Valdis Story : Abyssal City - You Got RPG In My Metroidvania!

Valdis Story : Abyssal City

Quite often a game will pop up on Steam and I will add it to my wishlist because it looks interesting - basically bookmarking it for later. Then later comes and it will be on sale for some decent amount and I pick it up. Then much later comes and I realize I haven't looked at or even remembered that I bought it. Or in the case of Valdis Story I see that I have it in my library but don't recall why or what the game is about. So I figured it was time to play it.

Valdis Story: Abyssal City is a quite nice looking "metroidvania" style game. You control the protagonist Wyatt in a 2D space, jumping across platforms, avoiding traps and fighting a myriad of creatures. A lot of the game is just exploration, testing the limits of where you can go with your current set of abilities, before gaining more abilities that open up the game world further, and so on. Good stuff for fans of that game genre.

The world does a great job of presenting itself to you both visually and by being quite compelling with it's game play systems. Broken into many different themed areas, Valdis Story is very good looking, brightly colored and crisp art combined with easy to pick out important elements like your character and enemies. The world level design teases you with chests and doors that are either just out of reach or locked, prompting you to explore further in order to gain access to these treasures.

At the start I had issues with the controls. The jumping and combat felt very "loose" - I had a hard time with the momentum of moving Wyatt where I needed him to go and some of the leaps you need to take are quite unforgiving. As I played more I got used to it but they were never as sharp and responsive as I would have liked and are a bit of a let down for a game of this ilk. Combat waxed and waned between being too easy and grossly frustrating. To often fights were between either solitary enemies of no threat or a combination of enemies whose abilities made the fight more annoying than fun or interesting. Too few was a fight that hit the sweet spot (at least for me - as always with this sort of thing YMMV).

The game has an inventory and crafting system that I feel would fit more into a deeper RPG game that this one. Each town you discover has multiple people you can give materials in order to craft things such as better weapons, armor and items but very rarely did I have what was needed. So then I had to remember in what area and what enemies did the materials drop from and then make the trek back to those points and grind fights in order to get the amount necessary. It felt a lot like busy work and really countered the main push of the game both story and design wise which seemed more about pushing you forwards to the next thing.

As it turned out grinding is a large part of Valdis Story. You need to grind for materials and you also need to grind for experience to level up. Not content with being a solid "metroidvania" the developer added a robust experience system complete six attribute scores and sub-attributes and a skill tree. Whew. Added to the crafting system it was a lot more RPG than I was expecting. And I think more RPG than the game world can handle. You get such meager amounts of experience from enemies that grinding is a must once you find out how hard the boss battles are (more on that later). Good thing you are already grinding for crafting materials right? *sad face*

But all is not lost, there is a good system of special magic abilities at your disposal that I think are quite well interlaced with the basic game mechanics. You have a selection of 4 magic slots that you can put any of the elemental spells you have earned (from defeating bosses). Each slot corresponds to to moving up (jumping), down (crouching), backwards or forwards and then hitting your spell button. Combined with the style of combat the game offers they compliment the actions you are already taking, well sort of, again with the controls being a little loose actually getting the timing of being in the right movement state when you press the spell button I found to often be frustrating. Do it wrong and either no spell or even the wrong spell can be cast. Tighter controls would have gone miles to make this good idea feel great.

This brings us to the boss fights. I only completed three bosses before pulling the plug on the game (though it wasn't the bosses that actually did it). Each of these fights are brutal and grueling. They do massive damage, have erratic attack patterns (against genre type) and so many hit points. Oh gawd so many hit points. While I applaud the rapid restart if you lose to a boss (it just quickly sets you back to the start of the boss fight) each win I eventually had felt far more like luck than skill. On the plus side you get more of the neat spells every time you defeat a boss and they allow all sort of new opportunities in the game world both in exploration and  combat. So at least a decent reward for your trouble.

There is a story in Valdis Story, you as Wyatt, have crashed your ship and discovered the lost Abyssal city, while losing your friends and crew. This city is full of "angels" and "demons" as the enemies and lots of mostly unhelpful NPCs to encounter. As you work your way through the world you find your lost friends one by one and make new companions along they way. But it's all too brief in the exposition department. I am not asking for wall-of-text story but a little more than the very slim conversations you are privy too would have been nice. Maybe less RPG systems and more RPG story? Over all it did little to engage me.

Finally I want to talk about timed button and door presses and what drove me to stop playing Valdis Story. An component of the game world are these large buttons that you (for lack of a better word) "butt-stomp" to open a door somewhere else. Then a timer appears on screen showing that you have 3 or 5 seconds to get to the door before it closes. As you gain more abilities the style that you interact with these buttons varies (chargeable gems for example) but in the end you are given a very short window to get to where you need to be before time runs out. Mostly these doors get you access to special chests or items. Not a huge deal if you can't make the precise jumps and no-room-for-error-not-even-one-tiny-slip-up pathing required. But after the last boss I fought in order to get out of the area and continue on you need to do a series of these button-door presses to climb out of the pit you are in. After an untold number of attempts over two 30 minute sessions I called it quits. My old man reflexes and the loose controls got the better of me.

So I only got about 5 hours into a game with some good core ideas and  maybe too many additional ideas. Some great visual design ideas but less than idea controls. For me the things I really liked about Valid Story didn't overcome the frustration of the things I had trouble with. It's mostly personal preference as the game has scored well (very positive on Steam) with those who have the skill and perseverance to get along with it. Valdis Story isn't a bad game - it's just not for me.