Based in Lyon, Redlock Studio offers the intriguing Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King, a video game inspired by Dark Souls. Without mastery or the same success.
What to play after completing the Exhilarating and Hearty Elden Ring ? This is the question that certainly many are asking. with the trilogy Dark Souls, FromSoftware has inspired several studios, which in turn want to register their name in the popular genre of demanding RPGs. First launched in Early Access on PC in 2019, Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King is now available on PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch. And when you read its description, you quickly understand where Redlock Studio is coming from.
Thereby, Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King is a ” action-RPG with complex storytelling and epic combat in a semi-open world “. In short, when we have spent hours and hours in Elden Ringwe have sufficiently sharpened reflexes to launch ourselves again into “ epic fights “. But still it is necessary that the experience be of quality, which is far from being the case with this Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King. The title has too many flaws to seduce the public and motivate them to discover its ultra cryptic universe.
More cryptic, you die
At least Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King fully assumes its complex storytelling “. After about ten hours spent surveying its sets with an atypical artistic direction (pure forms as much as possible), we are still struggling to understand what it is all about. He just knows that he must eliminate key enemies after the disappearance of a King who caused the fragmentation of an entire world. From this thin base, Redlock Studio nourishes its story with sometimes very opaque, if not poetic, sentences pronounced by a gallery of strange characters. Generally speaking, everything is a little weird in Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King, and the developers forgot to provide enough explanation to immerse us in the narrative.
A clumsily labyrinthine construction
The structure of Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King nor is it clear enough to provide some guidance on how to proceed. The different environments are linked without any real coherence, around a slightly larger hub, in which it is a little too easy to get lost. Fortunately, exploration is somewhat rewarded, otherwise we would pester much more to navigate in this ocean of the unknown. Especially since there is something to eat and drink regarding the environments: some are successful, others much less, despite a very present feeling of gigantism.
Note that, unlike Dark Souls, Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King plays the card of verticality a little more. Our hero quickly turns out to be very agile, from the moment you manage his endurance gauge well. For example, he can perform a double jump and rush forward to climb to the top. Naturally, the level architecture is designed to take advantage of this ability. There are even 2.5D portions reminiscent of platform games of yesteryear. Nevertheless, Redlock Studio sometimes errs in pride, with a clumsily labyrinthine construction.
Major finishing issues
I wanted to believe as much as possible Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King, ignoring the barriers to entry they set up to give him the best possible chance. Except that even the most daring will eventually get tired of its many finishing problems. I’ve personally encountered an annoying bug that prevents me from progressing after beating a boss and triggering a cutscene that results in a frozen screen (see screenshot below). I tried twice, with the same result each time.
To this big annoyance that does not make you want to add a very crippling technical debt, especially for a title that seeks to fit into the category of Dark Souls. Character stuck in an element, floors with holes, ugly visual bugs, enemies with very relative intelligence, very disparate soundtrack (sometimes the music cuts out for no reason), jerky loading times… For a game available on PS5 , Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King does not exude modernity, and undoubtedly suffers from a budget that is too light to materialize very high ambitions.
To make matters worse, the gameplay proves to be very approximate in everything it tries to undertake. The platform part? Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King lack of precision and visibility. The action part? The fights are too soft to captivate, proving on arrival less epic than promises. Between the parries that are difficult to place and the dodges that do not always produce the desired result, the clashes quickly become painful. Not to mention that there’s not the depth of a true RPG when it comes to hero customization. The arsenal consists only of more or less fast and powerful swords, and it is not the few spells and the very basic progression that will save the day.
In the end, everything suggests that Shattered – Tale of the Forgotten King could have been an interesting alternative to Dark Souls, with a universe and ideas of its own. Alas, he tripped over the carpet because of a pile of clumsiness betraying a lack of rigor. And God knows that it takes to give birth to an experience articulated around the notion of requirement.