DeVuego LATAM

Folks, Gordon Gekko had it wrong. It’s not greed that’s good, but the yoyo, which “clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” And if those words sound as hyperbolic as they do in Wall Street, just wait until you get your hands on Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo and see how gloriously right this weird, wonderful yoyo-centric adventure is.

You’re presumably capable of kicking the ball and hitting a bottle perched on a fence post, but it feels apt that you miss time and time again, until one of the other, better kids steps in to take the shot and does what you can’t. At which point, you keep at it, because the world goes on.

Over the course of Bloodless, Tomoe leads dozens, if not hundreds, of challengers to flee from her in fear. Their apparent lack of conviction—their willingness to take flight rather than die fighting—suggests a commentary on violence that the game fails to flesh out. Tomoe’s exchanges with new and old acquaintances, which transpire in sluggish scenes filled with trite dialogue, are similarly devoid of depth, texture, and specificity. Bloodless clearly has something to say about the cataclysmic potential of power and the cycles of suffering it locks people into, but by making its world feel universal—like it could be anywhere—it ends up nowhere at all.

But as engaging as Bahnsen Knights’s atmosphere may be, the process of navigating it isn’t as consistently engrossing. The similarities to Choose Your Own Adventure-style storytelling work both in the game’s favor and against it. On one hand, there’s freedom to how you approach many situations, and there’s some excitement to knowing that the game holds more mysteries than you’ll uncover on first playthrough. On the other, there are quite a few fail states that feel arbitrary or unfair, and reloading a dialogue sequence several times in quick succession only serves to break the mood that the game otherwise works so hard to maintain.

As for the game’s bosses, they’re most efficiently fought one on one, keeping the other characters out of harm’s way. It’s telling, then, that the game’s final area, the labyrinthine Aldalar Tomb, pointedly separates the three heroes. All that build-up to unite the family, and in the end, Greak: Memories of Azur finds it best to keep them apart.