I increasingly judge Souls-style games not by the size of their bosses or the depth of their dungeons, but by the cleverness of their shortcuts, and Flintlock: Siege Of Dawn has my favorite shortcuts in a while. Rather than simply routes to the other side of a barred door – though there are plenty of such Lordrannish loops in this game – they consist of aerial chains of magical purple triangles that suck you in when you hold down a button. They lend force to a branching, faux-Napoleonic world that would otherwise be a collection of atmospheric strolls between campfire equivalents and battles defined by tight resourcing systems. They’re idiot-proof grappling points from which you can launch yourself toward another triangle, a ledge full of upgrade materials, or a loitering musketeer in dire need of a ground slam.
Back to the shortcuts. First, some scene-setting. In Flintlock, you play Nor, a gaunt and dissolute genius in an army fighting legions of the dead. As the curtain rises, Nor and her fellow field engineers accidentally break through a portal that unleashes a full-fledged invasion of the underworld gods. The rest of the story is about putting the lid back on Pandora’s box, with Nor galloping between towns, fast-traveling wayshrines (which also spawn the local zombies), and boss battles with the escaped gods, while rallying her scattered friends into a traveling caravan of sidequest vendors and upgrade dispensers, who gather around campfires in your wake.
Early on, Nor befriends one of the lost gods, Enki, a feathered, fox-like spirit who accompanies you everywhere and is the source of your supernatural powers – most notably Nor’s gift for kicking himself around on gusts of enchanted blackpowder. Enki is God Of War’s Atreus, a supporting character assigned to a face button, but with a few key differences. For one, he doesn’t suffer from toxic childhood anxiety, though he does have some baggage regarding the nature of his divinity. Second, he has a smaller repertoire of support abilities than Atreus – essentially, you can hammer a button to have him curse opponents, “priming” them for an armour-shattering canned attack or finisher, while conserving energy for a choice of AOE mega-spells.
That focus makes it more forgettable than Atreus, but also less finicky. I feel the same way about much of Flintlock , which essentially combines God Of War with the Soulslike stylings of developer A44’s previous Ashen , then whittles the concoction down to a slick, 20-hour “Soulslite” with a handful of party tricks of its own making. The result is a satisfying summer extravaganza that won’t take up too many weekends, with a few questionable fittings and occasional flashes of genius.
The game’s inspirations are clear from the title screen, but Flintlock wastes no time fleshing them out. Nor does she wield a one-handed melee weapon in her right hand and a pistol in her left. As in Bloodborne, the pistol is primarily used for defense—interrupting otherwise unblockable attacks and setting the enemy up for a counterattack. But new pistols provide new applications. There’s a menacing radioactive tree root whose projectiles detonate after a few seconds, flinging Prime across the target’s entourage. There’s a blunderbuss that merely tickles an enemy’s health bars but also applies knockdowns in a wide arc, making it the perfect antidote to a roaming horde.
Melee weapons, meanwhile, cover a small, crowded spectrum, from hammers that wreak havoc through armor to flaming axes that sometimes keep you sitting out the fight. Each is a way to prime your gun, with the game granting a powder charge for every four hits that land. As such, you’ll always be a multiclass, chopping at heads to earn the powder to counter the next unblockable hit, though the game’s progression system—the upgrades of which can be rolled back at will, restoring some of the associated XP, or “Reputation,” in the process—does allow you to pivot your approach toward sorcery or carnage or gunplay.
On top of this well-measured combat chemistry, the effects of gear and old gear synergies stack up. Right now I’m wearing a set of togs that (if memory serves me correctly) cause me to explode when Enki casts four curses in a row, and also when I earn gunpowder, and also when I attack out of a block. It makes regular skirmishes a little unscientific – sometimes I can’t see myself for dust. It’s also a drawback when you’re wandering dungeons filled with gunpowder kegs and other unstable fixtures – Flintlock’s environment designers may be a little too fond of that one. I also have the option of a crystal-studded outfit that turns my dodge into a teleport, and a gold gauntlet that duplicates my grenades as they fly.
