Verho - Curse of Faces

[h3]A very effective Kingsfield-like that loses steam as it progresses but is still a fun ride[/h3]. Verho is a really neat game and extremely impressive given that it's pretty much just a single developer's project. From the outset the game clearly wears its inspirations on its sleeve - if I were to try and describe it I'd probably summarize it as "it's Dark Souls 2 but with Kingsfield gameplay". It has a lot of the worldbuilding, level-design and progression elements that Dark Souls 2 had but with Kingsfield-style combat, character building and enemy design. Now I'm someone that loved both of those games so this is great but there's areas where the two just don't marry into eachother as effectively as I was hoping they would and the game also unfortunately carries some of the more pressing problems those games had. For starters - the scope of the enemy/boss encounters starts to massively outpace what the game's engine is actually capable of. Later bosses tend to have extremely grandiose, complex movesets which look visually spectacular but aren't too fun to play around when you're operating without meaningful dodge, block, parry or combo mechanics. For what it's worth I didn't really [b]struggle[/b] on most bosses but also found myself confused and overwhelmed a lot of the time, taking damage from a lot of off-screen projectiles/shockwaves and just hitting the heal button. There's also a major issue with practically every enemy in the game for some reason ignoring walls/geometry and just clipping right through them. There's a few 'ghost' enemies this works for but when a random knight or zombie just phases through a cliff to smack you it leaves you feeling very confused. I feel like the developer realized this was an issue since the game absolutely floods you with healing potions and there's no animation/cooldown for using them. You can literally hammer the 'heal' button for an entire bossfight and indeed a lot of the later bosses tend to play out this way. This issue with scope also extends to the story, where later portions of the game try to capture some grand narrative and climactic end setpieces but the actual presentation is so archaic that it becomes impossible to follow what's actually happening. Lack of cutscenes or any kind of 'lore' like the Dark Souls item descriptions tend to provide mean you often end up just following along, killing bosses and not really understanding why. Those problems aside, it's a very good game. I was impressed with how smooth the level progression felt and how cool all the different weapons were. Spells all feel very functional and enemy weaknesses actually feel meaningful. I also really liked all the different NPCs - they felt much better than a lot of FromSoft's recent NPCs in my opinion and there's actually really cool pay-offs to most of their quests if you do them right. Overall, Verho is a great game that mostly just needed a second developer or some publisher oversight to reign-in some of the more 'ambitious' parts of the game and smooth-out some of the functional and narrative creases the game has. In that sense it actually feels even [b]more[/b] like Dark Souls 2.