38. Apotheon (Alientrap, Playstation 4, 2015)

Apotheon is a exploration based platformer set in the world of Greek mythology and designed to look like ancient Greek black-figure pottery painting. The game was free on Playstaion Plus several years back, and I had heard that the combat was similar to Dark Souls, so I was excited to give it a try.

Unfortunately, the game ends up being a disappointment on most levels. The art style looks great in still screenshots, but in motion, the animations leave something to be desired. One egregious example: your character will climb the sides of ladders rather than climbing up the middle. The game has voice acting, but none of it is particularly memorable and it tends to kill the pacing when you're locked into cutscenes.

Gameplay is a mixed bag; the jump is not great, but the combat is overall fine. You have a good variety of weapons that each feel different, though none feel amazing. I appreciate the spears and javelins especially, though at least in the early areas combat never felt very tactical. There is also a dedicated roll button, which I always enjoy, but the jump is not great and the game does not allow you to use the dpad for movement, which are both big knocks against it for me.

One bit of control that actually felt so good it seemed out of place: when you are running in a straight line for long enough, your character builds up an impressive amount of speed, which was fun when I found corridors long enough to take advantage of this.

After you leave the starting area, Apotheon introduces a crafting system as well as guards who will attack you if you get violent in a "safe" area. I accidentally attacked a guard, and after killing 4 or 5 more guards, one came up to me and asked for a small bribe (something like 20 gold when I had already amassed thousands) before calling off the other guards. This was about when I decided to stop playing.

2/5, interesting style, but there's a little too much jank in the gameplay.