Nearly every hack-and-slash asks whether you survived the fight. SoulQuest asks how you looked doing it. Out now on Nintendo Switch, the side-scrolling spectacle fighter from SoulBlade Studio, published by indie.io, scores every encounter on a scale from a shameful F to the coveted SSS, which turns a room full of enemies into something closer to a performance than an obstacle. This is the game’s first appearance on console, following a Steam launch in May that has held a Very Positive player rating ever since.
Reaching SSS means never repeating yourself. Light and heavy attacks chain into dozens of freeform combinations, each animation flowing into the next without a break, and magic and screen-clearing ultimates open the routes that pure swordplay cannot. The inputs are simple enough to understand in a minute. Stringing them into something the game will actually reward takes considerably longer, and the hardest difficulties exist for players who want the gods to be a genuine problem.
The reason Alys is fighting them at all is her husband. Gwydre was the mightiest knight in the world, and he still died when Cetonia burned, and the Celtic pantheon considered the matter closed. Alys did not. In the ruins she finds Abanus, a druid who tells her the dead can be reclaimed, but only by someone prepared to take that power from Morrigan, goddess of death, in person. The road there runs the length of the British Isles, and every god on it has to be dealt with individually. Those gods are drawn from Celtic folklore and Arthurian myth, and the whole thing is rendered in pixel art and scored with a medieval-inspired soundtrack.
SoulQuest is available now on Nintendo Switch for $19.99 USD, with a limited-time launch discount of 20%. It is also available on Steam.
Nintendo eShop | Steam
