Batora: Lost Haven

An action RPG that feels like a throw-back to the PS2 and early PS3 era in several ways. You play as Avril, a plucky young woman from a near-future Earth that was decimated in some calamity, as she gains awesome magic powers from ancient gods and goes on a galactic adventure with her best friend, Mila.

The basic gameplay loop involves juggling Avril’s two states, physical and mental, with a tap of a button. In physical state, Avril swings a sword and glows orange. In mental state, Avril shoots magic bullets and glows purple. Most of the game’s enemies are either orange or purple and you, as the player, need to match the attacks to the enemy color; there are also hybrid enemies with two health bars to eliminate by attacking with both states. You also earn a special orb for one nature by attacking enemies of the opposite nature, and you can burn an orb to heal and deal extra damage. I found this system weirdly compelling, as you need to juggle your states and how differently their attacks work with the current combat situation.

If anything, one of the game’s biggest problems is that it rolls out Avril’s special attacks way too slowly; I’m pretty sure you get the strong defensive abilities about 60% of the way through the game, way after the strong attack abilities and way after you’ve learned how to dodge effectively.

In addition, you can equip runes on your character to enhance their power, but I found that system very undercooked. Almost all of the runes are very bland stat trade-offs, such as 10% physical attack at the cost of 5% mental critical hit damage. The sole exceptions are a rune that allows you to enter a super mode by burning orbs of both natures, and a rune that attracts and repels enemies based on your nature. I feel like they hinted at potentially interesting ideas that perhaps the development team was unable to implement, which is a shame.

Unfortunately, I can’t easily praise the rest of the game. For one, the game focuses a lot on its story, which is hurt in its telling from below-average voice acting. For one, Avril and Mila have neutral American accents despite being from London (in fact, despite the game being developed in Italy and published by a British studio, nobody is British in this game), and an emotionally significant character delivers a monologue the story hinges on in a voice sounding like a synthesized voice reading the news on a YouTube ad-scam channel. Also, the portrait they use for Avril crying looks kind of ridiculous. Sorry.

In a sentence that will make sense to basically nobody, the story for this game reminded me a lot of Forspoken, but if Forspoken had attempted to try something and, while it didn’t succeed, you feel like you want to give it credit for trying anyway. I would go into how I felt about Avril’s character arc and become literally the only person on the entire internet to perform a literary analysis on Batora: Lost Haven, but I honestly don’t know if the path I didn’t take is different than the one I took.

As it is: I took the Defender route, and I felt like the game was a slog, because Avril quickly becomes overcome with grief at how all her choices hurt everyone around her. Which causes her to get upset at any progress I make in the game. At one point, she meets two fish people in a prison and escapes with them. After, no joke, five minutes, they sacrifice themselves to stop some enemies, which prompts Avril to react like her childhood neighbors sacrificed themselves to stop some enemies. I think if it was better executed, this tone could’ve worked, but I just felt like the game was just rubbing my nose in it. And, honestly, as I type this, I’m doubting the other path is different.

The game also focuses on how Your Choices Matter, and to the game’s credit, they managed to write interesting choices, in which you can see a human being who is not actively trying to be an asshole would make. For example, early on, a minor villain kidnaps a minor ally and threatens to kill him unless you steal some stone, which would destroy a village of mindless monsters. However, you can also fix the stone, which would cause the village to become peaceful but would get your ally killed. Unfortunately, the game labels the morality of the choices, and these choices cause you to gain points (or, importantly, not gain points) in stats that let you equip unique runes…that are also bland stat trade-offs. As it is, the choices essentially only affect the ending you get, a major missed opportunity.

Also, a few quick nitpicks. The Playstation 5 version is rather buggy, with cutscene subtitles remaining over the UI in gameplay, typos, a gate sealing shut when it shouldn’t have, and a boss getting stuck in geometry. The level design is just a bunch of boring hallways that doesn’t reward exploring. The camera angle, an overhead view with two zooms (that I would describe as “spy satellite” and “20 feet away”), never feels right. There is nothing aesthetically memorable about the game.

The saddest thing I can say about Batora: Lost Haven is that it would’ve been a perfect weekend rental at Blockbuster in 2005, and since you can’t rent it, I can’t recommend it unless you got it in, say, a Humble Bundle about video games with women protagonists or something. At 9 hours on New Game – and honestly, you can get all the achievements in the game in two playthroughs where you make opposite choices – you honestly could blast through this in a weekend. The combat is pleasant but it can’t buoy the other choices the developers made.