Titan Souls

[Lacoste]

 
Between our world and the world beyond lie the Titan Souls, the spiritual source and sum of all living things. Now scattered amongst the ruins and guarded by the idle titans charged with their care, a solitary hero armed with but a single arrow is once again assembling shards of the Titan Soul in a quest for truth and power.
Titan Souls tells the story of a nameless warrior’s quest to bring down the ancient titans with nothing but a single, indestructible arrow. There are no lesser classes of enemies, no crafting, no grinding and no side quests -- just you and the two dozen titans scattered throughout the land awaiting your challenge.

With no more than a bow and a single arrow, Titan Souls’ nameless child protagonist is a pure symbol of skill over style. He’s a small, barefoot, and seemingly insignificant David in the 16-bit shadows cast by the many hulking Golaiths that tower over him. And fittingly, just like the two-dimensional sprite of this boy,Titan Souls is itself an unassuming and short expression of mechanical excellence. Though the sparse fiction of its fantasy world takes a backseat to the exacting top-down arcade-style boss battles, felling the gargantuan creatures with feats of precision is an intense gauntlet where one mistake means instant death. Titan Souls’ great challenge is mastering these arenas and besting your own past performances in a game of escalating difficulty – and it’s a greatly rewarding experience.



 

Gameplay Trailer
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The spartan nature of Titan Souls is best summed up by the way it demands that you make every shot count. You have a bow and the ability to fire one single arrow – the longer you draw the bow, the further and faster the arrow travels – but the farther you shoot it, the tougher it is to retrieve and reuse. You can walk, run, or roll to go pick it up, or use your Force-like will to pull it back to you (at the cost of planting your feet). That’s it. This is your entire toolkit when tackling creatures that spit fire, swing boulder-sized maces, and conjure all sorts of lethal magical forces.
And though scant in ways to interact with the world, what’s here is snappy and fluid. I always felt as nimble and precise as the boy on screen appears, which is necessary when you’re running for your fragile life while waiting for that golden window to appear. The simplicity is refreshing, as it scoops out the fat that so many games layer on with so many variables and strategies.
Here, there is only one strategy: Learn where to fire your arrow and practice until you hit your mark. Each clash with the varied range of titans is excellently 
That same scarcity applies to the very loose story that ties it all together. It’s told through a few ambiguous cutscenes, cryptic murals etched into stone, and a single encounter that offers some narrative pseudo-explanation. Titan Souls is less a world in which one can get lost and more an obstacle course of mechanically challenging boss battles, though the superbly soothing acoustic strings that create its soundtrack make the repeated trek between fights much more enjoyable.



 

Evolution Trailer
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But as so much of Titan Souls is trial and error, and death comes so quickly and repeatedly, developer Acid Nerve has wisely scattered checkpoints throughout the smaller environments, minimizing what could otherwise be an immensely tedious journey back to an encounter. I found one or two battles to still be a noticeable shade too far from their respective checkpoints – a 10 to 15-second run – but the majority of the fights are helpfully just a few seconds away after death, which I absolutely appreciated when a titan ostensibly had my number.
Yet through perseverance and improvement, I conquered all of Titan Souls’ nearly two dozen titular beings in approximately four hours. And with all said and done, I admit to wishing there were more of these creative engagements to test myself against – that’s less a slight toward Titan Souls and more a symptom of the great satisfaction to be enjoyed from each victory.