I'm a big fan of this developer and loved the previous two Zeno Clash games. This is the weakest entry in the series, despite the obviously bigger budget and more modernized game design. I'm hardly a luddite and appreciate the care the developer has taken to update their sensibilities, but in this case they've lost more than they've gained IMO.

Combat never really clicked. Feedback is low both from incoming and outgoing hits, it's very easy to get knocked out of your combo, and flowing between offense and defense is difficult. Even when you do well in battle and parry, dodge, and strike your way to unlocking the (very fun) first-person punching, it completely ignores the rest of the systems that the game spends so much time teaching and improving: your stances, weapons, and special moves don't have any bearing on it. There's neither the sense of engagement than the previous games had, nor a deep and interesting new combat system to replace it.

The shift to third person really disconnects from the visceral combat and the detailed world. Looking enemies in the eyes, bobbing around their firsts, and getting up close to all the weird little structures and people in Zenozoik was a huge part of the charm of the first games, and it just doesn't hit right in third person. It was very easy to get lost or betrayed by the camera in the twisting canyons and tunnels, and miss landmarks in a way that wouldn't have happened in first person.

For as much gameplay and narrative space as the Ritual takes up, its presence felt vestigial to the rest of the experience. It's possible to entirely ignore the mechanic and just get by on your fists, without needing to risk drinking poison or getting tied up. I really wanted to enjoy this mechanic (I'm a board game maker IRL and playing a little board game before fighting for a boost is conceptually perfect for me), but it was just not satisfying to interact with.

I'm still looking forward to supporting the devs and this series in the future, and I applaud them for trying to make a different game with this new entry. I just don't feel like it's a better game for it.

I don't think there's many game series out there that do as good a job at creating a truly weird and alien yet somewhat comprehensible world as the Zeno Clash series.

I think this game is about 3/4 style and 1/4 substance. The world is incredibly creative and the characters are enthralling, and the combat and exploration teeter on the edge of being good but hover around just okay.

It can be hard to tell what terrain can and can't be navigated, and what is a collectable item and what is just background. Jumping is more about horizontal than vertical movement (usually), combat has the potential to be quite enthralling and complex but most of the time you're better off learning one or two combo's and dumping all your upgrades into those. Dodging functions about 80% of the time, and sometimes just doesn't work.

The 2-life system is interesting. If you die once you'll have a chance to get back to your body from a save point and resume with no lost progress. However if you don't have a nearby save point finding your way back again is a slog, and if you died in an awkward encounter you're usually just going to die again and then you get shunted back to the last autosave.

The one-rule dice challenge is also interesting, from both a mechanical and world-building P.o.V. It can do a lot to vary up the combat, but I always felt like I was barely winning and I had a hard time telling if I was playing poorly or just had a bad dice roll or didn't have a good selection of modifiers.

Overall I want to love this game, but as-is I only like it. If only the mechanics were as stunning as the world design or impeccable weird vibes. I highly recommend it if you have more patience than me, or if you can be spurred forward by aesthetics alone.

Looks beautiful, feels like a chore to play. The movement feels clunky and the different fighting style/stances don't seem to matter. This took all the wrong lessons from the Souls games.

I'll update my review once more when I finish the game. My stance at the moment is that this a very particular kind of game not suited to the tastes of most gamers. Very tough to recommend.

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"Clash: Artifacts of Chaos" is one of the most unique games that you've probably never heard about. It is reminiscent of early 2000's titles like "Jak and Daxter" and similar to the "Dark Souls" franchise in other ways. It's like if Kratos were butt ugly and Atreus became a winged creature.

The setting is interesting and the characters you find within are both strange and alluring. Prepare yourself for a very weird game here. Every single character seems to have been designed with the idea that they have to be as revolting as possible.

I wouldn't say the gameplay is the title's strong suit. It's honestly quite weak and finicky most of the time. A player can genuinely coast by nearly ALL of this game's combat encounters, bosses included, by spamming the Uppercut special attack. Solid damage, it will reposition Pseudo after every use, and it stunlocks almost every single enemy you can encounter in this game. If that fails, you can genuinely just outmaneuver them and spam the Projectile special attack instead.

The Ritual minigame is quite boring. It's a nice concept, but not one that you should be encountering with such frequency. Oh well, at least you can have The Boy do it for you.

