Laika: Aged Through Blood
Usually I blab about games once I finish them, but I'm going to have an Anthrocon-sized break in my usual gaming habits shortly and I'm not sure I'll finish this before then, given how busy I am in general. So the thoughts below may not represent my final feelings 100%, but I reckon I've got a good grip on Laika: Aged Through Blood at around 70-75% completion.
Laika had been on my radar since its announcement a few years ago on the strength of the developer team Brainwash Gang's earlier game, the gorgeous The Longest Road on Earth - less of a game admittedly and more of a selection of slice of life short stories, but one that has had a deep impact on me and which I return to play through at least once a year at this point (I wrote a little bit more about it here. Why I only picked it up recently was because of my own gentle hesitations of the gameplay elements it presented and having now been playing it, I would say that I was needlessly suspicious... but also a little bit right, too.
Laika: Aged Through Blood is a metroidvania - on a bike. The titular character traverses back and forth through a wasteland full of death and little in the way of hope, acquiring new gadgets and skills to her disposal along the way which then allow her to reach further areas, and you know how it is with metroidvanias. The element that gives Laika - the game - its own unique flair is that outside your home town and when stepping into shops, you're always riding your motorbike. Everything is designed around the motorbike, and specifically the necessity to always keep a sense of momentum and the careful balance of physics that riding a cycle comes with. You reload weapons and charge your counter through bike flips, you defend against bullets by positioning your bike between them and your flesh, and every bump on the road presents an opportunity to either recover or charge into attack. A rolling stone gathers no moss and a coyote standing still does little more than act as target practice, so every bit of the game's design is forged with that in mind - even the shotgun you acquire is a lot more useful as a tool than as a weapon because the kickback gives a skilled player a series of extra jumps when used right. Laika can only take a single hit, whether that's from an enemy gun or because you tipped your bike too hard and let the body hit the floor, so every combat or platformer encounter is effectively a test of your talents to execute your moves precisely and to improvise on the fly when inevitably your gun misses or a new enemy reveals itself behind the next hill.
Generally speaking, that's actually really fun - I was hesitant about the focus on bike physics, but in practice it can be really rewarding. The learning curve can be a steep when you practice your brain to effectively multitask at all times (control your bike, control your guns, observe your surroundings and keep an eye which side you're facing, etc) and death comes easily from the tiniest mistake, but death also comes cheap: respawn points are plenty, resurrection takes a mere flash and as long as you go back to collect the currency you dropped when you got it, there's no drawbacks. At its best, pulling off a series of stunts with perfect execution can feel really good and Laika is one of the few games of this type where you - as the player - can truly reflect on how your skills have grown across the journey in a manner that goes beyond just seeing how many hearts you might have collected along the way.
But then come the bosses and everything that was so rewarding previously now transforms into a twisted mirror version of itself. For what it's worth, the game does manage to make every boss fight unique which isn't an easy thing to do with such a defined, restricted gameplay style: but they're all awful in their unique ways. All the tricky elements become double-edged swords when you're restricted to a defined boss arena: finding momentum isn't so easy when you only have a tiny spot of land or a guided path to follow. You could say this brings with it its own refreshing challenge, but I've been finding the boss fights genuinely frustrating more than anything, so much so that they're actually tainting my overall experience. I'm currently about to face off what I understand is the penultimate boss, and part the reason I've been holding off from playing the game for a few days is because I just can't be bothered spending another couple of evenings annoyed at a game.
But, the gameplay is genuinely only one half of Laika: ATB - the other is the presentation, and this is where Brainwash Gang excels once more. The visuals are gorgeously stylised, meeting somewhere between charmingly cartoony and realistically ugly and finding a visual language in that no-mans-land that can be really powerful at times. Not to mention it's just simply gorgeous to look: some of the background vistas especially are genuinely phenomenal and whenever the game pans a little further to let the player really gaze at them, it's a well deserved victory lap. The game really earns its mature rating with some of the cutscene visuals where it's not afraid to show a little gore (one of the first things you see in the game is someone hung by his own guts), and it very rarely feels gratuitous. It's an ugly, violent world and it's realised powerfully through the graphics. The writing is less strong in this regard: the minimal plot mainly focuses on the key characters instead of a grand overarching adventure with twists and turns, and sometimes the dialogue acts like what teenagers think hardcore adult writing is like.
But the star of the show is the soundtrack, which is the biggest similarity between The Longest Road on Earth and Laika, and for the fans of the former, a genuine selling point. The score is written and performed again by BeÃcoli, one of the developers, in a style familiar from the earlier game: tender, vulnerable singer/songwriter compositions complete with full vocals and lyrics. The fragile melancholy and powerful melodies of BeÃcoli's music is a poignant contrast to what's happening on the screen: when all the death and deserts is narrated through these wistful ballads and gently rollicking folk pop songs, it really highlights the sadness that's constantly present in the world and in the player's actions - but it also shows a glimmer of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. Laika keeps a cassette player on her (hipster!) and the various BeÃcoli tapes you can find hidden in the wasteland become some of the most exciting collectables, because it means adding another song and another brushstroke of a different tone or a mood into your journeys. The more incidental score is generally excellent, and a special highlight goes to the bittersweet campfire song which plays in your hub town at night, expanded further as you find more of the band members scattered in the wasteland.
Overall, there's little else like Laika out there - and that is definitely something worth applauding for. Between its unique combination of gameplay elements in an otherwise quite populated genre in the indie world and the drop-dead stunning presentation, it's a thoroughly memorable and enchanting experience. Also incredibly frustrating at times, and though the game does a good job with its core gameplay loop, sometimes you get the feeling that it's not quite comfortable in its own skin and the ideas can only stretch so far without coming across cumbersome. Still, flaws and all, it's something that really stands out from everything around it and that makes it rewarding in its own right. I can't help but profess a little bit of a crush on Brainwash Gang: they take risks and they may not always perfectly (I only realised they were behind Friends vs Friends and whoo, I've deffo got a grumble about that), but they're genuinely walking their own path and their games feel like truly unique experiences. Laika is worth a shot - and it's got a demo, if you too might feel hesitant whether the gameplay is something you might enjoy.