GOTY 2021 mini reviews: Flynn: Son of Crimson (Patreon)

(brandon:) Continuing my series of mini-"reviews" of games I had to play to judge for competition. I chose this one because it seemed like a ~vania.

--

What's the game about?
This is indeed a ~vania of a sort, but much lighter. It's more of a gated experience where new areas are open with new powers, but in a very node-based way. there's no big continuous castle/map like there is in metroid or similar. Ultimately it winds up being more of a platforming hack and slash than a ~vania as a result. there are only three kinds of things to collect (health, money, relics) and so that kind of collection element is out too.

What is it like to play?

You're Flynn, yet another inheritor of the Sword of Destiny, which you must power up to take on the big bad who's spreading a plague throughout the land, and who has stolen your guardian dog's spirit powers. You take up the mantle of your grandfather (or somebody like that? I forget) and go off to beat the baddies.

So yeah, it winds up not really being a ~vania. There's an overworld from which you choose specific levels. many of these areas have multiple exits, but one will be completely closed to you if you don't have the power that's required to get there, so the powers are used much more directly as gating than in other games of this ilk.

Attacks with the sword are standard, but there are a few things that really annoy me about it. For one - and this is picking nits, but you hear it so often - the main character's grunts are obnoxious. They sound like somebody trying to make fun of somebody doing grunts, if that makes sense. They're nasal and somehow sarcastic sounding. It sounds like your parents making fun of how games sound. It's super distracting and strange. (note: I later found out the dev "had a cold" while recording these. weird.)

The bigger issue is that the sword is not fun to swing, for a few reasons. One is the short delay between the visual start of the swing and the hitbox appearing, which just makes it feel a little bad. Another is the hitbox itself - the very tip of your sword swing doesn't hit enemies, or at least it doesn't feel like it does, so zoning becomes difficult. Meanwhile, enemies (who also are just using simple melee) WILL be able to hit you from that distance even though their swings appear shorter. 

The combat in general is very straightforward. swing, swing, dodge. Your dodge is invincible and you'll need it, because enemies always attack. Maybe you get them dizzy and can swing a little more. But overall the pattern is swing X times, then dodge to the other side of them, swing again, dodge to the other side again. Combined with the slight knockback on the enemies, you're constantly having to slightly walk back from your dodge in order to hit the enemies again, taking care with your zoning because of the above issue of the visual edge of the swing not connecting. You can get used to it but it's not fun from the start.

On top of that, a lot of combat takes place on top of platforms, meaning you've got a high chance of dodging off a platform, which makes you too cautious, which makes you get hit, etc. Just a combination of micro frustrations.

Over time you level up your magic (which is mostly useful for hitting switches) and your sword swings, and the game does get a bit more fun after you do this. Unfortunately you don't even get access to any of this until about 60 minutes in which is... too long for the game to start getting a bit more fun in my opinion.

Leveling up is done by gathering red crystals, which you find in the level from enemies and by hitting crystal caches. Whenever you die you lose 5% of them (at least on normal difficulty) which can be frustrating because for that first 60 minutes you don't even know what they're for yet and how important it is that you're losing them. By the time I unlocked the ability to do upgrades I had 6,000 crystals and had lost easily 3,000 to deaths because of my frustrations above. You can also collect health blobs for these potion orbs which you manually activate in order to regain health. This lets you store your health restoration like potions, which is nice, but you have to wait for an animation to finish while taking a potion so you can't take one in a pinch.

And as for those switches I talked about - most of the puzzle platforming in here is "hit a switch with magic, ride a platform, jump off at the right time" and repeat in different configurations. Sometimes you push a box into a slot in order to activate the magic switch to hit. Sometimes you throw a bomb on it. It's fine but it will not inspire your imagination. Never was there a time where I felt clever, or felt like the game was being clever, or doing something new. 

On the bright side, the music is really excellent and reminiscent of yasunori mitsuda. Best thing about the game!

Do I think it's a contender for Action GOTY?

No, it's an alright effort but it just doesn't hit the spot for me. That said I really did not click with hollow knight either, which everybody loves, so maybe everyone will love this and it's all my subjective dislike! (to be clear my issues with hollow knight were a bit different, but the reason I bring it up is I also didn't like the animation->hitbox delay in that game, or the attack/attack/dodge pattern. But hollow knight does get a lot more complex than that, so I wouldn't put them 100% in the same boat. Flynn is dramatically more simple.)
--

The end! Some other judges did quite like this game, but it didn't wind up getting nominated.