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Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

 I have recently finished playing Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (2024). It is and adventure game set in a fantasy world in which medieval weaponry meets gods and magic. The gameplay is heavily inspired by the souls-like genre, most resembling the popular Star Wars Jedi series (2019, 2023). 


Gameplay

The gameplay feels very reminiscent of recent games in the genre. It is similar to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) in the way the combat has a lot of variety and allows the player to experiment with different strategies in battle. Another aspect that is similar is the traversal. In both games, the movement feels very fluid and the player feels as if they have freedom of movement. Flintlock has a mechanic that lets the player use small powder explosions to affect their movement. They can dodge in the air to get slightly more horizontal distance or cancel their moment by dodging in the other direction. They can also jump again in the air to gain extra height. The physics in the game allowed for conservation of momentum that created some fun methods of traversal, giving the player the opportunity to build up a lot of speed in the right circumstance. 

A couple of aspects of the gameplay in which Flintlock falls short are based on traversal. Firstly, many of the section of movement in the game involve the player needing to climb a ledge. However, the ledge mechanics are somewhat spotty and do not always register correctly. This makes for some aggravating gameplay in which the player spends a long time jumping from platform to platform, only for the character to not grab a ledge and fall back to the bottom. Another thing I would change about the game would be to add more opportunity for the player to experiment with momentum in traversal. There are a few sections of the game in which the is discoverable by accident when travelling down a hill, but it was so much fun to move that fast that it would be interesting to see how a game could lean into this. 


Sebo

There are characters the player can find throughout the game that serve as puzzles in the form of challenging the player to beat them at a popular game within the world, "Sebo". In this game that takes places on a small triangular grid, the player must form a triangle shape by moving their counters, while their opponent attempts to block them. If the player is successful, they swap roles, and must try and block the opponent from creating a triangle in fewer moves than they did. The way this puzzle is presented in the game allows for an observable difficulty curve. The game has open world elements but follows a somewhat linear structure, and the people that present the player with these puzzles in different layouts can be found on the main path as well as in some optional areas. Every puzzle is entirely optional, providing the player with a small amount of currency that is helpful, but not essential to completing the game. 

From a technical point of view, this puzzle is well made. At the start of the game, the setup of each game make it quite easy to win, but teaches the player basic strategy. As the game progresses, the player meets people that provide them with more complex setups for the puzzles that make them more difficult. The best part of these puzzles was that it almost always took me more than a single attempt to beat it, but they never felt impossible. 


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