There’s nowhere near the range of build options here as you’d find in a Soulslike or the latest God Of War, but there’s plenty of room for tinkering within the scope of a single playthrough. Flintlock isn’t as tough as Souls of GOW on normal difficulty either – it hands out Estus-style health flasks with every village it frees from the evil dead. But it does incentivise you to play well via a multiplier that awards bonus rep per move the longer you go unscathed. Throughout combat, there’s the lingering question of when to harvest that accumulated rep, which cancels out the multiplier; leave it too long and you risk losing thousands of XP to the next zombie looking for a hug.
Pistols aside, Nor gets longer-range firearms in the form of rifles, mortars, and a shotgun that spits out rolling grenades. In my hands, these tools exist to prune snipers and cancel out the odd midboss I don’t feel like dueling. Rather than organic extensions of the combat system, they feel like a safety valve for the inevitable tedium of any game that’s largely melee. I don’t mind that they’re there, but they don’t feel necessary.
I have similar feelings of disappointment with the plot and writing, to the extent that I thoughtlessly grafted them onto a point about the distance mechanics. Flintlock’s world is gorgeous, with its faux-Turkish coffee houses run by creatures made of arms holding masks, its attention to detail like cracked murals and brass ladles juxtaposed against its love of horizon-devouring, bone-white palaces and sky-bound mineral tumors. Broader ambient themes include the rise of blind fanaticism driven by the fear of mortality, and there are bits of written mythology to explore. But the people seem shallow. Surly companions are chatty, and have loyalty quests tacked on to the fanciest kit, but for the most part they’re glorified upgrade menus. Other mission-giving NPCs are creatures of 8-bit RPG brevity, though the voice acting is lively.
Some of the NPCs are players of Sebo, a mildly cheesy minigame that’s a sort of noughts-and-crosses game played on a triangular board, using tokens that can have special abilities like jumping over enemy pieces. It’s a nice addition, and one I’m eager to revisit now that I’m off deadline, but the artificial glut of Sebo players reflects a setting that’s not entirely sure whether it’s a world or a procession of pace-altering distractions and glossy landscapes.
Nor is herself a gruff do-gooder with a complicated past—a charismatic protagonist, to be sure, but lacking in much emotional depth. She’s at her best when she’s chatting with Enki about their dramatically different views on the cosmos. For all his divine insight and all his melodic voice acting, Enki can be touchingly childish (as can the other gods, in less touching ways). There’s a sweetly anti-Quixotic moment when he’s captivated by the spectacle of a windmill. Later, a tour of some memorials provides a chance to talk about loss and memory. What happens to deities when they die?
There’s always the danger that a tried-and-true genre hybrid will shrink to the sum of its influences, but Flintlock: Siege Of Dawn manages to weave it all together and add enough spin to set itself apart. Talk about those shortcuts. Flipping and coursing between cosmic triangles is a delight in itself, especially when the game flirtatiously stretches the gap between certain grab points, daring you to air-dash and double-jump to continue the chain. But the real reward is that feeling of uncovering a hidden designer’s logic, because with the uncovering of those triangles is also the slow realization that every layout, no matter how dank and ghoul-infested, no matter how Souls-adjacent, is built to be savored from above.
Each network of air launchers must be called upon, strand by strand. As you follow the quest paths, the rumble of the controller will lure you toward opalescent skullcaps coughing up the next set of triangles. By the time you’ve completed that quest, you should have a whole rollercoaster’s worth of coasters ready to whisk you back to the last town hub or campfire. Should you get one too many musket balls to the face while climbing, unlocking triangles as you go also makes the familiar ritual of reclaiming your dropped XP less tedious.
There’s a moment in the second major region where you find yourself at the top of what is essentially a giant slide, a dizzying drop between cliffs thickly littered with rotting crossbowmen. I cheered and slid all the way down to the campsite at the bottom, then found a skull plinth and began clearing the heights, discovering more plinths, until I could finally traverse the entire mountainside without getting my feet dirty. It stirred an emotion I’d never felt in Flintlock before: not just admiration for the sturdy craft on display, but delight.
This review is based on a review of the game, written by the developer.