Soulslike game are known for their punishing difficulty, but there’s no reason why they can’t also prioritize storytelling. No Place for Bravery adds another spin to the subgenre with a retro aesthetic for the 2D top-down action RPG. At PAX East this past weekend, I went hands on with the game and got to play a bit of an earlier demo and a newer one as well.
Developed by Glitch Factory and published by Ysbryd Games, No Place for Bravery is a narrative driven game about a father searching for his lost daughter through a war-torn world. Developer Matheus Queiroz told me that it’s a game about father absence, a theme that he said resonates with people from his home country of Brazil. At the start of the game, father Thorn and his daughter Leaf are together. However, when Matheus took me to a later section of No Place for Bravery about an hour and a half into the game, it became apparent that they had become separated.
In the first section, the No Place for Bravery seemed to draw heavily from Norse mythology. However, I was surprised to be greeted by what looked like a Mayan temple in the latter section. Matheus informed me that the fantasy world takes artistic inspiration from various aesthetics including the aforementioned Norse and Mayan looks as well as Celtic cultures. The Celtic inspiration comes through strongly from the haunting yet beautiful soundtrack by Eduardo Zolhof.
Meanwhile, the gameplay draws inspiration from Sekiro, in terms of the parry window and difficulty, but Matheus also told me that it borrows from Devil May Cry, specifically for the hack and slash combat. While the gameplay is tough, the difficulty is highly customizable. At first, I assumed that I could just choose from easy, medium, or hard difficulties and switch them throughout the game. And I could, but Matheus showed me that I could also tweak particular elements, such as how much health Thorn had or how much stamina he could use.
I played most of the demo on the more difficult setting, as I got the sense of blocking enemy attacks and following up with quick parries. For some enemies, attacking and quickly dodging worked well too. But for one platforming section that came in the Mayan-inspired chapter–more puzzle based than the starting area–I had trouble making it across while enemies fired arrows at me. For this section I raised my health, keeping the difficulty the same but with extra HP to make it past the pesky archers.
It’s this level of customization that Matheus seems especially proud of, and it’s understandable why. No Place for Bravery offers punishing combat but is a more narrative-driven title than other soulslike games, and it touches on personal themes around parenting and responsibility. “We want people to get the message at the end of the day,” Matheus explained.
Arriving on PC and Nintendo Switch, players can experience the pixelated and potentially punishing combat of No Place for Bravery later this year.
