No Place for Bravery’s Sekiro-esque combat isn’t punishing — it’s unfair

polygon.com:

Red is the color associated with the most heightened of emotions — passion, violence, pain. It also happens to be the hue No Place for Bravery frequently invokes in its goriest and most pivotal scenes. Thorn, its gruff hero, frequently douses himself in pools of blood and disembodied corpses, his blade smeared with the guts of his foes. But such vignettes are interspersed with sights of the game’s exquisite pixel art environments, its overgrown, emerald forests and dilapidated, rust-colored ruins teeming with vibrant details and immaculate textures. Once every few scenes you’ll even chance upon truly imposing sights, like that of the bone-dry carcass of a colossal dragon, its remains towering over Thorn’s diminutive figure.

That said, even breathtaking beauty can’t detract from the tedium of No Place for Bravery, an action RPG that clogs up its wretched tale of revenge and redemption with prolonged bouts of relentless, laborious combat.

As a battle-hardened ex-soldier and father named Thorn, a quiet, idyllic moment with your daughter, of hunting in the woods together, was disrupted when a warlock whisked her away with a snap of their fingers. Ten years later, you chanced upon a trace of the same warlock, and thus began your dogged pursuit of her abductor.

There’s a strand of sincerity in No Place for Bravery that, at times, wavers on gut-wrenching; I can’t imagine it’s easy to move on when it comes to the loss of your own child. But just as it seeks to be taken seriously in its ruminations on fatherhood, No Place for Bravery also revels in the violence and harshness of its battles. For the bulk of your time here, you’ll be hacking and slashing away at waves of demons and men, reducing them to fleshy meat bags amidst the