Think about Dark Souls. Now think about trying to explain the game to someone who have never seen or heard of the franchise. After doing that sit them down to play Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption and 9 out 10 times you’ll probably hear them tell you they are playing Dark Souls and that the game is too damn hard.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”13″]Release Date: October 18, 2018
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One [Reviewed] Developer: DarkStar Games
Genre(s): Action Adventure
# of players: Single[/perfectpullquote]

Look, If you’ve read enough of my work you’ll know I hate comparing any sort of game to Dark Souls, but it’s hard to escape the similarities with Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption. The steel plate armor, the look, the giant weapon you wield, the estus flask-like potion to regain health, the rolling like a crazy person, the soul sacrifice aspect of the game and the massive boss fights against all manner of crazy things out of my whiskey-laden nightmares.

Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is so much like Dark Souls that you’d think it was a fun little side-project from the same studio behind that series –it’s not. The only difference that you can see on the surface is that Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption gets rid off all the running around bits between boss fight sections.

That means that Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is a boss rush game, the idea of which is pretty exciting when you realize that most of the fun people remember from Dark Souls comes from those insanely hard boss battles. And boy, are the boss battles in Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption enough to render a few controllers no longer functional via violence.

Developers DarkStar Games have done a great job taking influence from the Souls series almost to the point where it could be considered more a clone than an original game. The enemy design is top-notch, the action is always tense and engaging with no down time, but everything about it feels like it was built from an already established template. A sort of paint-by-numbers affair.

And while most of Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is pretty generic in terms of design, what hurts the most is the lack of engaging narrative and lore. The game presents a brief back-story on each boss that you battle but the game does very little to flesh out your place in the grand scheme of things. And this is rough because the lore of the Dark Souls series is so important that you could get lost in it and not even play the game.

 

 

Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption takes so many things from the series that it tires to emulate that it sort of forgets to be its own thing, it’s own unique universe and setting. You could pop any of the cool bosses into a Souls game and everything would already fit. You just never truly get the feeling you are playing Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, but instead a Souls clone.

But that’s not to say that the core gaming experience in Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is bad in any way. In fact, it actual does something that no other Souls-like game has done. You begin the adventure in what amounts to your ultimate form. It’s backwards from most every video game ever before it. You are a killer with fully decked out armor, abilities, and inventory.

What makes things interesting is that you have to make a sacrifice before jumping into one of the eight bosses in the game. These sacrifices might include lowering your health and armor, slashing your inventory, or making your abilities less effective. Once you make the sacrifice you can tackle the boss but you won’t get back what you gave up even if you win.

It’s a wild concept that puts you into an entry-level base form by the time you face the last boss. It’s totally backwards from what you are accustomed to in video games. As you downgrade your character the bosses get harder, not because of the game upping the difficulty but because it is making you weaker. The game forces you to get better as opposed to just collecting better weapons and upgrading skill points, never really getting better at the game.

Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption also lets you tackle each of the eight bosses in any way you feel much like you do in the Mega Man series. This means if you run across a boss in which you need more health, or maybe more health flasks that you lost at another boss, you can go back to an old boss and take back your sacrifice.

Once you do this you can take on that difficult boss but you’ll also have to go back and make another sacrifice because the boss is revives when you take back a sacrifice. It’s not as complicated as it seems but it’s really nice to be able to play how you want and tackle bosses in all sorts of different ways. It’s a fun system that could have set the game apart if it were backed with a strong reason for it story-wise, aside from the name.

Unfortunately, this system isn’t quite enough to make Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption its own unique adventure. It simply ends up feeling like Dark Souls with a tacked on feature. Boss fights are fantastic if you love hard games, but without any meat in-between it also feels very loose and unconnected.

The developers of Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption did a great job making a Dark Souls clone, but just a good enough job that you’ll just want to go play Dark Souls instead. I had a fun time playing Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption for sure, but it just had me wanting to replay Dark Souls. The game being a pretty short experience doesn’t help, especially if you come from a strong Souls background and are used to the format.

I’m excited to see more from DarkStar Games as they really do know what they are doing, I’d just love for them to take their unique sacrifice mechanic and put it to use in a game with its own unique gameplay style and aesthetic. If you want a fun little boss rush game that’ll throw you a challenge I can totally recommend Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, but if you want something deep just go play Dark Souls again.

“Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is so close to a Dark Souls experience that you’ll probably just want to go play Dark Souls instead”

Final Score:

3/5

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