Blacktail

Blacktail (stylized in caps as BLACKTAIL) is a first person action-adventure game by a Polish studio, The Parasight (also stylized in caps). The game is based on Slavic folklore, namely that of Baba Yaga. The character's depiction in tales apparently is not coherent and leaves plenty of room for interpretation. In this game, you play as 16-year-old Yaga, still forging the legend, although Baba exists, too, as an antagonist. I'm not sure where the game's title comes from -- maybe the cat?

Baba is you?

To be frank, I didn't quite get the full picture of Blacktail's story because I peaced-out from following the cinematics maybe a half-way through and started straight up skipping them. I found them and dialogue too lengthy and wordy for the little substance they had -- nothing I hadn't heard before. Side quest NPCs were a bit more interesting but they talked too much as well.

The final nail in the coffin came from the game introducing a second narrator in addition to Yaga. Adam "Nergal" Darski, the lead vocalist and guitarist of Behemoth, sounds very Polish when speaking English and I have a very strong dislike for about any East European accent and the actual languages in general. Nergal is also the cat -- the second narrator, really, I guess.

Yaga herself was voiced by Valerie Rose Lohman whom I've heard before as Edith in What Remains of Edith Finch and as Jess Blazkowicz in Wolfenstein: Youngblood. She is perfect as Yaga but "The Voice" (Avalon Penrose) in her head very much not so. That kind of bitchy, disinterest vocal fry is not enjoyable to listen to. The Voice's writing also included a couple of anachronistic-sounding phrases in an assumed-medieval setting, like 'shit hitting the fan'.

Blacktail's open world map is divided into four regions. Yaga's hut is in the middle of it all from where you can access each of the zones: one for each season. The open world isn't very immersive. The world and its interactable objects exist just for you. It doesn't feel like a living world.

The game's visuals are mostly realistic in style but the sky is like from a children's storybook. There's chromatic aberration without a setting to turn it off but Unreal Engine's easy ini-file edits came to the rescue once again. But what bothered me the most with the visuals was the heavy contrast: anything not in direct light is so dark compared to everything else. It makes the environments annoying to look at with how difficult it is to perceive if there's something of importance in a shadowed area.

Helpful or evil?

Blacktail has a binary morality system: to which direction you progress is determined by dialogue choices as well as how you interact with the world. For instance: killing a bird stuck in a bird trap is a bad morality action (duh) while freeing it is a good one. Good and bad morality give their respective little bonuses, with more unlocking as you progress on the bar.

There are also sub-morality bars for three 'titles' towards which you can progress from either good or bad side. The ornithologist one is a bit weird because to reach it from the good side, you need to kill birds and destroy their nests while retaining overall good morality. Once you unlock the title from the good side, killing birds becomes a good morality action. They were evil all along, I guess. Feathers are found aplenty on the ground already but I suppose it helps you to avoid dropping morality from accidentally killing a bird.

Once you're at the either end of the main morality bar, you will be resurrected upon death. Triggering it reduces your morality and you have to fill the final bits of the bar again for the resurrection to be available. I found it quite annoying: it doesn't take many actions to refill the bar but you need to do three selected morality actions once at full -- damn anthills were never nearby when I needed them. I didn't die all that many times but I accidentally killed a stick bug (bad action) while using deflection charm to remove a spider in my way few times and had to go through the hassle more than necessary. I suppose I could've just continued on without the resurrection because the game isn't overly hard on the default difficulty.

I think I may stop buying games that have archery as their main method of doing combat. If you think about it, having to hold a button before an attack goes off -- like when drawing a bow -- is like hold-to-interact. I'd rather have things start happening immediately upon a button press. I suppose archery games often allow you to loose an arrow without a full draw but it sure is often ineffective in either accuracy or damage. In Blacktail, you often have to craft more arrows in the middle of things and not doing full damage with each shot would only accentuate that.

Parasight (having seemingly dropped the definite article from their name) went on work on 'DAVY x JONES', another some sort of first person action-adventure game. However, just yesterday they announced to have run into funding issues and the game's development has ceased on the early access at least in its current form.