The Last Oricru – Final Cut XSX Review 7.5/10 "More fun than Starfield" ⚔️🛡️ @oricru #GameDev #IndieGame

The Last Oricru had a rough ride when it was first released at the tail end of 2022, ending up 7th in Metacritic’s ‘The Worst Games of 2022’ list. It completely passed me by at the time, until I was hunting for RPGs that were off the beaten track on the Xbox store and quite fancied the game following a swifty at the trailer.

I contacted Goldknights and was advised that an overhauled version of the game was due in a few weeks, and so I held off covering the game until then, and I’m very glad I did. I didn’t play the original release of The Last Oricru. Still, I can quite confidently say that I had much more fun in the 15 hours or so that I spent with The Last Oricru (and completed it) than the 40 hours I spent on Bethesda’s latest release (before giving up on it out of boredom).

A ’Soulslike’ ARPG, the story of The Last Oricru begins with your character waking up in some sort of futuristic cryo-pod, wondering what the heck is going on… and then getting stabbed to death by a glowing alien. But fear not! Due to some sort of magic belt, our intrepid hero has the gift of a form of immortality, in that he comes back from that which lies beyond life each time he is slaughtered. Which is handy.

The Last Oricru piqued my interest pretty quickly, I’ve mentioned before that I quite like rough ‘n ready RPGs that may overreach their grasp or be flawed in some way, but still shine through in their idiosyncratic approaches in some way, be it world-building; dialogue; narrative, or mechanics.

Whilst the meat of the combat and gameplay here is nothing new – and indeed, has been done better in other games of its ilk such as Mortal Shell, here, The Last Oricru kept me engaged through its bizarre blending of intense combat, accessibility, and a pithy main ‘hero’ that looks like something from Cyberpunk 2077, but sounds like Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride.

When I first started playing, I thought, ‘Surely he isn’t meant to sound like that, and this is some sort of placeholder voice?’ but as I played, the main character – Silver – and his almost casual approach to the death, political machinations and world-ending ramifications that bubble around him completely won me over, and I was regularly amused at the many conversations that take place, culminating in a conversation with an NPC who asks how things went in a meeting with a giant, furious, human-despising rat-queen, and Silver’s response of, “She really doesn’t like me, almost as much as she doesn’t like proper grammar”.

The game is quite dialogue-heavy, but if you get on board with Silver’s world-weary, dismissive delivery, it really is amusing.

The various factions, denizens and locations in the various semi-open-world areas are all well and good, but what really caught my attention was the fact that you can switch the difficulty from ‘standard’ (bearing in mind this is a Soulslike game which will see you die a lot) to ‘story difficulty’ which really lowers the challenge and allows you to cheese through most enemies and bosses, within limits.

This is something that I’ve wanted in the genre for a while, especially as illustrated here, where you can adjust the difficulty on the fly, so you can play through until you hit a wall or grindpoint, and then pop the easy mode on until you make progress and then boom – back up to normal again. It means that people of all levels of skill get to enjoy the game, which is nice. Also – there’s a form of co-op whereby someone can join your game (in local co-op as well, groovy) to help you out in the combat stakes.

It's not all sunshine and flowers, though – The Last Oricru does suffer from some sections that feel padded due to excessive back-tracking (I look at YOU, level in the mines) and general issues such as frame rate judder in larger biomes, enemies floating away or getting caught up in scenery mid-combat,  some platforming elements, and boss fights that are irritating in either mode.

SUMMARY

As I’ve said, I didn’t play the original release of The Last Oricru, but the fact that it’s now £16.99 and is a fun and idiosyncratic approach to the Soulslike genre acts as a great entry point for those of us who fear the sheer difficulty and time-suck of similar releases.

I can imagine there are a lot of people who won’t enjoy the dry humour as much as I did, but I applaud Goldknights for re-assessing their game, fixing the more glaring issues, and expanding their vision.

I got Spiders (Technomancer, Bound by Flame etc.) vibes from The Last Oricru, and it has very much put Goldknights on the map for me, I’m keen to see where they take us next!