Brandish: The Dark Revenant
2009
- role-playing (rpg)
- action
- fantasy
- single player
The story
From acclaimed Japanese studio Nihon Falcom, the classically-styled dungeon crawler Brandish: The Dark Revenant puts players in the role of swordsman Ares Toraernos as he climbs his way through over 40 sprawling floors of monsters, traps and puzzles in an attempt to escape a long-forgotten underground labyrinth. Along the way he repeatedly encounters his arch-rival, the voluptuous sorceress Dela Delon, who’s just as interested in claiming the bounty on his head as she is in escaping the maze herself. With each floor boasting unrelenting enemies fought in real time, elaborate booby traps, ancient treasures, tricky puzzles and thousand-year-old mysteries to solve, Brandish promises to keep players fighting for survival till the bitter end.
What it’s like
Stone corridors, torchlit and gridded, unspool in first-person as the camera steps forward one tile at a time, with the dim, claustrophobic palette of an old dungeon crawler and occasional flashes of colour from spells and loot. Anime portrait art frames the story beats against that grey maze, and the soundtrack leans on tense, driving dungeon themes that repeat through long sessions. Its vibe is austere and stubborn, a late-night, one-more-floor grind with hard edges. The pacing is deliberate and punishing: each step is a choice, fights come in real time, and traps and puzzles stall progress for minutes at a stretch. Emotionally it stays cool and wry, with a rivalry that plays as sparring banter rather than warmth. Violence is frequent and sword-driven, with monsters dying in bursts of effects rather than lingering gore, and the suggestive character design is more cheeky than explicit. It suits players who want old-school dungeon mapping, unforgiving challenge and a long, solitary climb, and it is not a gentle or relaxing choice.
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