I’ve never been a big fan of rotoscoping as a special effect. As a kid I found Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings animation oddly disturbing and have never fully understood why. Nowadays it’s practically a lost art, and even in the games industry it’s fairly rare. While Crimson Capes from Poor Locke does a good job with the ancient tech, it’s really the environments that make their 2D soulslike stand out for me.
There’s an area fairly early on where your character makes his way through knee-high water and the ripple effects are mesmerising. So much so that I took a couple of hits to the chin while marvelling at the fluid motion. Sadly, that’s more or less where my awe and wonder at Crimson Capes starts and ends, as I just couldn’t force myself to enjoy the game as a whole.
Conceptually, it’s sound. It’s set in a magical kingdom where mages almost caused an apocalypse, and as such have been declared outlaws by the ruler of the land. To combat them, he created the Crimson Capes, dudes in bright red hoods that go out with big swords and mete out justice to errant spellcasters. It begins with you hunting down a Necromancer in a small idyllic village, and the way the townsfolk rally round the offender throws up some interesting questions about who is actually the good guy. But while the story does have some intriguing beats to it, the meat of this game is the combat.
With four different characters to unlock throughout the campaign, there is some variety – but not really as much as you’d expect. Movement and combat didn’t feel that much different from the default guy, Milon, and I felt most comfortable with his massive claymore anyway. On paper, the fighting sounds enticing: you can parry, riposte, feint, and dodge, using footwork to close the distance or sway out of harm’s way as you fight the enemy. In practice, though, it’s massively hampered by the 2D plain and reminded me most of classic side-scroller Barbarians from the late 80s.
See, for all the talk of footwork, you’re really just dodging back or hopping forward, and landing hits and avoiding them is a matter of reach and timing. You can mix in magical attacks, somewhat hypocritically, but I found the ones I used fairly underwhelming. Bosses in particular often have such massive reach that I found myself kind of hugging them and dealing damage as much as possible before running away, which didn’t feel particularly skilful or badass.
Garden variety enemies are almost all bandits or lizardmen, with a lot of repetition. This is fine in itself, of course, but it means your tactics will rarely vary once you know what you’re doing, something which makes the punctuating boss fights even trickier to adapt to. I’ll be honest, I’m also not a fan of any game that lets me equip weapons and armour but doesn’t change the character’s appearance. It took me out of it in Crimson Capes that no matter what I did Milon just looked like a guy in skin-tight hose and a fancy red hood.
As with all things, especially soulslikes, your mileage will vary with Crimson Capes. For an indie adventure, it packs in some good ideas and does a hell of a lot with a relatively small budget. It’s also fairly unique even within its own oversaturated genre, but it just didn’t come together in the right way for me. The ponderous movement, one-note combat and busy pixel-art visuals weren’t balanced fully by its handful of good ideas, or even those insane water effects.