Blind Fate: Edo no Yami

Full Walkthrough:
Gameplay: Decent
Combat: Feels Repetitive
Graphics: Good
Audio: Good
Story: Epic
PC Requirements: Fast
Game Time: 6-10 hours

Blind Fate: Edo no Yami is a story-driven, Souls-like hack and slash side scroller in 2.5D with outstanding visuals and tough-as-nails combat. Initially, this review started with the tag-line: "If you don’t like the Dark Souls iconic difficulty, this game isn’t for you.". While this was painfully true at the moment of playing and reviewing it, things changed considerably with the release of the 1.0.2 Patch on 22 Sep 2002, which addressed a lot of the complaints regarding the difficulty and the boss fights. In my opinion, this patch improved substantially the game by making it more accessible to anyone interested in it in the slightest, and thus allowing it to reach a wider range of players.
Set in a fictional Edo period in which Japan has been overtaken by robotic versions of Japanese folklore creatures, you play a cyborg samurai whose main body parts have been replaced by machines. Yami is an experienced warrior who lost not only his limbs, but also his sight. Despite this, he never backs off from a fight, remaining true to the core values of a samurai: honor and bravery.
To compensate for his blindness, Yami employs his other senses to explore the world and to detect enemies in combat. The player can switch from normal vision to a “sound”, “smell” and respectively a ”heat” vision, each of them making different aspects of the environment visible. While the “sound” sensor is heavily used, not only because it can highlight traps, enemies approaching you (which are invisible at first and become visible as long as Yami keeps landing hits on them) and collectibles, the other two are fairly rarely used, with the “smell” sensor being the core mechanic in one boss fight only, and the “heat” vision (which is supposed to highlight exits or objects to interact with) being useful only very few times during the whole game, including another boss fight and some enemies and locations.
Blind Fate: Edo no Yami has a rather slow-paced, but precision-based combat system, in which well-timed attacks, parries and dodges are of uttermost importance. Aside from melee-ing the enemies with his Katana, Yami also has a ranged attack in the form of a cannon with 5 bullets plus 5 extra for recharge. He also has 3 medkits that can recover his lost HP, but both the ammo and the med kits are extremely scarce in the game world, therefore you’ll need to be rather stingy with using them. As such, your attacks will mostly be melee, and timing them, together with parrying and building combos will allow Yami to stun the enemies and trigger a charged blow or a finisher, delivered through a short minigame of quickly switching to a certain sensor followed by aiming your mouse / controller in a certain position, or respectively a QTE sequence that instantly kills them.
The fights can take several minutes, and normally consist of multiple waves of enemies that attack Yami in mixed ranged and melee groups. There is no way to save the game during these sequences but the levels are split into rooms / sections, with a checkpoint before each of them. Defeating enemies will award XP which can then be used to upgrade Yami’s abilities. The basic attacks do very little damage, but their final forms have considerably more impact, plus the upgraded version of dashing through enemies or stomping them will prove to be extremely useful end-game. However, in order to unlock these, a certain amount of grinding is needed.
There are 5 bosses in the game, ranging from decent to being quite frustrating mainly because of the length of the fights. Some take even a dozen minutes (that is, if you manage to survive that long) and are pretty unforgiving to mistakes. The combat mechanic of the game is overall very repetitive but the boss fights are even more so, because they’re designed so that you can place only a couple of hits before a long sequence of enemies spawning follows (or some other event that makes the boss invulnerable), and in order to defeat a boss you’ll need to correctly perform many cycles of “a couple of hits on the boss” followed by “several minutes to kill enemies or continuously dodge various attacks”. On top of that, having a very low amount of heals and an extremely limited number of bullets that you can use makes these fights even more of an endless suffering, even on the easiest of the two possible difficulty modes.
The plot is unraveled in a fragmented manner and until the end of the game, when everything is explained in one single sequence, the player is fed only bits, here and there, through dialogues or lore fragments. The story is perhaps even more cryptic prior to the final reveal if you don’t have any knowledge of Japanese mythology or you’re unable to recognize the meaning behind all the Japanese terms mentioned in the dialogues. Without spoiling too much of the plot, I can perhaps only hint at the fact that the story revolves around the idea of making a better world through science, but sacrificing humanity in the process.
In order to obtain all the achievements, one has to defeat all the bosses, unlock all the skills, complete all the mini challenges (these act as short tutorial / practice levels), and also acquire all the data and collectibles from the world. The latter two categories require not only a considerable amount of grinding (only certain enemies seem to drop a data fragment) but also constantly switching to the “sound” sensor in order to be able to see the lore fragments. Even though it’s possible to play the entire game with the “sound” sensor on, this ruins the whole experience because the blue layer of this sensor completely covers the beautifully crafted environments. One other annoying thing is that applying finishers during combat will automatically switch you to normal vision mode, thus you’ll have to repeatedly switch back to the “sound” mode after each finisher. The main story can be completed in around 10 hours (depending on your skills), and all areas can be revisited afterwards in order to gather the missing collectibles or more data about the enemies. Each area has a completion rate that indicates whether you still have things to discover there or not.
As a casual player, I initially found the game way past my comfort zone, but after the patch was released it felt much more relaxing in comparison to my prior experience - unfortunately by then I had completed the whole game, with lots of struggles. While playing in its original form, I didn’t even have the bravery to try the “Normal” mode because the “Easy” mode was already pretty much like the “Hard” mode in other games, or even more difficult than that, but then the difficulty was noticeably scaled down. What kept me going until the end was the whole atmosphere and story. The combat is what it is - repetitive and to some extent merciless (although I don’t mind the former), but the Cyberpunk-Edo environments and the whole story line managed to always compensate for my struggles. From a neon-lit replica of Tokyo, to forest pathways, rainy and foggy docks or climbing snowy mountains, the biomes of Blind Fate: Edo no Yami are all exquisitely beautiful and well-designed. The visual effects during fights are also very catchy.
Underneath the many, many frustrations of a Souls-like mechanics and difficulty, Blind Fate: Edo no Yami is a genuinely nice game that deserves to be explored, especially if you’re a fan of the genre.
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This is really really cool. I don't remember the last time game served me my ass on a plate so much in the first couple of hours and I didn't ragequit it. Gotta go to work now, but freaking delightful game, will add more as soon as a I am back, but now I also want a cyberdemosamurai AI.
EDIT 1: I will not tell you that to show off, but just in case, I beat the first boss at the first attempt without taking damage.
EDIT 2: I read a review on a magazine about the game having Input Lag. Dude, I think you need to stop spamming the attack button and get your gamepad checked, cause there is no input lag in this game. What you call input lag IMO is just the fact that it's got a precision-based combat system, with well timed strikes, blocks and dodges. It even lets you dodge interrupting an attack I noticed, in the same frame.

