you gather ink, which you can use to improve your connection to the Companion and learn new skills.
But you may notice from the quaint little mansion that you start off in that there doesn’t seem to be much going on, especially of the eldrich variety, and thats because you’re investigating who Fox’s father was, and to continue the investigation, the Companion helps you to navigate through Father’s Limbo. This is where the meat of the game takes place and where the true danger lays.
The game does have some combat, but beyond one boss fight and a couple arena fights, it’s not the main focus of the game. You have a dagger that deals some damage to enemies, but is mostly for charging your flare gun, and a flare gun that deals a lot of damage, but has limited ammo and needs to be recharged by striking foes with the dagger. You also start with a parry ability that lets you block incoming damage, and even counter attack or reflect bullets if timed perfectly. Most enemies deal only 1 damage, and you start with 4 health, similar to games like Hollow Knight. You do have healing in the form of estus flasks, and those provide either 1 HP when you tap the button, or a full heal over time for holding it. There is a merchant that can upgrade the tap healing though, which I do recommend picking up early.
There are some puzzles in this game that use a code system that unlike Tunic, actually existed in the real world, and foreknowledge of that may lend itself to some potential sequence breaking, though it didn’t really pose too much of an issue for me, all the knowledge you need to complete this game can be found in notes scattered around Limbo.
Note from after playing the game: This game does not have custom map markers, or in most cases map markers at all, however there is a difficulty setting for “Exploration Difficulty”. By default this will put a question mark against unexplored map edges. You can crank this difficulty up to remove those question marks, but IMO the best experience would be to crank this setting down to “I don’t like being lost.” This will replace the question marks with the specific kind of barrier preventing you from passing the map border. I did not realise this until very late in the game (and subsequently do not know if this setting also guides you towards story critical items, unfortunately), but having to remember which doors use which locks is difficult to say the least.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2023360 £20.99
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