Game review: False Hero for Steam

False Hero got on my radar thanks you a YouTuber playing it, and I barely watched any of their playthrough before deciding to look at a trailer. Here we’ve got a Dark Souls inspired game that is doing its own thing in many respects, and it’s also a one man passion project, the truest kind of indie artwork. Yeah, I’m going to have to buy that immediately. Got to show love for the indies, especially now when so may big studios are cranking out bestsellers and still firing their artists.

Before I get to anything else, let me just reiterate that aside from voice acting and localization services, this whole thing is the six year efforts of one person. Any personal lamentations I might bring up about the process of reaching the end should not take away what an incredible accomplishment this is. Setting aside anything to do with how it feels to play, this game is gorgeous even doing its own retro graphical style, and the music is glorious in every level and boss fight. This IS 100% a work of art designed by a single brilliant mind.

Is it perfect? No, but then no game is ever perfect. But what it is, is extraordinary and worth your time, with one caveat. You have to be into difficult games, because this one is on the higher side of the challenging meter.

Let’s hop in with the basic premise. In a fantasy world ruled by the four goddesses of Wisdom, Birth, Hope, and Passion, Death has come and corrupted the land and its inhabitants. (Or did they? Dun-dun-DUN!) Your character is a lowly scholar who finds a mask that grants them the ability to learn, and to avoid Death.

Just like any standard Souls-like, you’ll find some familiar mechanics. Paths that are locked until you find the shortcut by traversing the long way around, places (Bloodsprings) to save and upgrade stuff while resetting all the enemies, stamina and focus bars regulating physical activity and special move casting, and bosses waiting behind fog gates. (Though said fog doesn’t appear until after you lose the first time and have to backtrack to them.)

However, instead of picking up weapons and upgrading them, False Hero has a system of learning enemy attacks and using them yourself. Aside from the basic sword attack, everything else is mapped to the controller by you. What this means is, you not only have the freedom to make your own build. In this game, you also decide which buttons do what, and I can tell you that was a huge plus for a button klutz like me. My most used attack going where I want it? Yes, please!

How this works is that some enemies will drop insight. In theory, there’s no grinding because you can’t get more insight by fighting the same guy over and over. You have to seek out their kin elsewhere in the area to get more. Some might only require three or four, while others can go up to eleven or so. But there is still a grind of sorts because upgrading each attack requires increasing levels of ink (Ink Scraps, Dried Ink, and so on up to level 8 upgrades) as well as this game’s own version of XP. It’s not hard to amass the points for upgrades, but the ink is in short supply, at least until you get a bit further into the game.

Of course at first, there’s not much on tap to choose from as you navigate the first world of Wisdom, and unlike Souls games, this one is very linear. Getting to each new area requires the essence of the previous goddess, so there’s no skipping ahead. So, for instance, in Dark Souls, you could run the “wrong” way and skip the second boss to unlock a very useful shortcut. Or you could go WAY off the beaten path and unlock a special relic to increase the number of health potions throughout the rest of your run. That sort of thing doesn’t work in False Hero.

Perhaps because of this, the first few bosses are harder because you don’t have a lot of options to deal with them. But getting into the land of Birth starts to offer more attacks, making putting together your own build easier. By the time I got to the end of the second biome, I felt more comfortable dealing with the bosses.

However, now we come to my first lament, and it’s a common problem in a lot of video games: any attack in an enemy’s hands is fast and devastating, but in yours they’re slower and much, MUCH weaker. Several variations are a lunge attack. The enemy using them can slide halfway across a large room to land a blow that does huge damage. But your version of the lunge barely covers a meter of distance, and the damage is just slightly higher than your basic attack. Ranged attacks suffer from the same problem, getting weaker the farther away you are from an enemy, and draining focus that requires closing the distance to use your basic attack to recover your magic pool.

None of this is helped by the fact that all enemies have VERY long ranges on their melee weapons. Oh, and also? Your versions of most attacks are much slower, so you can look forward to having attacks interrupted, losing most of your focus, and having to recharge using your wimpy “Sword of Wisdom.”

And there are areas where two, three, and four enemies all attack at once, and all of your slow attacks mean you’re still drawing back to hit one guy when his friend leaps through his chest to knock you back. Now you have no focus, your sword is sheathed, and in the time you need to draw it, a third enemy has knocked you down again. In Dark Souls, this is called gank spanking, and it’s about as fun as hazing with a gauntlet of four foot paddles wielded by power lifters.

AND THEN, you get Acid Spray, granting you the ability to punish whole groups of enemies for grouping up too close. Every tick of damage the enemy suffers grants back focus points, and so hitting a group of them gives back enough focus to chain more Acid Spray attacks until everyone is the area is melted into a puddle of goo.

