Blade & Bones is an action game heavily inspired by the Dark Souls sub-genre of games. It has its own visual style, but gameplay often feels far too similar to ignore the comparison.
The game’s combat system has numerous flaws that make it feel like a cheap knockoff of Demon/Dark Souls. Oftentimes attacks will hit an enemy visually, but deal no damage, presumably because of unrefined hit-boxes. Occasionally, you will press a button but the game won’t register it. These types of bugs are inexcusable in a game modeled after Dark Souls, especially because of the difficulty. Blade & Bones even takes it a step further than Dark Souls and implements a permadeath system. Rather than dropping your souls on death, like Dark Souls, you lose a life. You have a finite amount of lives, but after losing one, it is hidden in a random place for you to find. In theory, I like this concept and it could have been an interesting deviation from the Souls-like formula. Unfortunately, the large amount of bugs cause you to die at least a handful of times, no matter how well or how carefully you play the game. It also borrows the Dark Souls healing system, in which you get a few health potions, but can only get more by resting at a checkpoint.
Story-wise, Blade & Bones is fairly sparse, with most of the storytelling coming from a handful of NPCs. There isn’t much of the plot that is explicitly told to you, you are instead forced to piece the story together from the small snippets of dialogue you hear. This is fine in a game that is focused on gameplay, but due to the unsatisfying combat, it becomes quite noticeable that there is a severe lack of content.
Visually, the game looks unique and quite good for an indie game. There is a distinctive art style that looks fantastic when paired with the game’s color palette. It is easily the highlight of the game for me, and goes to show that even graphics that aren’t impressive in a technical sense can still be beautiful when executed with a consistent and polished theme.
Blade & Bones is a good game buried underneath a mountain of bugs and unpolished features. This is the type of indie game that would have benefited greatly from a publisher willing to throw some money at the game to give it a longer development cycle and allow the developers to enhance the weaker aspects of Blade & Bones. As it stands now, this is a game with a lot of wasted potential that isn’t worth playing unless you don’t mind buggy combat and want to play an indie version of Dark Souls.
