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Valdis Story: Abyssal City
PC (Steam)
Angels and Demons and Ferals, OH MY!
4/5 stars
“Valdis Story: Abyssal City” (“Valdis Story”) is the third game from Indie developer, Endless Fluff, a tiny development outfit consisting of two people. “Valdis Story” was funded via Kickstarter (with high-tier backers getting to design a non-player character in the game) and launched on Desura before being Greenlit onto Steam. Like so many Indie games that follow the unwritten rules for Indie games, “Valdis Story” is a Metroid-vania style Action/Adventure title with some unique twists.
Presentation
“Valdis Story” is an absolute delight for the eyes and the ears. The graphics are all hand-drawn 2D sprites that are large, colorful, and well-animated. The game’s overall art style for characters and monsters is quite distinctive and aesthetically pleasing. The soundtrack is likewise quite beautiful and evocative of both the old ‘Metroid’ games that served as “Valdis Story’s” inspiration as well as the game’s own unique environments. There is, however, no voiceacting, which might turn-off some people, but doesn’t detract from the game’s presentation in any way.
Story
“Valdis Story” is set in a world with a relatively dense amount of background material. However, instead of just dumping all of the religion and philosophy of the world in which two goddesses are at war over the remaining power of their departed mother (the titular Valdis) upon the player up front, the game world’s mythology is spread out and revealed via conversations with enemies and NPCs. The core of the story is very similar to that of the ‘Diablo’ franchise, in which demons and angels are at war, humanity is caught in the middle, and neither side is particularly ‘good.’
Our heroes are Wyatt, a stereotypical badass swordsman with a mysterious past and lineage, and Reina, an orphan girl who was raised by monks, and is thus a martial arts master. Two other playable characters are planned for a future (free!) update. In addition to the heroes of the story, Wyatt has a crew of disreputable characters (the ones designed by Kickstarter backers) that serve various purposed within the framework of the game. The one thing Wyatt, Reina, and the rest of the crew have in common is that they are all disenfranchised by the conflict between the angels and demons in some way, despite being a mix of angels, demons, humans, and half-breeds themselves.
The story begins with Wyatt and his crew chasing a demon ship across the ocean. Just as they are about to board the demons’ vessel, a huge whale-like creature emerges from the depths and destroys both ships. Wyatt, Reina, and the rest of the crew are separated, and it’s up to the player to guide their chosen character through the remains of a large submerged city in order to reunite the crew and deal with the angels and demons that have found their way into the city as well.
However, Wyatt’s crew, the angels, and the demons aren’t alone in the sunken city. It turns out that the inhabitants of the city survived and are still eking out an existence within the ruins. Furthermore, an unknown type of monster, dubbed Ferals, inhabits the ruins, attacking humans, demons, and angels alike with no allegiances.
“Valdis Story” includes a few interesting (and frustrating) mechanics in which the player’s actions (or inactions) can affect the way the story plays out (but not the way it ends), leading to certain areas being conquered by Ferals or not, which removes the potential for certain dialogs completely. It shows a lot of careful craftsmanship on the part of the developers that the game actually has reactions like this to player actions, but can also lead to significant amounts of frustration during a first playthrough, as letting Ferals take over too much of the sunken city removes options and makes the gameplay harder.
Gameplay
“Valdis Story” is based upon the ‘Metroid’ style of exploration. The entire map of the sunken city is interconnected, with newly acquired power-ups (in this case, magic spells) required to reach previously-inaccessible areas and continue with the game’s sequence of events. “Valdis Story’s” biggest flaw is, unfortunately, that the city map is quite terrible. It is lacking in details, such as what kind of locked doors are in each discovered room, and at no point is it possible to see the entire map at once. Instead, the map is subdivided into small local regions with some vague color coding for save points and human-inhabited regions. Even worse, there are no markers on the map to show rooms that have hidden features (a staple of ‘Metroid’) or unopened treasure chests, which can result in a lot of aimless and repetitive backtracking unless the player is drawing their own map on paper.
