Slavic folklore is not so common in games, but it is in demand. Think The Witcher and Baba Yaga’s successful expansion for Rise of the Tomb Rider. And The Black Book, based on fairy tales, won applause all over the world. And then there is the excellent RPG Yaga. Blacktail, the debut work of the Polish company The Parasight about how Baba Yaga came to such a life, also turned out to be surprisingly worthy.
A teenage girl is Yaga, only she is not an ugly old woman who loves to devour children’s bones and take care of good fellows, but her alternative version. Instead of a rabbit, we will give a black cat. Well, a crazy world with mutant bees and talking mushrooms. The path to the legendary witch is still very, very long, but there is very little information about the youth of this character. In fact, it doesn’t exist at all. So the scope for the developer’s imagination is huge.
Story
The story of an outcast girl named Yaga, who is forced to leave her village in search of her missing sister and three more children, unfolds very gradually. Moreover, using rather clichéd elements, the authors still manage to catch up with intrigue, confuse the player and throw an interesting plot twist a couple of times. Moreover, the plot, if you do not run headlong through it, is not in a hurry at all and gives you time to think.
Zora – only thanks to her sister Yaga they endured in the village. When her sister and other teenagers she knew disappeared into the forest, our heroine realized that she no longer belonged there. She goes in search of her sister and is now forced to survive alone, listening only to a strange but pleasant female voice in her head, which helps, comments, and teaches the young Yaga.
In search of her sister Zora and attempting to understand what kind of voice in her head regularly distracts her from what is happening around her, the girl sets off alone on a journey through a colorful but perilous world. No one is waiting for her at home. The girl was expelled from her native village and accused of witchcraft, so there is nothing to worry about except for her and her sister’s life.
On the way, we will meet many different fairy-tale characters. No, don’t expect Ivanushka or any other iconic character among them. Instead, the developers offer you to help (or deceive), for example, a Maybug larva in a top hat or a family of entirely crazy mushrooms that will ask you to deal with the dragon. Where the dragon comes from in Slavic folklore is another question, but oh well.
And we don’t know what Yaga looks like. The girl constantly wears a wooden mask on her head and is in no hurry to take it off, but even now, the heroine’s face is not shown to us.
Gameplay
On the one hand, Blacktail is a genuinely classic combination of wilderness survival and adventure story. We collect resources, fight, complete tasks, try in battles with bosses, and move on. Basically, we run around with a bow and collect feathers/sticks/flowers/crystals/honey to make different types of arrows, antidotes, potions, and more. You can also hunt game and cook meat over a fire unless you need to make equipment and build houses with fences and workbenches.
Blacktail is trying to plunge into the world of fairy tales and magic, in which both Slavic and European myths are guessed. It is interesting to follow the adventures of Yagi, spinning her story like a ball. While the storyline is predictable, that doesn’t make it any less exciting.
It’s nice to deal with other characters’ problems, among which there are very strange personalities. You may be stunned by the unexpected meeting with smart mushrooms, the warlike ant queen or the charming worm Sudar. Communicating with them is a lot of moments of the game that you can sincerely laugh at. The game is crazy in a good way.
The mood of the game evokes associations with “Alice in Wonderland”: a world in which there are no rules, logic, and harmonious structure, which exists on its own and manages to remain complete and correct in its own way. Unlike the light-hearted and funny characters, Yaga’s story seems even more tragic, and this has a great effect on her perception.
The NPCs are not only happy to chat, but they are always happy to give the girl some kind of assignment. Whether the heroine agrees to fulfill it depends on her “moral compass.” And not only from this: morality is influenced by many actions, such as knocking down a bee hive from a tree or helping a hedgehog that cannot get an apple from a tree.
All this inclines the arrow of the “compass” towards evil or good and opens up various possibilities for Yaga. For example, if the protagonist steps into the path of light, he gains more resources and his ability slows targets in front of him. If you choose the dark side, you can get healing spheres in battle and drain health from opponents. BLACKTAIL has a lot of moral forks, and not all are simple and unambiguous, so keeping his “compass” strictly in the chosen position is complex. In reality, he can fluctuate back and forth, following random decisions.
Skills
But you need to learn the skills. Some we get by the story (for example, the ability to teleport to pedestals with a bow), others we open with the help of found recipes and resources – this is how we learn how to make sticky arrows and brew potions on the go, as well as pull the bowstring faster. There are also spells with various passive effects.
