Bloodroots
PC, PS4, Switch
Revenge is a dish best served cold, which makes ultra-violent Weird West action game Bloodroots positively frosty. The first minutes see you, as the hulking Mr Wolf, running through a village strewn with corpses, before the perpetrator – the terrifying Black Wolf – brings down a hatchet upon your head. By some miracle, you survive, and set out on a quest to avenge Tarrytown. And, for a game from an indie studio we’ve never heard of before, there’s an unexpected richness to almost everything – animation, sound and level design in particular – that inspires an insatiable bloodlust.
That might all sound rather sanguinary, and it is. But Bloodroots’ sense of style and slapstick humour affords it a wonderful lightness. Its cartoonish setting looks like papercraft; fully-destructible towns are decorated with die-cut trees and houses, and lit with a textural warmth. And nearly everything within them, from the buckets to the fenceposts, can be picked up and used as a weapon. Guards stand motionless, flesh-skittles waiting to be bowled over by our vicious choreography – until we come within range, and they charge.
Each item-slash-weapon has its own quirks that play into a successful run through a level. A small pot can be thrown quickly and from a distance, whereas the few frames longer it takes to swing an axe at a nearby head must be accounted for. The pot can only be deployed once, while the hatchet will last for three kills (or more, should we manage to bag multi-kills). Spears are very handy: our only three buttons are assigned to picking up an object, using an object and jumping, meaning there’s no dash to speak of. A spear, however, lets us shoot forward like a human needle, threading kills together effortlessly. Charging forward with a ladder is an effective way to splat a foe; jumping with one springs us up onto higher ground, and spinning it grants us an area-of-effect attack – and even flight while in the air. Items such as lanterns and rifles are less common, but powerful: flames spread quickly in Bloodroots, and shrieking guards are wont to accidentally set each other on fire, or shoot a comrade who’s in their line of sight.
Even when we can’t find cutlasses, harpoons or fireworks, it’s critical that we keep something to hand, even if it’s just a post torn from a nearby fence. Mr Wolf’s default punch works in a pinch, but is slow and doesn’t come with any perks. And levels are designed as semi-platforming puzzles that require resourcefulness. From the coastal climes of the first act to the searing desert and frozen tundra of the second and third, little breadcrumb trails are laid: a hatchet ahead of a tree, a harpoon gun in front of a gap too wide to jump, a barrel near some spikes and a small group of guards. It’s so clear: we grab the axe, chop down the tree and sprint up its trunk to the next ledge, thunk the harpoon into the chest of the enemy across the gap to pull ourselves over it, then hop onto the barrel and roll it to avoid the spikes and squash two enemies before kicking it into a third.
There are always a few viable alternative routes in the open-ended levels to take when we tire of messing up a lengthy sequence (checkpoints are sometimes meted out too strictly). Often, they’re even more entertaining: improvising new approaches keeps things fresh, and Paper Cult has clearly worked hard to ensure that levels work from a variety of angles: we rarely ever have to restart due to having used up all available ways to cross a chasm, for instance. And the number of hilariously animated, often referential finishing moves – triggered by timing an attack perfectly with particular weapons – is dizzying, and encourages us to switch things up, whether this involves suffocating someone with a tuna or paying homage to a certain shovel-wielding Knight.
As the story rolls onwards, you meet and fight the three irresistibly wacky, smack-talking Beasts – each of whom gets a distinctly designed, fairly checkpointed and thoroughly enjoyable boss fight, and whose ghosts haunt you your camp every night. More complex regular enemy types appear, and more outlandish weapons are introduced: no spoilers, but our favourite might be the bizarre kind of gun that heralds the eventual appearance of Mrs Crow. It’s her third-act setting, however, that frustrates most. The tundra introduces some of our least favourite environmental hurdles in games – strong winds, slippy ice and deep snow, the first two of which consistently ruin our carefully planned choreography for no reason, and the last so poorly visually communicated as to catch us by surprise when we’re trying to run from danger. Then again, even without a gale blowing us offcourse, a select few scenarios are teeth-grindingly difficult to clear, thanks to Bloodroots’ slightly too-loose controls. There are large areas of spikes that must be cleared by balancing on barrels or giant cannonballs, which break after three kills or one accidental bump; landing Mr Wolf safely on the next barrel or ball seems to us to depend entirely on luck. It’s in these moments that Bloodroots’ excellent core conceit wears thinnest.
Overall, there’s a general feeling that – despite its generous efforts to introduce new, surprising weapons up until the final moments – Bloodroots is a shade too long, with many areas feeling like slightly reconfigured repetitions of ones that have come before, instead of meaningful evolutions. Then again, when it pulls out all the conceptual stops towards the end, it’s unforgettable: one sequence that’s by turns gut-busting and chilling rivals even Rockstar’s substance-addled vignettes. It’s perfectly timed as Nick Suttner’s writing begins to hint more aggressively at the truth of Mr Wolf’s thirst for revenge, and Paper Cult’s cartoon cinematography approaches the sublime in revealing it once and for all. Much like its hero, then, Bloodroots is perhaps a touch bloated in the middle – but the gore-soaked trail it’ll trace in your mind will leave a lasting mark.
There’s an unexpected richness to almost everything that inspires an insatiable bloodlust