Yes, I really am doing this. Yes, this is a PlayStation 2 Game. Yes I am recommending it.
I found this game at a second hand games shop towards the end of August. I have played it before, but I was probably around 10 years old when I did, and had some understandable problems with the game as a kid that pretty much stopped me in my tracks in some of the larger puzzle box rooms. I have vivid memories of the first big fight vs Father in the grand hall (that takes place after a gauntlet of sharp things flying at you, with no place to heal before the fight.) And the large bird-cage like room. But thats about as far as my previous memories hold up about this game.
It has since been almost 2 decades, and I’ve since beaten a bunch of platformer heavy games and games with tricky fight stuff, so I felt a little bit more confident coming into the game now.
And boy is it jank.
This game really does a fantastic job at showing it’s age. I can’t blame it for that though, it came out in like 2003, only a couple years after the PS2 did, and while it does have a lot of platformer games that did it right to draw inspiration from, it also had a lot of platformer games that did things horribly horribly wrong too.
In terms of platforming, the jump and dodge button are bound together on X, and work contextually based on if you’re standing still, near a ledge or enemy, or on a solid surface. That leads to some cases where you’re trying to roll but end up jumping instead. The “Special Action” button, R1, is also bound to so many different things. It’s your block/parry button, it’s your wall run, pole swing, and basically everything else other than basic jump/dodge and attack/dagger. Whether you wall run or wall climb is dependent on your angle against the wall, and to be bluntly honest, about 10% of the time you’re gonna run towards the edge and mantle down it instead of wall running anyway.
In terms of combat, the hitboxes are… weird. It’s very easy to get stuck against walls and not be able to run between the whale pussy sized gap between two enemies beacuse they both just jank into you and hold you in place. You have to hold R1 to block, but also to run up walls, and it was never clear to me which one was being used. If you’re on the floor, you must tap X or Square to get up because if you hold R1 (which you were already doing before that leg sweep attack knocked you down), you go into parrying whilst laying down, and the length of the animation to both start and stop that parry provide a perfect opportunity for more enemies to hit you. It’s very very easy to get jugglefucked into taking 4-8 hits in quick succession when you get knocked over.
This game is also very committal. It doesn’t have input buffering, and button mashing will very easily make you fail jumps or fights. Especially wall jumps, where you must press the button the moment you hit the wall, and not a second sooner or later, or the wall jump fails. It’s like a quarter second window or something, but if you’re playing with a wireless controller, this is going to cause you problems. You can also be attacked out of confirming your kills, beacuse this game likes to force you to dagger downed enemies to kill them, which is like a 2 second animation, and if you don’t do that then they get back up again. All in all, just pay attention to what attacks are going on around you, don’t be afraid to run away in fights, and if you can put the right amount of distance between you and the enemies, you can holster with Circle and hold R1 at a fountain for a cheeky mid-fight heal.
The game’s main mechanic is that you can stop and reverse time. Every enemy you kill refills a sand tank, and holding L1 with a sand tank will undo up to about 10 seconds, or as far back as your last kill. This lets you undo bad platforming mistakes, deaths, falling, or the aformentioned jugglefucking.
My last gripe with the game is the camera and cutscenes, which while not the worst, they really do like to fight you for control over the camera. Every room has a fixed camera position that you can view with R2, and a lot of segments wrangle the camera into a limited bubble around you that you can’t really control. This makes some platforming stuff awkward and forces you to essentially place a huge amount of trust in the level designers that things will just work. As for cutscenes, this game looooooves being “cinematic”. Any time you enter a new room, the camera will be taken and flown around to see whats there and where the exit is. Any time you finish a fight, the camera flashes to you putting away your sword before letting you continue. It gets to be a bit much.
But the game is also only about 5-8 hours long, so the wonderful jank doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.
For as clumsy as it feels, it is still a fun experience and I do recommend giving it a go if you’ve got a second hand game shop anywhere nearby or a dumped PS2 rom to use on your computer. It still holds up in terms of story and characters, and for a PS2 game in 2025, it’s a surprisingly fun day.
CeX: https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?id=3307210146588 £3.00
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