UUnto The End
Learn to be a warrior alongside another of gaming’s unlikely dad-heroes
PC, P PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Realism can be anathema to good game design: if you’re not going to allow the player to jump, for instance, you’d better have some sound reasoning for the decision, because jumping is both fun and useful. We worry, then, when Stephen and Sara Danton tell us that realism is one of the core tenets of their 2D action game Unto The End. The first thing we do is hit X‚ and our bearded avatar jumps. A good start.
The movement is not exactly what you’d call athletic, but this suits our hero. He’s a visibly downtrodden, heavy-set sort of fellow – his breathing is often laboured – who’s searching for his missing wife and child. He’s not exactly bouncing on the balls of his feet. We feel the full heft of him as he throws his weight across a gap at our commands, or dodge-rolls away from a collapsing cliff, and it seems appropriate. But the real convincer comes when we run up against an obstacle we can’t seem to jump high enough to clear. “Oh, there’s a double jump,” Stephen Danton explains, and we raise an eyebrow, thinking of “realism”, as we’re told to push forward against the rock face while jumping. We do so – and to our surprise, the man uses his momentum and an outstretched hand to give himself an extra boost.
Small, clever details like this are everywhere in our demo of Unto The End, and help keep the commitment to realism atmospheric, rather than annoying. There’s very little UI to speak of: instead of a health bar, a stooping stance and blood on our clothes tells us how much damage we’ve taken. The animations layered onto the graphic, Another World- esque art style are meticulously choreographed, and are key to telling the story wordlessly – both narratively, and mechanically.
At first, we’re not ready to listen, too busy getting to grips with the combat system. With our sword held either high or low, we can deal blows; we can deflect them in the same way, the clang and reverberation of metal so precisely rendered that we can almost feel it in our palms as our character reels back for just a moment. Three deflections breaks an enemy’s posture, and we can unleash a more damaging attack. Each successful defence resets your stance, however – you can’t just continue to hold up after blocking a high hit if you see another incoming, and must push your sword back into place once more. We understand the thinking, but can’t help but feel it’s persnickety, and using thumbsticks makes it feel slightly too loose. The Dantons happily agree that adding in an option to play with the D-pad might help.
It’s a simplified take on games such as For Honor, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or (the criminally underappreciated) Absolver, perhaps, with a few extra wrinkles thrown in: a shoulder charge on the right trigger, a throwable dagger – which needs to be manually retrieved – on a bumper. We tend to forget those, however. At first, we die constantly to the orc-like ‘woad’, just a couple of wrong guesses spelling disaster. To survive, we find ourselves focusing intently on their physical tells. Each enemy is handdesigned, meaning that we’re starting from scratch every time we meet a new woad: this one’s attacks can be ducked under, another throws spears that have to be dodge-rolled past (and we can throw them back at our foe).
Slowly, it all comes together, our understanding of each opponent’s rhythms meaning our mastery improves with every fight. Well, mostly: we feel cheated at times by bits of level dressing, such as large trees on the plane closest to us that block some enemy attacks from view, or having to fight in the dark in caves when our torch is knocked from our hands. Then again, it does force us to be more careful about our positioning. Indeed, most of Unto The End seems to be about keeping us honest as a player, which we can only respect. And while, realistically, there isn’t too much here we haven’t seen before, the grace and thought with which this is put together already has us eager to, erm, jump in.
Most of Unto The End seems to be about keeping us honest, which we can only respect