The announcement trailer for Venture to the Vile wasn’t anything extraordinary, but its engrossing visuals, somber music, and Victorian aesthetics had me yearning to experience more of it. Sadly, I decided to stream the game and was not as gripped by the gameplay as I’d hoped, but there were enough positives for a few extra hours offline as well. Though I didn’t finish the title, I wanted to discuss my observations from behind the stag mask.
This is a quaint world with an idyllic small town called Rainybrook, which seems okay at first, minus the stereotypical bullies. It’s a little odd I suppose, because everyone here is wearing masks based on different beasts, has correlating animal names, oh, and there’s some evil force trying to move in on everything by mutating the local inhabitants—guess I could have led with that part. That would be the Vile in the title and the story’s main threat, because now the protagonist’s love interest has gone missing and he’s been infected by this evil, but he can form blades from the excess infernal material and absorb it as a side effect. This could be a bad tradeoff, but it helps set up the adventure quite nicely.
The game starts slow, but the story isn’t unwelcoming, and once things get going it feels like something we want to see through. There’s the main tale, of course, and a ton of side quests to pick up from random townsfolks who are in need, as well as multiple endings to entice players. Although a normal run can be done in under eight hours, there seems to be enough content to keep people involved here for a while. The game is also challenging, while not feeling unreasonable, it comes close to finding a solid balance. Most of my issues with the combat came from the parry system.
It takes a little while to get used to because we are taught to watch for this starburst to know when enemies will attack, but each foe has its own timing and potentially multiple attacks that require the player to watch their movements or simply have experience with guarding against. Once players get the double jump, it’s almost easier to simply dodge or leap over some bad guys, however, these efforts can land our hero in environmental hazards or cause them to end up in another monster’s clutches. Things feel smooth at first, but when combat steps up, the handling can be iffy at times. Enemy design isn’t bad and there are some creative bosses, a couple that may even surprise new adventurers, most will need a couple of tries to learn patterns and how the game wants them to be treated, even if it isn’t a skill issue.
It only resulted in my death a few times, but Venture to the Vile does suffer from some odd slowdown where the controls were sluggish to respond. Even outside of combat, there were a couple of moments where the game seemed to stagger, even though nothing major was happening on screen. Text bubbles were occasionally messed up as well, like the words were having trouble rendering, making them incredibly hard to read. The loading times were also quite long at times and I don’t think it was my PC. I chose to play after the patch was released in hopes these types of issues would be minimal, but there are still a few things that need to be fixed before it will feel comfortable.
If things get too tough, there are upgrades that mostly help with traversal and a currency to spend on tweaks that help toughen up the hero and make him a bit more versatile. Grinding is an option—so is dying a lot and having to go back to the previous save. I did that a few times unintentionally due to getting lost. There were a couple of times I wasn’t sure of the best way to get somewhere and the lack of dedicated fast travel wasn’t thrilling me, but at least the map has a charming aesthetic.
The visuals truly are the best part of the game at the moment. Everything has depth, and not just because players can switch planes, but the color choice, how shadows move along the walls, and lighting, it all comes together in this corrupted home vibe that is accented by hollow and creepy sound design to accent everything, with even little touches like the footsteps. There’s an excellent weather system as well as a day and night cycle that changes the environment – enemies and backgrounds – making sure the presentation is shifting and enigmatic like the force that is taking it over. People like to compare this style to Tim Burton’s animated projects, a twisted storybook, and that makes sense, but at a few points it comes across as something even darker and I wanted more of that.
I’ll probably come back to Venture to the Vile, and give it some more attention later. This is a solid offering that needs some massaging, perhaps a little smoothing, but is still going to make some Metroidvania (we still calling them that?) fans quite thrilled. The art is its strong suit, but that doesn’t mean the other aspects are bad. it just might not go much further than that for some people, but it’s worth a shot.
A code was provided for these impressions.
Stephen Wilds 