You walk down a dark, rocky path, not knowing what awaits you. You have done some things that you are not proud of, and you want to make up for it and atone. The afterlife can be a fickle mistress. You will need to fight eight separate demons to save your crumbling kingdom, and each one is more difficult than the last. This is our review for Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption.
From Developer DARK STAR, and Publisher Another Indie comes a title that has you fighting for your life, or afterlife, against eight separate bosses. The bosses are supposed to represent sins and one final boss that is not based on one of the seven deadly sins. With each boss, you will be challenged more than the first as you have to sacrifice health and stamina stats, and take losses to weapon attacks and armor as well, to go into the realm of each boss. Sinner is an action-RPG that has you fighting for your kingdoms redemption, as they are currently sitting in blasphemy.
The combat in the game is very hard. I spent a good hour trying to learn the controls of the game through the tutorial before I figured out you could just walk by everything. The controls on the keyboard are very rough to get used to as well and may require some keybind changes when you play. K is how you block, for example. You have the ability to use a heavy weapon and a light weapon in your gaming with more being available to unlock as you complete boss battles in the hard-but-fair combat system. Sinner tries to deal with Dark Souls type of combat while removing each of the levels and giving you only boss fights in this system. Each of the bosses has their own stylized attacks with one finisher that will kill you in one hit if it lands. It will be up to you to sidestep attacks, and figure out ways to survive each fight to move onto the next.
When it comes to Dark Souls, one of the biggest things you can see in the game are the landscapes and backgrounds. In Sinner, however, all of the backdrops are blurred, and the landscapes are of low quality. Even your character doesn’t seem like he is a completely finished model, and this may have been done on purpose because of the type of game. It does seem like maybe it was a little rushed. There is one saving grace for the details of the game though. Each of the bosses all looks like they had lots of time put into their textures and model builds, and they all look spectacular in each of their fights.
For the type of “boss-rush” game that it is, Sinner does present a unique challenge to its players and allows you to try and learn on the fly after each fight. Sadly there is very little obvious story, and that is one of the biggest things that leave an impression on you and begs you to come back for more. This is not the case with Sinner. If you decide to go back to it, then it is because you want to try and finish the game because you are into completionism.
Note: Our copy was reviewed on PC through Discord with a code provided by PR.
