Following on from its announcement and our developer interview, Last Hero of Nostalgaia allowed us to get hands-on with this stripped back Souls experience. Taking that description in a very unexpected direction, developer Over The Moon Games didn’t disarm players or remove the opportunity to progress. Instead, this experience is a re-pixelated world. Don’t expect ray-traced ruins. In Nostalgaia, things are heading back to the early nineties and heroes are definitely not welcome in these new days of old.
While the graphics might look a little old school, Last Hero of Nostalgaia kicked off with something distinctly common for systems powerful enough to push polygons. The character creator, however, firmly establishes what we were up against. Playing a dangerously underwhelming looking hero, you won’t get anywhere up against a barrage of slider bars. Immediately mocking the first player of the day, Last Hero of Nostalgaia’s character creator allows players to choose a uniform stick figure or a uniform stick figure to represent them in this epic battle to bring back a modern world.
From here on in, an opening exposition recants the same pithy disdain for your quest that the trailer teased, and dropped us into a medieval dungeon where the residents of this world begin by hanging the body of another unsuspecting hero from the rafters. Suffice to say this mob is out hack you down. Over the next 15 minutes, we got to pick one of four classes, the Datadin, Formatter, Resolutionary, Sourcerer, and Randomaster each of which brings its own benefits and very different paystyle to battle. These classes largely follow the same structure Souls fans will recognize, and we picked the Datadin’s sword and board approach so we could balance our ineptitude with some defensive capabilities.
Classes aren’t the only thing that stay the same, despite the de-evolved backdrop. Combat is a free form hack and slash sort of affair that feels totally at home on the end of an Xbox controller. Controls feel tight and responsive with plenty of opportunities to hit dodge and weave while choosing how to handle weapons of various heft.
Similarly, notes dropped on the floor allow players to read a little further into the game. Anybody who played as far as the Elden ring tutorial will recognize this, with some other very obvious Souls systems, including online pay inventory items, upgrades, and the option to pick up and play with different weapons. This even goes as far as allowing players to wield with one or two hands. I’m so bad at these that I couldn’t even discern if two-handed wielding makes a difference but, here’s hoping.
While things still feel familiarly souls-esque, the difficulty felt tuned down for those of us that might not want to turn the difficulty up before the second coffee on a Wednesday morning. still, things did get hectic quickly. We took down a small collection of different mob types. Whether it was heavy-hitting axe wielders, simple townsfolk with a pointy thing, or a crossbow carrier they all felt simple enough to take down, with one of the most difficult feats initiating combat at the right time. Once mid-flow in a set of combos, combat feels more fluid than actually striking out. There’s a deliberate effort to attack and that made us consider our movement when we got up around the throngs of pixelated locals laying around the appropriately bland brown castle walls.
As we cut through the matt colors and blocky stairwells of this 15 minutes, dying, recovering or dropped progress, and then repeating, the narrator chips in. Reminding us that while this is a Souls game, this is something of a joyous subversive twist. Everything is here if you’re just looking for a straightforward Souls experience, but Last Hero of Nostalgaia is jsut lathered in cutting quips and rhetoric that know exactly how silly it is. If there is anywhere that this dark humor is going to go down well, it’s surrounded by British sensibilities at WASSD. Find out more on the official Steam Store page now.