Blacktail does not always inform the player that certain skills are required to complete the story. For example, at one of the stages, the heroine finds herself in a cold area inhabited by ice monsters, and blocks of ice block many passages. Without the skill of making ice arrows, it is impossible to pass it, and if you have not mastered it by this time, you will suffer, constantly getting stuck and not understanding what to do next.
Yes, many cult games of the past also did not lead the gamer by the hand, but modern game design has taught that, at least in story missions, the authors must provide all the tools for passing so that the player does not abandon the passage halfway through.
There is also pumping in the game, which is quite tricky, given that to learn a skill, you need to find a scroll with a recipe, and get special teeth from chests hidden in secluded places, which here serve as something like talent points. and also collect a certain amount of resources. After that, you can go to the Izba, throw the scroll, teeth, and herbs into the cauldron, and master the desired ability.
These skills are divided into four branches – hare, goat, crow, and snake. They belong to several conditional categories: improving abilities related to using a bow, making potions, magic skills, pumping a broom, and so on. If you learn several skills from a certain branch, for example, snakes, the corresponding enchantment will open – passive bonuses, such as increasing the number of arrows in your inventory or restoring mana after killing an enemy.
While leveling up affects gameplay by making Yaga stronger, it’s depressing how actively the game pushes you to grind resources. They are needed here for absolutely everything, from learning skills to making arrows. This significantly slows down the player’s progress, even though abundant resources are scattered around the world. You will have to stop often to collect herbs and feathers, extract eyes from spiders and extract honeycombs from beehives.
Good Baba Yaga or bad?
How we resolve this situation will affect Yagi’s temper – move him to the dark or the light side. There are other moral dilemmas in Blacktail as well. You can meet a tiny but vicious Ant Queen who wants to destroy the village and asks us to help with this. But we do good deeds by helping the little talking sir Worm, who rids the earth of corpses. Plus a bunch of little things. They shot at the hive to get honey – an evil deed shot down an apple for a hedgehog – a good one. And if they killed him, they were completely brutalized …
Moving along the scale to the dark or light side, we get new titles and titles in kindness or viciousness and open up new options for this in dialogues. In addition, it gives bonuses during battles and exploration of the world. Glorious Yaga gathers more resources, her main spell slows and damages enemies. In a vicious variant, blood balls with a certain probability remain on opponents, restoring Yaga’s health, and the main spell steals life from enemies and gives it to the heroine.
Combat system
Perhaps the Blacktail combat system is the aspect to which I had the most questions. The thing is that the developers made it somehow clumsy. This is especially true of the dash, with which you can dodge attacks. It turned out somehow clumsy, which looks very strange for a character who owns a bow. Moreover, you will often notice that your arrow, which flies right on the target, for some reason does not hit it. I don’t know if there is a bug in hitboxes or in the mechanics of fixing damage, but such a bug gets boring very quickly.
Visual
Graphically, BLACKTAIL doesn’t look very good, but it’s still very good. The designers managed to stylize the visual in a certain way – if you look at the picture in front of your eyes as a whole, you can even enjoy it, but as soon as you start looking at the details… Something can prick your eye.
So what is Blacktail?
As you can see, Blacktail has elements of survival, moral dilemmas, and worms in top hats paired with talking mushrooms. What’s more, when you hear the squeaky voice of a tiny ant queen demanding our help destroying an entire village, you don’t know whether to cry or laugh. For some, this may cause dissonance.
But in fact, the main feature of Slavic folklore is a colorful combination of serious and funny humor, mysticism, and tragedy. Remember The Witcher, where dramaturgy and unpretentious jokes of Ivasik were combined, or the same tales about the Baba Yaga, who rode in a hut, flew on a broomstick (she also cleaned the house herself) and at the same time ate the kids. Both funny and creepy.
The further we wander into the dark jungle of the plot, the more tragedy and horror it contains. And the more we sympathize with the heroine. This is no longer a joke. Unpleasant visions and memories visit the girl. We learn more about what happened to her, and about the missing children. Moreover, in these visions and flashbacks, the game can suddenly turn into a dark platformer or a puzzle game that allows you to reconstruct a creepy scene from the past.
