From a hobbyist critic’s point of view, I couldn’t really have asked for a more fascinating game to review than Veritus. On the surface, Veritus isn’t doing a ton you haven’t seen before—it’s very proudly wearing its inspirations on its sleeve, mostly the Gameboy era overhead 2-D Zelda games such as Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Seasons, and Oracle of Ages, with a heaping spoonful of unclear, hazy storytelling and a penchant for emphasising multiple playthroughs to uncover everything being kept hidden from you, ala Dark Souls dolloped on top for good measure. As a big fan of all these things, to mention nothing of the absolutely gorgeous pixel art on display here, I was very surprised to find that the game struggled to leave much of an impression on me.
The biggest issue with Veritus is that it’s actually a sequel to a game I’d never heard of called Prodigal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the game being a sequel, of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever played any game, or indeed, experienced any media, in which I felt as lost trying to follow the story as I was here. I hope that for fans of developer Colorgrave’s previous works, the plot here is satisfying, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what actually happened in this game. You play as Oran, you’re part of a crew breaking into the castle of the eponymous Veritus to collect some doodads and get further in, and uh, there’s a cool wolfman merchant that can sell you cheese?
Most of the lore of the game is told through journal entries found throughout the various floors of the castle, but to say I found these hard to follow would be giving them way too much credit; the majority of the journal entries were basically gibberish to me, contextless voids of text, all of which are much longer than you’d expect, that could have been arranged in any random order for all it mattered to my comprehension. And I say this not to be rude or dismissive; I’ve spent dozens upon dozens of hours obsessing over and discussing Elden Ring lore in my life, and it’s some of my favourite shared time with her. I enjoy, nay, love when a game obscures what it’s trying to say to me, forcing me to shuffle through both in-game item descriptions and the notes I’ve scribbled in real life scattered across my desk. In the case of Veritus, however, playing it without having played Prodigal felt like I was missing some 90% of the story, which was even more frustrating than it sounds, because I think the world and characters on offer here seemed pretty cool. Especially the aforementioned wolfman merchant.
Things fare a bit better on the gameplay side of things, especially if you’re a fan of Zelda-styled puzzle solving. Each floor of Veritus can essentially be viewed as its own standalone dungeon, complete with its own sets of gimmicks, puzzle structures, and boss battles to end the floor. If you’re not familiar with what I mean by puzzle solving in Zelda games, you’ll largely be figuring out how to open doors or collect keys by defeating enemies with your pickaxe, avoiding traps, or figuring out the correct order of operations to activate sets of switches. You’ll also collect equipment as you go that broadens your verbset, and these new abilities help with future puzzle solving.
Once you progress past a floor, you go through a story sequence, end up back at camp with the rest of your spelunking crew, and can no longer revisit previously completed floors, at least as far as I’m aware. If you’re someone who suffers from decision paralysis from FOMO, Veritus will be your nightmare. My endgame stat screen informing me I had somehow discovered a mere 2 of 21 secrets served to openly mock me, as I thought I had been doing a decent job of plumbing the depths of the castle for its most eldritch mysteries.
This aspect of Veritus is what I find most interesting about it, as the developers have created a short, run-based Gameboy-styled dungeon crawler that isn’t a roguelite or roguelike. My first playthrough took a meagre three hours, so I imagine even passing familiarity will let players carve through the game in less time than the length of most feature films, and there are a plethora of things that can make each playthrough unique, namely when it comes to hidden, optional items to find and the upgrades you can craft with them, as well as optional side quests. Unfortunately, while I do think this is the most interesting aspect of Veritus, it also didn’t succeed in tempting me in for future replays, at least not anytime soon. What I find so addictive about replaying a Souls-like game over and over is the diversity in build variety and feeling like I’m uncovering secrets in a (formerly) living, breathing world; there isn’t a whole lot of gameplay diversity in figuring out the optimal upgrade materials for my pickaxe or boots, and the issues I had with the game’s story inherently meant I wasn’t very invested in turning over every last pebble of lore. Still, I can’t help but admire the experimentation the developers employed here, especially when they avoided dipping their toes into the absurdly crowded rogue-adjacent space.
I’d be remiss not to dedicate at least a few sentences to the overall presentation on display in Veritus, because it’s truly gorgeous. Visually, the game is doing nothing new (how much uncharted territory is there left to explore with an 8-bit aesthetic, anyway?), but it absolutely excels at what it is doing, particularly when it comes to the character portraits. Despite not gelling with the story presented, I diligently kept reading every line of dialogue solely because of how downright cool I found all the character designs and the ways in which they were translated to chunky 8-bit profiles. Did I mention before how cool the manwolf merchant character is? Because he is really cool.
Veritus is an interesting experiment, and overall, I’d recommend people check it out if they’ve got an itch for a game styled after classic Zelda entries with a bit of modern, obfuscated game design mixed in. That said, if Veritus does look up your alley and you don’t want your eyes to involuntarily glaze over whenever text starts scrolling on your screen, I’d encourage you to check out Prodigal before diving in here. I can’t speak from personal experience on whether it’ll actually help with your comprehension of this game, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.
Release Date: Out Now!
Platforms: PC (Steam)
Price: £5.89
Version Tested: PC
Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy
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