Tips for platinum

[Hexameron-]

There is no trophy guide yet for this obscure indie game with roughly 60 game owners and 18% platinum completion rate as of writing. This is more a bulletin about an average gamer's platinum run and not really a trophy guide.

 

Platinum difficulty: 5/10

Estimated time to platinum: 2-5 hours (skill dependent)

Number of playthroughs: 1

Trophy total: 42 (1, platinum, 3 gold, 12 silver, 26 bronze)

Missables: 28 (9 related to finisher moves, 9 for specific ways of dying, 4 based on finding certain items, 6 for using special attacks of weapons you find in game that are also missable)

Misc: No online trophies, no difficulty related trophies, no glitched trophies

 

I'm being objective with my platinum difficulty rating of 5/10. IBadDriverI who made the quintessential and only platinum walkthrough video puts it at 4.5/10. He's pretty good at games and I think he gives lowball estimates for difficulty ratings. Whenever I compare his with mine, I'm always bumping up the difficulty by 1-3 points. I had a harder time with Demon Skin and might go as high as 6/10 owing to frustrations with the atrocious controls and stiff combat. The difficulty comes not from the trophies, but grappling with the game itself, which tracks your deaths and if death count is anything to go by, I had about 70 unintentional deaths by the end. Still, others may find this to be 4/10 because the trophies are straightforward including the missables. There's not much exploration needed apart from climbing a few optional places or reaching hidden areas behind breakable walls. I recommend following Bad Driver's video for finding the 6 artifact weapons and 4 crystals required for their corresponding trophies.

 

You can get the finisher move trophies out of the way early in the first level. You need to use a finishing move with each of the 3 stances for 3 different weapon types (axe, sword, hammer). In the first level, you'll pick up every weapon type. You can get lucky by sticking to one stance and spamming attack until you accidentally trigger a finisher, or you can try to make sense of the awkward combat system and learn when to use the finisher based on the visual indicators. These indicators look like the curly brace on a keyboard, e.g. { flashing in front of the enemy. Look for the yellow version of this which tells you which stance to use and get the finisher on an enemy. All you do is attack with the correct stance to trigger the finisher.

 

The other largest group of missable trophies concerns dying to different environmental hazards: lava, spikes, water, rotating fans, acid, gas clouds, fire, pistons, and bear traps. Keep an eye out for these hazards which appear only in certain biomes or tilesets, and remind yourself to die by them (after reaching a checkpoint first). You'll get all these without needing a walkthrough.

 

The weapons dropped by enemies are quite useless and you'll definitely want to find and use instead the 6 special weapons found in chests or altars in secret areas. Just use Bad Driver's video guide for locating these. Then all you need to do is activate their special attack after you have sufficient meter buildup--the blue V-shape--displaying in the HUD. The combo inputs for activating the special attacks are designated on the "artefact" tab. Picking up the 4 crystals you find adds defense points to your armor rating. Eating bugs for health pickups also adds to defense, although this effect seemed random to me.

 

The platforming in general is abysmal and many of the jumps require perfect precision. Failing the jumps gets frustrating due to badly positioned checkpoints. The platforming setpieces where you must leap onto collapsing pillars or avoid obstacles are extremely obnoxious. Again, study how Bad Driver does them if you want to save time, which isn't helped by the unusually long load times after dying.

 

The final boss can be trivialized if you corner him against the wall and spam attacks while countering his directional attacks with the appropriate stance change. As long as you're in a groove with this the boss will just stand against the wall dishing out a rigid pattern of attacks. The problem was healing while having him against the wall. Using heals leaves you open to hits and should be done only after countering an attack. Otherwise fighting him normally out in the boss room is more challenging as his AI makes him move around more and change up his attacks unpredictably.

 

I'm not going to be polite about the qualities of this game: there are almost none. What I liked: the visuals and the loading screen art, especially the late game loading screen featuring a certain character's cleavage. Everything else about the game I found mediocre or annoying. This is a sidescrolling hack-and-slash that tries to borrow stance mechanics from For Honor and stamina management from 2D soulslikes. By any basis of comparison the combat system is clunky and marred by unresponsive controls. The blocking mechanic of matching the enemy's directional attack with the correct stance is poorly conceived with directional indicators getting lost in the visual noise on screen. Probably the most frustrating thing about the combat is the long delay before your stamina bar replenishes. It takes about 2 seconds before the stamina bar starts to regenerate. So when you roll through enemies to get behind them, you have to awkwardly condition yourself to pause and wait until your stamina bar refreshes before attacking. This long delay incorporated into the stamina management feels unnatural and restrictive. Even worse is when you try to attack at zero stamina your character is exhausted and executes a long wind-up animation to perform a weak attack that does minimal damage. This "fatigued" attack leaves you vulnerable and you'll be angry every time it happens. At least it can be cancelled by backstepping, but when you're out of stamina and you have no options but to backstep or stand still and hope you can adjust your stance to counter incoming attacks, it is simply not fun. I did not enjoy this game and got through it simply for an easy platinum. Would I have rather bought and played a 20-minute throwaway Ratalaika title for the same outcome? Yes.

 

Edited April 23 by Hexameron-
Link fix