From its gorgeous landscapes, gripping acting, and historically inspired combat animations, 1348 Ex Voto makes a strong first impression in its opening moments, seeming to promise something bold is about to follow. It doesn’t live up to that promise at all, however, quickly abandoning the interesting bits of its story and leaning most of its gameplay on shallow and shoddy combat and mission structures. Even it’s beauty is compromised by bugs and glitches that make playing through it a burdensome vow to keep.
The story of Aeta, the knight errant we pilot through this blood-soaked Black Plague-era hack-and-slash, and her charge Bianca is a bit of a mess. On the whole, it’s pretty straightforward: Bianca is meant to be shipped off to a convent because her low-born parents can’t afford to raise her anymore – but before that happens, their village is sacked, Bianca is kidnapped, and Aeta pursues the bandits to get her back. It’s played like a standard damsel-saving endeavor for most of its brisk five-hour runtime, and the backdrop of the closest thing humans have to a real post-apocalypse makes for a promising setting for such a tried and true tale.
But its attempts to upend this classic trope, specifically through Aeta’s gender, land pretty flat. A woman as the gallant knight is certainly subversive, and she spends the first half of the story being identified by others as a boy and not correcting them. This is an interesting thread that’s left bare early on – and when it is eventually pulled around midway through, it immediately unravels before the concept is dropped completely. Same goes for the mild implications of a queer romance between the two leads. Aeta’s pining can be read as infatuation, but as the story progresses, there’s less and less room to call what these two women have a romance. It’s far easier to interpret her one-track minded mission to save Bianca as a desperate need to not lose the last person left in her life, as the rest of her high-born family have been killed by the ongoing pestilence. And look, I’m a cis, straight, not-Italian man – I am no expert here. But this feels more disappointingly platonic than anything else, unless you think Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins’ relationship is romantic, in which case you know what? Fair, and I wish your AO3 account many blessings in the future.
It’s all at least very well acted, unsurprising considering the main pair is played by Alby Baldwin and Jennifer English, but even the sparse few minor characters that get more than one speaking line are delivered with gusto. The camera work and shot framing really speaks to how inspired by prestige film Ex Voto is, and while this is no A24 cinematic event, it does a great job filling the blanks in the story with palpable tension and tone. Some animation glitches really mar the affair though, specifically how mouths and eyes twist and bulge unnaturally during moments of heightened emotions. The way the lips curl on a certain sinister flagellant about a third of the way through was uncomfortable to the point of comedy in a scene thick with very not funny drama.
When you aren’t watching the story unfold, you can interact with Ex Voto in two very simple ways: Exploring its linear environments and killing everything that moves in them. Every chapter starts almost exactly the same way, zooming in on some distant point of interest unsubtly calling you towards it and then trudging your way to the finish line. The process through every leg of the journey plays out almost exactly the same way too – quieter sections of walking and climbing broken up by little skirmishes in areas that only exist for bad guys to materialize in them. It’s generations-old game design, but not in the way some contemporary games might use to invoke a sort of “simpler time” energy from the era. Instead, it plays how I imagine the loaves of bread used for healing in Aeta’s pack taste, cold and stale.
Most of the locations look good from mid range or farther, especially outdoor zones like the white rocks of the mountain side or the verdant emerald forests, though blobby textures and jagged edges betray the grandeur of it all while up close. These areas have lots of nooks and crannies where collectables can hide, but there’s only one path to your main objectives, and without a map it can be hard to know when you’ve searched a side route or not as some of the poorly landmarked layouts start to blend together. I missed a lot of extra goodies my first playthrough, and during my second I found that quite a few of them were in places I definitely looked previously, but because I maybe didn’t stand close enough or at the right angle near them, no prompt appeared to grab them. This finicky responsiveness was my own personal plague relatively often. On the occasions where I needed to crouch under a log or hop down from a ledge, it would always take me several attempts to push the designated button to actually do the thing.
When it’s time for Aeta to wield her blade, the proceedings are usually pretty drab. Mixing one-handed and two-handed attacks, you flail through four-hit combo strings in order to break enemy guard gauges and slice them up when they’re vulnerable. Holding the attack button while in either stance charges up heavy attacks, which do more stagger and damage but are telegraphed and easy to avoid. There’s no obvious difference between light attacks in either stance besides that some enemies are more keen to parry a specific kind more often, usually at a predictable point in a combo that you’ll be forced to attack around. I found no real benefit from switching between the light attacks in combos against most regular enemies unless forced to, but there can be some benefit to using light attacks to cover for your heavies, making them more likely to hit and break stagger bars down faster.
There’s a short recovery time after a combo is finished, and enemies usually use that space to throw a string of their own attacks. These are easily blocked until you run out of your own stagger gauge, and less easily dodged thanks to how weird the timing for attacks can be, as they sometimes vacuum towards you to make up distances that seem unintuitive in action. The window of impact also seems off time from when an enemy looks like it will land a strike, which is frustrating during the sections of Ex Voto with enemies who cannot be blocked. Enemies attack one at a time, most of the time, but can be tempted to pile on if you venture too close to a passive one while actively engaging the main antagonist. Occasionally, they get feisty and try to jump you, but it always felt like the enemy logic confusing itself into becoming a problem rather than an intentional way to spice up difficulty.
This back and forth dance gets sort of rote pretty quickly, and isn’t saved much by the skills you can learn to elongate your combos, add a parry window to your block, or introduce a perfect dodge that slows down time. These upgrades are strong in a bubble, but don’t deepen the shallow combat at all, and don’t present any new ways to engage enemies besides mashing attacks in longer stanzas.
The same goes for trinkets and weapon parts, which can be found hidden in the world. These can have more dramatic effects on combat, like letting you regain health when you perfect dodge, but they just increase the rewards for playing the only way you can. That said, there is at least a little customization required with them, since you can only have a certain amount of trinkets equipped at once. Weapon pieces have passive effects that are noticeable when compounded – you can focus your pommel, grip, guard, and blade loadouts all to make two-handed attacks more powerful, for instance. But most enemy encounters are push overs, and rooting around to collect all of these boons isn’t worth the effort when being a more patient masher can do the job just as well.