You chase a fox with big boobas, I would recommend

you can pet a dog

Disclaimer: I received the review key free of charge from the game publisher 101XP. I'm not affiliated with 101XP and I have not received any kind of compensation for my review.
Blind Faith: Edo no Yami is what I'd call a soul-lite action game set in a feudal-punk Sengoku-era Japan. You take control of Yami, once a famous demon-hunter samurai faithfully serving the Shogun now reduced to a blind, bionic-warrior that needs to rely on his artificial sensors. While Yami tries to track down his aggressors and the plot unfolds, new secrets comes to light that makes him question his principles, values and actions.
Just like most "souls" games the game features a pattern-based combat where you also need to keep an eye to your stamina bar that progressively depletes with every attack, roll, jump or dash you make; unlike traditional souls games though there's no XP penalty upon death. Each enemy has a sort of "exhaustion bar" that fills with every attack you land: when it's full you can land a precisely timed attack to the enemy's weak spot for big damage. Combat feels satisfying despite being pretty basic - no fancy combos whatsoever, just a basic 3-4 hit combo and a ranged shot; swiftly dashing around "dancing like a butterfly, stinging like a bee" is big fun, though.
The game's pivotal game mechanics are the sensors: your bionic body can detect heat, movements and life through one of your 3 sensors, and only one sensor can be active at a given time. On the paper each sensors could ne useful to scan the stage for details that couldn't be seen in the standard view - hidden upgrades, doors, interactable objects, even enemies - but in practice these mechanics feels a little underused and you'll probably want stick to your "hearing" sensor for most part of the journey.
While hardly stretching any graphical boundaries, Edo no Yami is a good looking game. The graphics are 3D but the game plays out on 2D stages, therefore you can't really fully appreciate the quality (or lack of thereof) of the models. The stages generally aren't filled with a big amount of details, to a point that sometimes they can even feel a little empty, and the level design could really benefit from less linear/more complex layouts from time to time. The total however is greater than the sum of its parts, and the overall aesthetics retain that traditional Japanese allure while nailing a more modern, robotic feel.
As a final note, I have to say I TOTALLY fell in love with the hand-drawn sketches that you're shown throughout the game: I must've taken a couple dozens of screens while playing, they're simply stunning. Kudos to the artists!
I completed the game in almost 14 hours. I've been playing the whole game on the go on my Steam Deck, it was a match made in Heaven and for the most part a flawless experience, only partially marred by a couple of hard crashes (the devs are running a Discord server and are very helpful when reporting a bug) and some sporadic performance slowdowns in very specific areas that hardly compromised my gaming experience.
I definitely enjoyed my time with the game. Of course you could argue that there would be a lot of room for improvement - as I said earlier, the level design could be expanded and the sensor mechanics, while being neat on the paper, unfortunately didn't show their full potential throughout the game. But all in all, I still think that Edo no Yami could be a good fit for those who love some good samurai action, a nice story and some frankly-quite-sick steampunk aesthetics.

Been following this project for looong time (played Demo and Prologue). The game is not perfect and there's room for improvement in some areas, but man, it is a much needed fresh take on the genre. I expect some people to complain about difficulty, and the game is difficult, but it also gives you all the means to overcome difficulties, enemies, bosses, etc. All you need to do is pay attention to all the details (dialogues, descriptions, tutorial messages, etc.). I saw people complaining about the second boss; do you even look around game environments? There are usually several ways to beat enemies, just look around ffs lol
Action packed, interesting story, great atmosphere, nice action music. What else can I say?
Thumbs up from me. GG developers!