Around 50% of players beat the first boss of the game. Only ~25% of players beat the game's second boss. Every single Nightmare boss has a completion rate of under 10% and we're supposed to beat them all in order to face Nightmare Gemini for the last piece of North Armor. Player engagement is absolutely abysmal, especially when it comes to the 'secret' stuff. In my opinion, this is because the combat is weak, the fighting feels unresponsive at times, and the story doesn't pick up fast enough to pique player interest.

Personally, I almost tapped out after the first boss because I encountered a section of the game where 2 minibosses repeatedly ran my pockets after I spent 5 minutes walking there and also picking up everything on the way. Whenever I lost, I'd have to completely repeat everything I just did because I did not realize that I could backtrack 3 levels and save at that old campfire. The campfire scarcity is a little ridiculous and they could do with some better tips for the players that will struggle even more than I did in that regard.

There are a decent amount of shortcuts to be opened up in the game, but I would've appreciated a fast travel system. It's as though the developers WANT you to have a guide open on the side telling you exactly where to go. Trying to backtrack for collectibles, stances, etc. that you may have missed is a real pain. Sooooo much pointless walking around in these mazelike maps... Foregoing quality of life features like a proper map do not make a game charming!!! Taking a few days off from playing this game means you completely lose your bearings.

I like the variety of pieces available for the Night Mode avatar, but the traversal makes it a pain to hunt for the hidden costume bits. You can't actually see where these pieces are in the daytime, so you basically have to walk the whole map over again on foot in the hopes you find something new to equip. Some sets aren't even in the same location and those particular pieces are thereby useless by the time you actually find them.

love the art style of the game I really do BUT I just find it unplayable from a mechanics point of view. I really wanted to play it because the world is awesome but I find it unplayable for fighting and thus progressing its just too punishing and disappointing lol. I tried but just don't like it.

I want this game to be good because I like this developer and I think this project had heart put into it, but fact is that it doesn't feel finished. The game takes the already strange and divisive combat of Zeno Clash (which I liked) and sets it in an "open world" (what looks like open space but is actually corridors and invisible walls) which just chews up time. I could see someone really enjoying this game if they liked the combat system and could tolerate the jankiness, but that is going to be a very particular person.

The combat is dull, and you're asked to do a lot of it. It's difficult to win fights by engaging with all the game's battle mechanics, but easy if you find one exploitable move and repeat it over and over.

I got this game thinking, "Even if the combat sucks, I'll dig the world." But you experience the world through a played-straight Lone Wolf & Cub-type story. Lotta rote lines that raise flags for media junkies like me. "I didn't mean to hurt him," "Bring me the boy!" that kinda thing. There's visual imagination but little narrative imagination.

UPDATED REVIEW: I changed from recommend to not recommend after getting 100% achievements. There are way too many negative things about this game. Only get it if you just want to support ACE Team and Zenozoik (which is what I'm doing).

This game is barely related to Zeno Clash 1 and 2, but it's set in the same world of Zenozoik. You don't have to play Zeno Clash to play this game at all, but I recommend you go play Zeno Clash anyway because it's great.

- Returning to Zenozoik. I will always play any game set in Zenozoik, one of the most creative and interesting worlds ever made.
- Character design is top notch still
- Dialogue performance for everyone other than Pseudo and the boy is pretty good
- The Ritual is a really fun minigame and I find myself challenging people even if I don't want to punish them
- Combat works well. It's more like Absolver than a Zeno Clash game, though
- There's a rage mode that turns the game first person, which is awesome and makes me wish the whole game was like that
- If you hit the enemy enough times without missing or getting hit, you can execute a neat God of War style animation beat down that feels unique to the creatures you're fighting. Super easy to do because you get some stun from a full light attack combo and you just circle a little bit to dodge anything they might attack you with.
- Weapons are good if you're having a hard time with fights as a good. Once you get the hang of parries, your aggressive meter fills up crazy fast and weapons are no longer needed. I ended with a huge amount of weapons in my inventory because I forgot about them, really.

