Sundered

DISCLAIMER: This post was originally typed up when I played through Sundered at the end of July/beginning of August. I just never posted it until now because I'm an idiot. Enjoy!

While I love playing a game that I've been waiting ages for, I love even more to play a game that I wasn't originally aware of and falling in love with it. This describes my experience with Sundered, a PS4 and PC video game made by the creators of Jotun. Jotun was a beautiful game in its own right but I never made it past the first boss. It just didn't capture me in the way other indie titles like Titan Souls or The Binding of Issac did. Sundered immediately gripped me up and I played like a madman in the 13 hours I had with it.

Sundered is a Metroidvania rogue like game. Now, if you don't know anything about me, Metroidvania games are one of my favorite genres of gaming, along with turn based RPGs, visual novels and ridiculous sandbox adventures like Crackdown and Sunset Overdrive. You tell me the game is MV and I'm onboard. Then, it was said to be a difficult game with randomly generated areas! Here's my money! I literally preordered the game once I found all that out and saw the massive screen covering bosses. I LOVE a good boss fight. Everything going into the game was a win.

I started playing Sundered a little after midnight on its release day. The first thing you notice is that the load times are horrible. It takes a LONG time to transition from one major area to the next. It almost feels like a PS1 game. There are also massive slowdowns and it can give the enemies an unfair advantage. Sometimes it just stopped when I was running away from enemies and then I would find myself getting killed. The game frequently crashes as well. Never during gameplay thankfully. It was always after I died so it wasn't that big of an issue but it got annoying, especially after dying after a boss battle. I really wanted to get back in, not go through the motions of loading again. Other than these few annoyances, Sundered is a really fantastic experience.

As a Metroidvania game, there is a lot of running, platforming and going to areas you don't have abilities for yet. Eshe, the main character, starts off with nothing, as she's pulled into these ruins by an unknown force. Over the course of the game, Eshe will gain a protective shield, the ability to double jump, gain a massive cannon for crowd control, be able to charge her attacks, gain a midair dodge, run up walls and use grappling hooks. Eshe has the ability to corrupt her abilities by gaining these things called the Elder Shards. Depending on your actions, you can either corrupt your abilities or destroy the Shards. I went full on embrace for my first playthrough and the powers you get are pretty amazing. If you corrupt your abilities, your shield will damage your enemies when you get attacked, you can glide after your second jump, the cannon turn into a laser beam, the charged attacks become much stronger, the midair dodge becomes a midair teleportation ability, you can climb on all walls instead of just running up from the base and the grappling hooks will now allow for an extra boost after locking onto it. The corrupted abilities are game changers, especially crawling on all walls and the glide ability, especially in the last area, which is mostly floating islands.

The boss battles live up to the hype. They really are screen filled battles. The monsters are HUGE and are the best part of the hand drawn adventure. In my playthrough, I only encountered five different bosses. The game requires you to face the same three bosses, one for each of the game's distinct areas but the last boss is up to how you play the game. The last boss changes depending on your actions in the game, mainly around if you destroy or harness the power of the Elder Shards. I only got one ending and that was the Embrace Ending, where you fight what's left of Eshe's humanity and the last boss, Humanity. The boss is difficult but the Sundered gods looked out for me. The bossed glitched out and once he dived off screen, he never returned. This made the fight impossible to lose as there was nothing to stop me from destroying the crystal. It was an anticlimactic ending to the crazy journey. I want to play through again but this time, destroy all the Elder Shards but at this current time, there are just TOO many gaming releases I'm playing through that include Pyre, Hellblade and the upcoming Agents of Mayhem next week. Sundered will have to wait for my next go around.

Sundered is an amazing accomplishment from ThunderLotus game. Not only does it add to PS4's amazing digital only library, it's a true Metroidvania classic for fans of the genre to enjoy. There are some obvious problems such as the load times, slowdown and crashes but there's nothing wrong with the mechanics of how the game plays. It can be a bit unforgiving but as Souls player, it was nothing compared to the despair I felt trying to defeat Smough and Ornstein in Dark Souls I. A must play for fans of the genre!