Valfaris (

2019

) ½

I complain a lot about the veritable plague of wimpy, pastel-shaded, irony-drenched, hipster trash in the indie scene but, it should be noted that that is not the whole story. Indeed, between Blasphemous [2019], Slain: Back to Hell [2016], Blazing Chrome [2019], and today’s game I’m forced to admit that there is an emerging trend pushing in the other direction. Thank God! As a fan of grimdark, ultraviolent, heavy metal bullshit I couldn’t be happier. Maybe if we’ve very lucky we’ll get a few ultra-edgy AAA games before the industry goes back to cranking out more of the same bland monotonous dreck, as outside of From Soft’s occasional masterpiece and the odd Doom [2016] sequel, the big boys of the industry are if anything even more milquetoast than their indie counterparts. Even previously edgy shit like God of War has had to reinvent itself as being a sober meditation on fatherhood. We don’t have to go back to the mid-1990s when everyone was trying to one-up each other with how brutal and transgressive they could be, just throw me a bone every now and then.

Today’s game is probably the most extreme of its subgenre too, which is really saying something when its chief competition is a Heavy Metal album come to life (Slain: Back to Hell [2016]) and a game set inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting (Blasphemous [2019]). The game takes place in a nightmarish sci-fi world that would be out of place in Heavy Metal (1981) in terms of how violent and absurd it is. The dead walk again as horrific undead abominations, that is if their souls are not used to fashion burning blades of immeasurable power. Drone-like soldiers battle a grotesque alien infestation at the behest of their masters who resemble an order of chivalrous knights from the middle ages. At the end of the game, the bad guy (who is incidentally a 20-foot-tall anthropomorphic dinosaur) decides the only option is to plunge an entire planet-sized space station into a star to prevent the bizarre infection that has inflicted it from spreading further. When you defeat him and cast him into said star he returns as a mutated three-headed dragon. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it is consistently awesome.

The most obvious point of comparison is with Warhammer 40k, though that may not be entirely fair. Valfaris is arguably more 40k than the actual 40k at this point, as the tabletop game is already in the process of sanding off all its rough edges in a doomed quest to appeal to a larger audience. Valfaris by contrast isn’t afraid to be grotesque, violent, gory, and unfathomably stupid, usually all at once. Hell, the game even tosses players a bit of titillation with the AI Hekate who resembles a green copy of Cortana before her boob nerf in Halo 5: Guardians [2015].

Much of the world-building in Valfaris is left shrouded in mystery, though given how absolutely bat-shit insane many of the things in the game are this may be by deliberate design. It’s always able to surprise you with the next absurd twist because the rules of the world have not been clearly established. When the radiation from a dying star transforms the final boss into a three-headed dragon you’re left to just shrug and think “Well, I guess that’s something that can happen.” The game’s logic remains internally consistent if only because we don’t have enough information to actually understand what’s going on. Not the tightest world-building, but fun enough when the focus is rooted firmly on the action.

While the world and its rules may be incomprehensible, the basic plot of Valfaris is rather straightforward. You take on the role of Therion, a former prince of the space fortress/paradise Valfaris who has returned to his home in order to track down and kill his traitorous father: Vroll. The only problem is when Therion arrives on Valfaris, he finds the massive station has become a hellish landscape populated by monsters and madmen. A lot has happened in his absence, but he’s certain that Vroll is behind all of this, and is determined to track him down and take his vengeance.

To accomplish your revenge you’ve got a sidearm, a sword, and a heavy weapon that you can alternate between on the fly with a speed that is simply ludicrous. There are multiple options for each weapon type that you’ll unlock throughout the game, some on optional secret paths others scattered about on the game’s critical path. Each weapon can be upgraded with tokens that improve damage and add special abilities. This plays into a neat mechanic where you effectively get to choose which checkpoints to activate with a limited consumable item. Leftovers can be used at the end of each level for additional upgrade tokens, so you’re incentivized to use a few checkpoints as possible. This introduces a nice risk-reward calculation for the players and pushes you to challenge yourself by skipping a few checkpoints.

There is a nice variety of weapons, with each of the sidearms and heavy weapons occupying a unique niche. Swords are less exciting, but they all have at least some unique mechanics to make them worth trying out. The only issue with the weapons is that it’s easy to get locked in by the sunk cost fallacy and continue to upgrade your starter weapons because you’ve already poured limited resources into them. As a result, you’ll be less likely to experiment with the new weapons you pick up throughout the game and not get to take advantage of the full variety of gameplay or have the best option for the best situation. The existence of a NG+ in the form of Full Metal Mode goes some way towards ameliorating this problem, but it should be noted that the difficulty of the base game is already pretty high and Full Metal Mode cranks it up to an entirely new level.

The core gameplay follows the credo of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and lifts pretty much everything in it wholesale from classic run-and-guns like Contra III: The Alien Wars [1992] and Gunstar Heroes [1993]. It’s not innovative, but then again it doesn’t really need to be. Run-and-guns were more or less perfected thirty years ago, and both the above-mentioned titles could easily enthrall modern audiences, unlike something like Doom [1993] which has been rendered all but obsolete by a few thousand niggling quality of life improvements (like the not-insignificant ability to aim your gun up and down). The only technical improvement of any significance in Valfaris is the increased details of the sprite artwork.

Indeed, the chief draw of the game is the gorgeous pixel art, augmented by a bit of clever and non-obtrusive 3D. Character models are simply stunning both in terms of the detail and artistry on display in each crisp pixel-perfect frame. The animations are uniformly slick, though some enemy attacks could be a bit more clearly telegraphed. At times the screen can get a bit too cluttered and busy, but that’s just the price you have to pay when everything and everyone cranked up to 11. Moreover, all the creatures and the world they inhabit seem to fit each other. There is a real sense of verisimilitude at work in Valfaris, as nothing is real or realistic yet each piece seems to fit naturally into the larger whole.

Valfaris's biggest shortcoming is the most obvious: Its soundtrack is way too anemic and wimpy to serve as a basis for a heavy metal run-and-gun. It’s as if Cuphead [2017] had a single guy with a kazoo instead of its full orchestra. Were this Gunstar Heroes [1993], I wouldn’t mind much but if you’re going to have your protagonist head-bang when he finds a new weapon you had better at least give him something to head-bang to! Fortunately, this issue is easily rectified on PC where you can just mute the in-game audio and put on your favorite power metal album in the background.