- Exploration and night mode go hand in hand in their ruining of the game.
- The night mode is when you sleep at a tent checkpoint from flesh Pseudo to a wooden version of Pseudo that can pass through brambles and see hidden chests and armor pieces and best of all, doesn't have the boy saying stupid things. Sounds cool at first, but then you realize it just exists to waste your time.
- The exploration sucks. Bad. Do you like staring at corners and just running alongside the wall for any ingredients for potions or figurines you use to upgrade your skills and stances? Do you like multiple dead ends that may or may not have chest in them? Sometimes, yeah? Well do it twice the exact same way because you're missing stuff from night mode, maybe.
- Even if you're like me and just wanted to see the story and not mess with night mode, too bad. You find brambles and get to make the most laborious decision in a video game; do you backtrack now to the previous camp and go wooden Pseudo and go through the brambles now or try and go a little further and hope that the next tent is close by? Either way, you've got to backtrack. Then what if once you go through the brambles, you kill a thorn guardian that clears the brambles so flesh Pseudo can go through and interact with a totem that only flesh Pseudo can interact with? You got it, more backtracking to get to the same place you're standing in.
- Bloodborne style, you can knock down a ladder (a boulder in this case) or open a door to unlock a shortcut once you've gotten far enough, but the shortcuts are also put in strange places where it's not even clear if they help or not. You've also likely gotten another tent checkpoint before the shortcut, so it becomes even more forgettable.
- There's a kid. He whines and says the dumbest things possible. One of the most irritating things is you go into the mountains all nice and it isn't until you get high up that the kid starts consistently whining it's too freezy and he feels sick. What? You didn't get the warm fur outfit from the trader at the bottom of the mountain? You guessed it, go backtrack! I chose not too in hopes that the boy would get sick and die, but unfortunately that didn't happen. Looking forward to an upcoming patch, I guess.
- The boy, again. I get it, they wanted to add a foil to a story so Pseudo has someone to explain the world to. However, by making it a kid, it's so painfully obvious that when Pseudo talks to the kid, he's talking to the player and treating you like a kid. Even simple things like trying to tell the player what an enemy is called isn't done in a natural way in items that clearly come from those enemies or someone talking about it and trusting the player is smart enough to connect dots. The boy instead randomly says the enemy's name. "Watch out, a cave crab!" Yeah, I know. We just killed like 5 of them a couple seconds ago.
- Pseudo is a jerk to everyone except the boy. The dialogue between the other characters is great and pulls you into this weird world of Zenozoik where even the way of speaking sounds unique, only for Pseudo to say something bland and faux intimidating. Then the boy asks some of the dumbest questions and Pseudo's all invested and earnest.
- The story is only interesting with Golem and talking to Word, which Pseudo shuts down, because why wouldn't he? Aside from that, it's pretty much find the things to defeat the person. That's the whole game in a nutshell.
- By the time you get the third flask, you'll never really run out and the game gets real easy
- Stats feel like they don't mean anything. I put like 5 in power, 5 in constitution and 15 in aggressiveness and was good for the rest of the game. Seriously, I ended the game with over 50 unallocated stat points. I guess that's better than stat screwing yourself over, but I was always waiting to see if I could tell the difference between them all, but it just never really mattered.
- Builds don't really matter. Pseudo gets clothing and wood pseudo gets body parts, neither really mattered when I played. You get different stances and special moves that you can burn figurines to improve. I ended up leaving my favored stances and special attacks with low level figurines because FOMO and I just felt like there was going to be some great stance or special attack, but it never came. I just ended up using boxing exclusively and spin kick mostly. I tried some other specials, but they didn't work with how I liked playing.

- The world is far too colorful for me. The gritty dark and weird worlds of Zeno Clash 1/2 fit way better for characters. Zenozoik was brutal feeling, this game feels too welcoming and kid friendly
- Zeno Clash's first person combat was far more unique and satisfying than this game's third person combat. In first person, it added another level of uniqueness since I can't recall many first person brawlers in addition to the added benefit of seeing the enemy character models closer and feel like they're focusing on you, not your character model. The third person combat of this game is more like Absolver than Zeno Clash, it's too karate/kung fu artsy, which might fit the new bright arty landscape but feels slightly contradictory from the brutal and primal design of characters and buildings. The reason I said it was less satisfying in third person is because there needed to be some way to control the number of enemies you're currently fighting. Zeno Clash did this by strong attacks that sent enemies flying and ragdolling and could even hit into other enemies. That was very fun and satisfying. I feel less powerful as Pseudo.
- Melee weapons felt better to use in Zeno Clash, I can hardly tell if I'm using some of the weapons here unless the enemy's health bar starts dropping faster than normal.

I wish I could recommend this game, but it's just not very compelling for most people not invested in Zenozoik with the amount of backtracking and the weak story.

Combat feels good one moment and weird the next, not sure if its dropping inputs or what it is but leads to frustrating game play that has reached the point of no longer being enjoyable.

Great Look to the game. Really liked the Art style,

Combat is boring, very little in common with xeno clash 1 or 2. too many complicated parts i.e crafting, ritual items. the Combat is the biggest let down, no impact to it.