There are many such attacks that come up across the lands of Hope and Passion, so where the first quarter of the game is a struggle to find anything to catch a moment to breathe, the latter half is more about deciding what combo works best for you. I spent of lot of time alternating through Leap Strike, Tentacle Swipe, Acid Spray, and Book Throw. Then I got Corpse Barrage and Wish, and then I really started juggling moves because each new mob type and boss offered a new toy worth exploring.

There’s a few other things to cover, with one being Staggering. It sounds simple enough: landing enough blows on an enemy will fill a white bar under their health, signaling an impending moment of vulnerability. But up until the late game, very few of my attacks could reach that desired condition. Near the end of the game, I could deal enough damage that even bosses would stagger. But before that, I was frequently griping that stagger felt useless because I couldn’t make it work for me.

Oh, and there’s puzzles, and unlike a lot of action games, these aren’t an afterthought. Each time I found one, I got excited because the first was so good, and none of them were a disappointment. A lot of this has to do with puzzles having no or very few enemies to deal with. There’s clues to nudge you in the right direction, and the rest is just experimenting and finding the solution. So yeah, I have to heap extra praise on these puzzles that I liked finding instead of being annoyed as distractions from the action.

Next are the outfits. They don’t have any stats, so it’s all mostly cosmetic. Certain parts of the story require specific costumes to trigger them (no spoilers), but aside from that, they just give you options to play dress up doll with your hero. Not every outfit worked for me, but right up to the end of the game, I was mixing and matching pants, tops, and hats because I am all about the Fashion Souls, baby.

The other thing to cover is scrolls, which are False Hero’s version of rings. You start off only able to equip one, but finding an item in the game will grant two more slots, and there are a LOT of useful scrolls. There’s one to reduce poison damage, conveniently found in the poison swamp biome when you need it most. (Unlike Dark Souls, which made you buy that poison resist ring for an ungodly sum from an NPC who is very easily missed in the early part of the game. (And even then, it wasn’t all that effective. (Meh.))) There are also scrolls to increase damage through aggressive attacking, recover focus by dodging enemy and boss attacks, and recover health by killing enemies, among many others. All of them can be useful, and it really just depends on how you choose to play.

Keep in mind, I bought this game early enough that the maker is still taking feedback in the Steam Discussions, and based on someone else’s request, they added a patch to include “Flask Shards” that allow players to use two more health potions between visits to the Bloodsprings. I can tell you that helped a LOT during the last few boss fights, and I don’t think I would have been able to finish without them. Or if I did, it would have taken a lot longer.

Before they were added, I was struggling against one boss because after beating it once, the bastard got up, grew wings as well as a second health bar, and proceeded to spread my ass across his whole arena like I was peanut butter on a slab of Texas Toast.

And now I come to another lamentation. The last of the game’s areas is run by the goddess of Passion, but because her alternate ego is Apathy, most of her troops are just laying around, blowing themselves up as suicide bombers. It’s kind of anticlimactic, you know? If I had been arranging the order of levels, I think I might have gone with Wisdom, Passion, Birth and Hope.

This is also because Hope’s biome is the most visually striking and had the hardest bosses for me. Between the flying eyeball and a giant flying, lightning casting dragon, that whole area had me relieved to finally be done with it. (To say nothing of Hope/Despair, who twisted my hero into a pretzel several times before I got her patterns down.)

Having said that, the last few fights were tough, but not nearly as much as I had been dreading. Again, this had a lot to do with finally being able to stagger the bosses and get in some free swings before having to go on the defensive again.

The final boss did frustrate me in a new way by floating up and away from my attacks, leaving me to wait for them to decide to come back for another round of “Dodge, dodge, got you, bitch!” And yeah, those two extra potions made it so that I only needed four or five attempts to end them instead of whole days of salt, controller throttling, and hair pulling.

There’s still a whole other side of the story to explore, not to mention many other build possibilities, and none of my complaints would detract from me making more runs through the game again. I’d say that as an indie effort riffing off a classic while still pulling off its own thing, it definitely succeeded.

Even as I considered this review finished and ready to publish, a new patch came out adding a randomizer mode to the game, both for New Game and New Game Plus modes. The fine human developing this game wants to win my heart, and by God, they are succeeding.

Which is why, even with my complaints, I’m going to give False Hero 5 stars. I’d recommend it to people willing to deal with some early adversity. If you can stick with it, the increasing platter of options for your own personalized all-you-can-kill buffet become downright tasty. You just have to go hungry for the first half hour, but in my opinion, it’s worth the effort.