Well this is never making it on the front page, not like In-Indie was ever on the front page in the first place. Other than horrible gaming journalists not understanding how indie games work, another thing people say is how unfair they can be. Cuphead is unfair because your character only has three hearts on them. Hotline Miami is too hard because enemies can kill te in one hit. Slime Rancher is too hard because I can’t feed my Slimes in time. But there is a game out there that I can say with slight certainty that it can feel really unfair at times. A game so difficult that it already has me cursing before the game starts. A Bastard’s Tale.



A Bastard’s Tale follows a knight, I’m going to assume he’s the fabled Bastard, as he makes his way through a set of levels in a very slow movement speed, his quest, uncertain, but apparently, people praise him for his efforts after each level. Now if te play the game right, te could beat A Bastard’s Tale in sixteen minutes. It is a pretty short game. So why is it that HowLongtoBeat.com says that it takes two hours to beat? Because the game is so damn hard. Now it doesn’t have the difficult bosses like Cuphead o the one hit death mechanic of Hotline Miami, but what it does have is a lot of enemies. Honestly, this game has elements of being forgiving unlike the other two. te can take way più damage than in either game, and te can find a bottle of potion to heal up right before the boss. The game gives te plenty of time to prepare for the worst. So why is it so much harder? Because the controls are so damn confusing. te have three basic attacks, two side swings, one from the left and one from the right, and te have a downward slash. te can also block from these directions if te hold the shoulder button. It’s this mechanic that makes A Bastard’s Tale so tough. Enemies hold their weapons out to block, and te gotta swing at them in the right way. I always found swinging downward when they hold their weapons in any other direction the easiest since I can never really tell which side their blocking from. te gotta master these controls as soon as possible, because an enemy can really mess te up in seconds. They give little cool down time and are ready to swing again in seconds, and while te do have a health bar, they can drain it just as fast. While I did find some of the ways the game can get te killed pretty humorous, like a knight flinging his spear into the air after te kill him only to fall back and kill you. That’s kinda funny, like a Monty pitone, python thing. Sadly, that laughter turns into a groan as I am thrown back to the start. While it feels good to beat a level after dying so many times, te will die many, many times. I think I died on the first two levels più times than I did on any of the levels of Hotline Miami… combined.
A Bastard’s Tale is tough, and kinda unforgiving with it’s difficulty. I did say that it is unfair, but the ways it does kill te can be funny if te can forgive how painfully difficult it is. A Bastard’s Tale is not a terrible game, despite what many of the reviews say for it, but even when te get passed the insane difficulty, it is a very simple game. I would recommend it for people who like the style o want a hard game… o buy it for a dollar like I did, but te can find better games that have a huge difficulty to it but has più to it than just difficulty like Hollow Knight, Hotline Miami, Cuphead, and for a più recente example, Blasphemous.

Up next: How low can your innocence go?