Demo Time: Sancticide (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Sancticide - Demo through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Sancticide Demo

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: TBD

Publisher: Sylen Studio, Red Square Games

Developer: Red Square Games, Sylen Studio

Time Spent: 50 Minutes

Sancticide is kinda strange and I'm not sure how to feel about it or the message that I might have interpreted from only playing the demo.  You can watch the whole of the demo which is up on our YouTube channel here.

The story here, as far as I was able to gather from the 1.3 playthroughs I did, was that you're a guy in a post-apocalyptic, potentially post-rapture world that happened some years before the start of the game, and you're making your way through an area killing groups of bandits/sinners and the occasional apparition.  The story location is not made clear, although it's somewhere with exposed magma chambers, although that could have been a result of the apocalypse/rapture, but the developers, Red Square Games, are a Polish studio so it could just as well be somewhere in the Polish countryside.  You play as a guy dressed like a cross between a Romanesque Centurian Soldier, and a modern military soldier-man, with maybe a bit of zealot priest thrown in for good measure.

In the demo, your character wakes up after something potentially traumatic happened, possibly tumbling down the cliff face?  But there is a singular goal upon realizing where he is, and that's to search the campsite and kill all of the sinners.  Like, I want to know what this campsite is all about.  Are these refugees, fleeing from an oppressive religious society?  Are they an organized group that is raping and pillaging their way through southern Poland?  In typical video game fashion, nearly everyone we come across as we slaughter our way through the camp looks like they're either on patrol or patiently waiting for an attack to come from somewhere, meaning there isn't really any sign of civilian life that I noticed.

The setting itself is a mixed bag, literally.  As mentioned, there is supposed to have been some event that did something big to the world population, which is why you are a holy solider guy running around with a gladius, or whatever sword-like weapon you find along the way, but you also have the option of a machine gun in contextual situations.  There isn't a whole lot in the way of modern civilization that you see apart from broken down or derelict vehicles, bags of cement lying around, and dozens of lit candles atop a broken washing machine.  Oh, and several enemies/sinners do carry firearms.  And then on top of all that, there is a fantastical element as your character has Witcher-like magical abilities that are only hinted at in the demo, like a sonic push-like ability that drains from your magic (faith?) meter.  There are also several goblin/ghoul-like creatures and literal ghost-like shades that talk smack at you.  Maybe it's because this is a demo, but it felt like there wasn't much time to question what was going on or why you were doing what it was that you were doing, except searching the campsite and killing sinners.

I don't know if the demo ended prematurely for me because I took too much damage in a group fight, or if it was scripted to end, but I ended up nearly killed, and then you're saved by a fellow Sin Collector (as is what your savior calls you and himself), who then presumably kills the remainder of the sinners and takes you, via cutscene stills to what I assume to be is a Sin Collector stronghold ala Kaer Morhen.  The demo however ends with you spawning into a rotunda where you can spar against several collections of enemies until you want to end the demo.  I'll get back to this rotunda battle in a bit because it's intrinsically linked to my next bit.

The controls in this game were something, and I should also point out that the game ran between 12-20 frames-per-second on the Steam Deck at both medium and high graphical settings.  The camera controls and sensitivity left something to be desired as I often found that I could never rotate the camera as fast as I wanted it to, especially in close-quarter combat with multiple enemies.  The group of ghosts, the ghouls, the final battle, and the rotunda battle all felt hampered because I could not get the camera to move around as fast as I wanted.  There was also no lock-on option in combat, which combined with a slow rotation speed did not help the feel of combat.  Lastly, there was no dodge or roll option, or at least none that was either intuitive or made known to me.  I'm not saying that every one-on-one (or thereabouts) third-person adventure game needs to have a dodge/roll option and I recognize that Dark Souls has trained me well in this regard, but combat really felt like it was missing a dodge/roll action.  Yes, there was a parry button that seemed to be the combat-related skill wall that I never quite mastered, and I never learned if you're able to parry projectiles, because those bloody ghoul creatures and whatever it was that they were throwing nearly took me out of the game.

So the end of the demo consisted of a sparring battle arena where you could select what type of enemies and how many you wanted to fight in this specific rotunda; I genuinely don't know what else to call it.  I started off fighting what I knew in numbers I could handle, but eventually, I pitted myself against the maximum number of Proselytes (there being 10 of them).  But hey, I had a reticle-less assault rifle, so how hard could they really be?  I think I managed to kill one, take the helmets off of a couple, and maimed a few before I was literally gutted.  I didn't actually mind the combination of using either a sword or an assault rifle interchangeably during combat and in the right circumstances and setting, it probably could have been a lot of fun outside of the sparring arena.

So that's where I stand on Sancticide, which if you're not sure by the time you're at the end of this article, then you're in the same boat as I am.  If the game implemented at the very least lock-on targeting during combat (as if I know how easy/difficult that is to implement in a video game) and some type of dodge mechanic, then I would likely enjoy the combat a lot more than I did in the demo.  I'm sure that there is a lot more to the story and what is going on than what is in this 20-minute demo and I would be very surprised if the demo is how the game actually started.  I need to know more about these sinners before I allow myself the pleasure of gutting them with a three-thousand-year-old sword.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental