![]() ![]() ![]() Even with a number of extra hearts (lifted directly from Zelda), enemies will often one-hit you. Most of that will come from combat, as Baldo likes to treat its enemies like mini Dark Souls bosses. Separate from the obscurity and the bugs, Baldo is also a hard, hard game, and you’ll be seeing a listless number of Game Over screens. The controversial topic is the difficulty. We took it as an opportunity to take a holiday from an excruciating game, so we’re kind of thankful for it. Scanning forums, this blocker and others are extremely common, and the delay to Baldo’s release date hasn’t removed them all. We hit a critical, game-ending bug in the middle of Baldo, and we weren’t the only ones. We got locked in scenery, got our followers locked in scenery, created impossible permutations of puzzles, and generally restarted the game every hour or so. Then we get to the load times, which are roughly fifteen seconds too long, even on a Series X|S. ![]() Baldo never talks (presumably his terrible name has made him shy around others), so everyone talks in a weird rambly way that goes all the way from “Hello” to “oh my gosh, can you help me with a quest?” in the space of a chat box. The camera is completely static, but ledges and important items are often tucked behind stuff, so you enter a raffle called ‘Reward or Death?’. It takes four different buttons and multiple interfaces to use items. There are too many design weirdnesses to catalogue properly. But there’s a fine line between a lack of handholding and bad design, and Baldo lives deep, deep in the Realm of Bad Design. We’re certainly aware of that criticism and we occasionally feel it. Some will sneer and say that Baldo is doing God’s work, creating a demanding game when so many others wrap a player in cotton wool. You’ll see what it’s like to play something that has them all yanked out. If you want a lesson in how much modern gaming has done in terms of subtly pathing you, guiding you to solutions through its lighting, or staggering problems so they don’t overwhelm you, then play Baldo: The Guardian Owls. Critical objects will often look like background furniture, and you will tear your hair out as you realise, for the 700th time, that one particular crate was pushable, when all the others were inactive. You’ll be constantly wondering where you’re meant to be heading, backtracking more often than forward-tracking and scanning a map which is marginally more useful than a blank page. These are discrete areas that are harder to get lost in, but a problem and it’s solution are often separated by an entire dungeon. It should be better in dungeons but it’s worse. Baldo is a vat of alphabet soup and you’re trying to find anything that spells out a main quest line. Quest-givers give you a vague notion of where to go, leaving the rest down to you, even though the areas are gargantuan and dense with stuff. There won’t be much in the way of direction towards each one either, as the maps are zoomed out and useless, and the waypoint markers are permanently on the fringes of your game screen, each one a generic white so that it’s impossible to tell the difference between them. Instead of giving you a main quest line, Baldo gives you several at once and let’s you guess which one’s possible with the abilities you have right now. But Baldo has crises of design and difficulty. This could and should have been a Link-beater. Holy Miyazaki, all of the ingredients are here. The main dungeons are locked behind a sub-dungeon, which are locked behind a sub-sub-dungeon, and Baldo would put you through a dungeon to complete a ‘cat up a tree’ quest if it could. End to end, Rodia takes a good thirty minutes to cross, but you’ll take a while to get to that position: you’ll be blocked by the usual Metroidvania gubbins and an impossibly large number of dungeons. Baldo is flipping massive, like an early Legend of Zelda game that’s got hold of a Breath of the Wild strategy guide and decided that it likes the look of its map. There isn’t much wrong with the amount of content, either. The same goes with the soundtrack, which feels like a bunch of Howard Shore’s offcuts from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Again, a small caveat that areas tended toward darkness more than we would have liked (making it hard to pick out items to use), but Rodia is a kingdom dense with detail, often vibrant, and it absolutely looks like a game that took fifteen years to create. The world looks and sounds astounding too. ![]()
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