Trek to Yomi slashes through the competition – Preview

gamepur.com:

Trek to Yomi wears its influences on its sleeve. The next game from Devolver Digital’s increasingly impressive publishing arm is unabashedly trying to capture the magic of an Akira Kurosawa samurai film. You’ll notice it immediately with the film grain that’s imposed over its black-and-white visuals and the plot that centers around a lone samurai. In my short time with the opening few chapters of the game, that classic samurai movie feel is what stood out the most.

It’s not just the visuals that get you there. Trek to Yomi uses a relatively simple control scheme to put you in a series of battles against bandits and other samurai. Because your moveset is limited to just a few attacks and your health pool is relatively small, you’re forced to master timing and blocking to survive each encounter. Dark Souls is an easy comparison, but Yomi is stripped back even further which makes combat feel both more streamlined and cinematic.

You have a light and heavy attack, as well as a limited-use ranged weapon. You can block any attack, but you do need to manage your stamina, or you’ll enter a “tired state” where enemies can more easily hit you. To make things more difficult, you have to press a button to flip directions in this 2D adventure and can’t block attacks behind you. This becomes important when you come up against groups of fighters.

Enemies in Yomi will approach you one at a time. In many games, this can feel a bit odd as a real-life fight would never play out like that. If I got in a bar fight with a group of guys, they’re not going to sit back and give me a fair fight. They’d all attack me at once. Yomi alleviates that oddness a bit because you can’t freely spin around. By making you press a button to turn and face an