I am pretty confident in my ability to judge video games. I’ve been playing them (increasingly badly over more recent years!) for almost 40 years and writing about them for over 20, so it’s rare that something blindsides me. But that’s exactly what happened with Blades of Fire, the action soulslike adventure from Mercury Steam. I loved the studio’s Castlevania rethink, Lords of Shadow, but was so-so on its output since, including the Nintendo-published Metroid Dread. My expectations for Blades of Fire were low to moderate. Incredible, then, that I’ve not played another game released this year that I enjoyed more.
My early time with the game actually made such a negative impact on me that had I not been reviewing the game it’s highly likely that I’d have given up and moved on to something else – I’m a big believer in cutting your losses, rather than ploughing more and more time into something you aren’t enjoying. The combat felt unfair and unforgiving, the characters dull and generic, and the visuals rather uninspired with a distinctly last-gen vibe. Given the soulslike nature of the combat and experience, I tried and failed to progress meaningfully through the first proper area time and time again. I was frustrated and rather annoyed at myself for essentially offering up a chunk of my own time to play a game that I hated.
And then, to my great surprise, it clicked.
Blades of Fire is an adventure game at heart, full of obscure paths to take, bridges to cross, and towering steps to climb, all taking you somewhere – maybe not where you really needed to go, but a location worth exploring to find something cool, or simply to take in the view. That early impression of a bland game couldn’t be less representative of the one that unfurls in front of you. This is the kind of fantastical world that begs to be poured over, remarked at, and enjoyed. All for nothing, of course, if the gameplay you’re forced to endure while in it does little but frustrate.
The key to overcoming this proved to be rather simple: meet the game at its level, rather than what I expected. So, yes, while Blades of Fire is a soulslike of sorts, a genre I have routinely failed to get a real sense of satisfaction from, it’s also got some obvious rules that must be obeyed – and it’s these that I think helped get me on the hook. I was so primed to approach the game like I had countless others, simply not expecting a radical departure from the norm, that I’d failed to see how Blades of Fire was offering something different, something the developers clearly thought worked better for their game than simply porting over the required muscle memory from other genre titles.
There’s a reason people joke about Ubisoft open world games having a formula. While they clearly aren’t carbon copies of each other, you broadly know what to expect and generally there’s little to no friction. I’m not arguing that these games don’t have valuable roles to play, appealing as they do to many many millions of players, but if you’ve been there and done that multiple times over, you, like me, might start to long for something different.
Initially Blades of Fire felt cumbersome and clunky, but this was my preconceptions rebounding off some very clearly outlined rules that I simply hadn’t taken seriously – this was something different, I just hadn’t realised. Enemies each offer up different vulnerabilities and weaknesses, whether it be due to their general makeup or armour, so it’s essential you learn which weapons to use against each, but also how to break through stubborn foes, and which direction to attack from.
There’s no comfort in Blades of Fire, no rhythm to fall into as you coast along. Even 30 hours in a lapse in concentration can cause real problems, but the effort is worth it. Few games have ever given me such a sense of exaltation, of discovery, and that attribute that is hard to break down into a term other than to say “pure video game”.
In truth the game’s combat isn’t a kind of “eureka!” moment – it isn’t a wholly new discovery that will change video games forever, but the dev team believed in this alternative approach and shaped the whole game around it, including the novel weapon forging system (something I didn’t love, but I still appreciate the attempt to take a different path to what had gone before). Blades of Fire surprised me, not only in that it ended up being one of my favourite games of this generation, but also in how it felt unlike most other games I’ve played. That’s a rare feeling in the world of high-budget video games – and make no mistake, while this isn’t triple-A in the vein of the Marvel’s Spider-Mans of this world, there’s no doubt its budget would give smaller indie studios a coronary.
It’s funny, the other game I think will stick with me more than any other from my 2025 playlist is Death Stranding, a game I finally built up the stamina to play in part thanks to the praise this year’s sequel had lavished upon it. It too isn’t bothered with conventions outside of the very basics of what makes a video game that is broadly accepted by the mainstream. Kojima’s breakaway from Metal Gear Solid and Konami baffles me at every turn, throwing concepts out there like confetti at a wedding, baffling character names that border on parody, and deeply serious themes that, if they’d come from anyone else, might have slipped into the ridiculous. I’m not even a Kojima fan as such, but there’s no doubt that the industry would be weaker if his blockbuster avante garde style didn’t exist.
Death Stranding is a more refined game than Blades of Fire, and it also takes more risks because it can – its creator is as much of a celebrity the games industry has ever had, and has a personal fanbase Mercury Steam and other dev studios can only dream of – but both highlight how important it is to have a vision, not a focus tested design doc with all the rough edges smoothed out and the actual magic of video games brushed aside. I don’t mind if every idea doesn’t land – I’d much rather play a game that takes some risks, than one which doesn’t try anything original at all.