Where “Valdis Story” primarily differentiates itself from ‘Metroid’ games and the ‘Castlevania’ games that started aping Nintendo’s franchise is in its combat, item customization, and leveling systems. “Valdis Story’s” characters can gain experience by killing enemies, which allows them to level up to a cap of 20. Each level grants the character an attribute point and a skill point. The attribute point can be used to raise one of four stats (strength, intelligence, agility, and luck) while the skill point can be spent do unlock a perk from one of three skill trees (attack, defense, and magic).
Item customization works by collecting random bits of stuff dropped by enemies (or acquired from trader NPCs), then taking this stuff to a variety of crafting NPCs. There is a wide variety of armor and accessories to be found in the game, and a couple of non-default weapons can be crafted after acquiring materials from optional boss battles. Each weapon has a customization tree with several divergent branches, while armors simply get upgraded a maximum of twice. The variety of weapons, armor, and accessories allow for significantly different play styles between different players, even while using the same character.
The combat system is, unfortunately, my least favorite part of “Valdis Story.” Instead of being a simple affair like the ‘Metroid’ and ‘Castlevania’ games that inspired it, “Valdis Story’s” combat is a fast, twitchy, combo-based affair that is more reminiscent of a 2D version of a game like “Devil May Cry” or “Bayonetta” than anything else. At least – MERCIFULLY – “Valdis Story” doesn’t have QuickTime Events! The combos in “Valdis Story” can be made up of light attacks, heavy attacks, magic attacks, and assist attacks (in which Wyatt/Reina summons one of the other crew members to perform a single move). Combos must be strung together via Skill Cancels, which is the game’s primary differentiating gimmick. At any point, it’s possible to hit the Skill Cancel button to completely reset the main character’s stance to the default and stop them from doing whatever they are currently doing. Moving side-to-side while Skill Cancelling results in a short dash move. Skill Cancels are used in combat to extend combos and dash through enemy attacks, of course, but they are also used when exploring in order to move quickly enough to outpace the game’s many, many timer switches, which is a rather annoying mechanic.
The worst part of combat, however, is the game’s variety of boss battles. These battles are relatively difficult, even on Normal difficulty. The thing that makes them even more frustrating than their general difficulty (which is mitigated by a ‘retry’ function) is the fact that they are graded. Every boss battle is graded on Time, Style, and Healing on a scale of F, D, C, B, A, S, with S being the best. Time and Healing a fairly self-explanatory, but the Style rating requires the player to land stupidly long combo chains in order to do well. I didn’t S rank any bosses on my normal playthrough, instead wavering with 100% consistency between A and F, with nothing in the middle. The final kick in the groin is that getting an A or S rank on a boss results in a stat bonus that is equivalent to gaining an extra level. Honestly, if the game wanted to hand out free stat bonuses, it should have given them away for F ranks, considering players who perform poorly against bosses are in much greater need of free levels (over the level cap!) than players with the elite twitch reaction skills to S-rank these abominations.
Finally, I’d like to point out that the default button layout for “Valdis Story” is pretty terrible. It’s great that the game supports gamepads out of the box, but the default layout just doesn’t work very well. Thankfully, the game also supports button remapping out of the box, so I was able to change to controls to something more suitable.
Overall
“Valdis Story: Abyssal City” is yet another in the growing field of high-quality Metroid-vania style Indie games. It’s also one of the best looking of that bunch. However, the extra-twitchy combo-based combat doesn’t really speak to me as a fan of the games that inspired it. Between the combat and the horrible map, I found my initial unbridled enjoyment of “Valdis Story” falling with each subsequent boss encounter or tedious slog across the map to re-check every area for newly-accessible nooks and crannies. At only 7-10 hours, “Valdis Story” isn’t particularly long, but its faults make it difficult to work up the motivation to replay it.
Presentation: 5/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
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