Last week, TA had a little holiday to the London-based event WASD. Kes, Heidi, and Luke slashed their swords at a few different games, and are giving you their impressions. Led by one member of the team — Kes in this instance — the other two provide the colour commentary. Part Two of our triplet of Team Impressions pieceS focuses on the black and white sidescroller Trek to Yomi. You play as a samurai battling for revenge after his hometown is burnt to the ground. It will be a day one inclusion on Xbox Game Pass, so all three of the team were excited to get a nose into the savage wilds of Japan… KesAs soon as we entered the show floor, I made a beeline for Flying Wild Hog’s side-scrolling samurai game, Trek to Yomi. I’ve had my eyes on it since that majestic first trailer and now I can say my eyes have seen that majesty first hand. The section we played was from the opening of the game. You play as the samurai Hiroki as he kills his way through a village under siege. The combat is driven primarily by two-button attacks, heavy and light, and you face variously armoured enemies. It’s simple in the early stages to help you get your bearings, but later in the demo, you need to be able to turn on the 2D plane to counter attacks from front and rear. This really starts opening up the potential challenge of combat as you manage a stream of foes. I enjoyed what I saw, but I hope there is a little more depth than the demo suggested. I found a hidden combo that did intrigue, though, so I imagine that this will be the case. Hands-on mostly surprised me because the game looks crisp and gorgeous in black and white, with incredible sound to create a rich auditory depth to the world. In part, this is because menus and HUD elements seemed non-existent. On the bottom left was my health, and that was it. It’s a direction I love in video games to help increase immersion, and Trek to Yomi uses real estate to really draw you in. Sounds become richer without anything glowing and distracting on the screen to divert your attention, meaning you rely on the momentary calls of suffering peasants to guide you into unseen places or a clank of steel to inform your next button press in combat. I adore the bold choice — it seems like a simple one but it shows the developer has confidence in the world it has built. The 2D plane in a 3D space is an intriguing setup for a game that has been used effectively by modern classics like Fez. Even in the initial stages, it feels like the developers are ready to use that to their full advantage. There are secrets hidden around out-of-sight walls, sketchy combat scenarios in off-path storage rooms, and mini-quests that require you to find something in the world. These small deviations helped open up Trek to Yomi a lot from my limited time. Now, I did have huge technical hiccups with frame rates — this was fixed later with a resolution change, but there were some continued frame hitches. After hands-on, I know that I will be playing this on day one. Let’s see what Heidi and Luke thought! LukeThis may come across as a bit pretentious, but my favourite thing about Trek to Yomi is the cinematography. It’s almost something of a lost art in modern gaming, with the free camera controls of most games putting scene composition in the hands of players rather than creators. Not here, though. Trek to Yomi isn’t strictly 2D as it first appeared, but rather uses static camera angles like the early Resident Evils or, slightly closer to the mark, the Onimusha games. It felt a little awkward at first but it didn’t take long for it to click, and what a click it was. This approach allows for some truly breathtaking scenes that look like they have fallen out of a Kurosawa movie, framed in interesting and unusual ways the likes of which you don’t often see in games — an encounter on a bridge shot from a distant camera as an abandoned rowboat rocks on the tide in the foreground, for instance, or a high-angle shot of a rooftop battle bookended by the rest of the village burning around you. As Kes says, the combat itself felt a little on the basic side in these early stages (and the parry window is ridiculously wide, although the slow-motion glancing blade effect is really cool) so hopefully, that’s something that evolves over the course of the game. I absolutely love the presentation, but I fear there may not be enough depth to the combat to elevate Trek to Yomi beyond being a visually arresting one-and-done kind of game. I’d love to be proven wrong, though…HeidiSorry, Trek to Yomi can’t escape one comparison to one other excellent samurai game, but it’s a good’un — Trek to Yomi instantly put me in mind of the black and white scenes in Ghost of Tsushima, and it achieves that same sense of cinematic beauty with its epic backgrounds, whether that’s a burning village or a stand-off with enemies on a bridge. This is not to say that my playthrough was as cinematic as it could be — it turns out I am not the most adept of samurai, and I faced defeat at several points in the demo. For the most part, it felt as though there was a clear path forward, and moving onwards felt like a natural progression, although there were a few instances where it felt a little clunky or the perspective tripped you up about where you were going next. We play as Hiroki, who had pledged himself to protect his town and his people, and even in the short time we had with the demo, Trek to Yomi really got across that sense of one lone warrior against the world.Will you be doing any trekking? Let us know if you will be playing this day one in the comments below!
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