Blade of Darkness

Recommending the game with some heavy caveats.

This game plays like a Soulslike, but it was made 8 years before Demon's Souls. It has methodical combat, crunchy attack animations, and some superb level design. Each area has a strong sense of flow and identity as you fight through goblin forts, skeleton-infested tombs, mines crawling with orcs, etc. The game design was way ahead of its time, and It's still fun going through the levels now with some experience in modern Soulslikes.

That said, there are some glaring technical issues, even in this remaster. First of all, it takes some tinkering just to make the game launch on Steam Deck. I'm not even sure what I did that made it work or why it didn't work before. Also, the controls are wildly inconsistent. Your attack button always does an attack, your dodge button always dodges, etc., but the direction detection is wonky as hell. Sometimes you'll be trying to dodge sideways and you get stuck on a wall. Sometimes your down attack comes out as a side attack. And when the special attacks require specific directional sequences, they're needlessly difficult to execute. Sometimes your combo just won't come out because the game read your Neutral Slash > Up Analog as Up Slash > Neutral Analog. Etc.

To hedge against the wonky combo inputs, I try to pause and take my thumb off the stick first. This seems to reset the position detection. Also, all the combos are LINKS, NOT CANCELS. You can't buffer the combo in advance, you have to input the next step as the prior attack is finishing. It's still awkward when you have multiple enemies breathing down your neck, but it becomes feasible in 1v1. Eventually.

Given the atrocious control detection, I often find myself defaulting to cheese tactics. Run around, wait for enemy to expose themselves, hope I can get one whiff punish that hits, then disengage and repeat. You can save anywhere, including mid-battle, so you should hypothetically Save State through everything hitless. But I wish it were more intuitive to fight fair.

The Steam Deck Verified tag is not appropriate. The game is playable with tinkering. And some inputs are wonky. For clarity, your control stick works normally for movement, but hit detection seems to be erratic for analog + button combos like directional attacks and dodges.