That fight is absolutely the product someone being disappointed that Gwyn wasn’t the hardest boss in Dark Souls.
Gwyn could be easily beaten by parries, so make Adam immune.
Gwyn didn’t parry, so make Adam parry.
Enemy designer prefers bosses to drag the hell on, so make Adam perfect at parrying.
Other bosses had at least a second phase, so give Adam a third.
Gwyn’s what the Chosen Undead’s pushed to become, so give Adam better versions of every single ability.
Theres a lot i could say. But I think you get everything out in the video. And Mas gets a lot said above.
I just gotta say how much I enjoyed The Pillar Men theme coming in like that. I really appreciated it.
So, just in case you thought this game was way too easy and the appeal of artificial challenges like “beat the bosses in the reverse order of what you did previously” or “make all of the sacrifices before fighting any of the bosses” isn’t enough for you, the game features a Challenge Mode. It’s got room for more, and the press releases hint at multiple “new game plus” modes that I haven’t seen any sign of, but the first entry in the list is the Nightmare Challenge, and I can hardly imagine what more you could want. The added challenge in this boss rush game is… a boss rush. But this boss rush doesn’t give you a chance to recover and restock between bosses. In fact, if you’re not fast enough, there isn’t even a between. It seems as though only certain pairs of bosses will show up together - Rhodes shows up while you’re fighting Faiz Tilus unless you’re really fast, but I’ve never seen Chanel appear before I finish off Rhodes. The good news is that many of the fights are simpler than their equivalents in the main game, often removing moves that make no sense in this arena or wouldn’t be counterable, including many of the desperation attacks. There are also no arena gimmicks like ice holes, tentacles, or phallic rocks to hide behind (sadly), and you don’t need to make any sacrifices to enter this mode, so you can fight at full strength, although it’s probably possible to bail out of the main game at any time to take on the challenge with, say, two health upgrades but minus your shield and items, if that sounds like a more attractive way to do it. I didn’t dedicate much time to trying to perfect my performance for this video, since I have more playthroughs of the main game to go, so I’ll return later with potentially more skill. For now, this is the Nightmare Challenge. It’s probably equal parts fun and tedious.
Part 7: Nightmare Challenge, take 1
Gameplay-wise, we’ve now seen everything I’m aware of Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption having to offer. I’m going to confess right now that there’s only so much I can do to make future videos of exactly the same thing interesting, and that probably equates to “nothing at all”. But I hope that there’s some value in seeing someone learn from their mistakes and improve their performance, and there is at least a new ending to look forward to. If any of that appeals to you, I’ll be taking on the bosses in pairs from now on, since I can reliably beat each one within a few tries. This is a great time to guess how many deaths I’ll have for the second run. If not, I’ll let you know which videos have any new content in them. This is not one of them.
Part 8: Faiz Tilus and Levin Undok
I’ve been going back to Nightmare mode every so often to see whether I can improve my performance and perhaps find a reliable way to beat the early bosses so I can get some practice on the later ones. I’ve got some ideas, particularly using a more reliable controller, but so far, I still die to Rhodes far more often than not. Speaking of dying more often than not, this video happens to contain both of the bosses I beat without dying in my earlier playthrough. Has my performance improved? If you guessed how many times I’d die, you might want to revise that after seeing this performance.
Part 9: Yordo and Chanel
This game is finally out on Steam if anyone was waiting to buy it. It’s also got new content. It’s not much, but considering how little there actually is of this game, it’s a fairly sizeable update. If anyone wants to wait and see for themselves: There’s a new boss, and two new boss weapons you can get by fighting the new boss. One is pretty good, and I don’t much care for the other yet. There are also three new game modes - one where you run faster, but you’re not invulnerable during dodge rolls; one where you have to beat the game without dying; and one with both conditions AND all of the sacrifices made at the start. I don’t plan to attempt that last one. The last thing they added is a new “Illusion” challenge mode that just lets you train against the bosses with no sacrifices. I guess it’s something.
I’m hoping to post videos a bit more often so I can catch up with the new content. With that in mind, here are a couple of familiar fights with no new surprises, but the lack of increased health is starting to make things dicey.
Part 10: Camber Luce and Rhodes
And here’s the end of the second run, where I beat exactly the same final boss with significantly less health. I’ve mentioned a few times how big a difference this makes, but here’s a graphic I whipped up in a couple of minutes to show just how much less health I have. The top screenshot shows my bars from the first fight with Adam, including all of the health upgrades. The bottom screenshot is from this video.
I think I’ve underestimated how much those upgrades do. Anyway, I’ve suffered through the entire game with the minimum possible amount of health so you can see the other ending, and here it is.
Part 11: Angronn and Adam
I hope you weren’t expecting anything poignant. Next time, we start on the other other ending.
By now, everything in this game is old news. I completed one more playthrough before the update came along and added more actual content, but the potential variety in the game is ultimately limited by two factors: The order in which you defeat the bosses, and whether you redeem or banish each one as you go. For those who can’t do the math or don’t think this game is worth the effort, that’s 5,040 possible orders of combat and a further 128 possible redeem/banish combinations. It probably doesn’t surprise anyone that the order in which you fight the bosses is irrelevant with respect to the ending - it would be rather cruel to center the game around the gimmick of having to choose sacrifices and then hide content behind doing it a specific way. Of the remaining options, most are parceled in some fashion into the two endings we’ve already seen. There is one specific set of conditions that leads to the remaining, hidden ending, and your first guess is probably correct. I can only refer to this as… the Thirst Run.
Part 12: Chanel and Levin Undok
I don’t die as much this time, but that’s about all that’s changed, unless you want to see what the ghost of Chanel has to say about the last couple of bosses I haven’t asked her about previously.
Part 13: Faiz Tilus, Yordo, and Camber Luce
And here we are. At the end of everything, there’s one challenge left to overcome. Forced to make it to the end with exactly one health upgrade, we fight a new version of Adam that’s got new moves and new abilities. The alternate version of the cutscene leading to it leads me to believe that there’s some sort of significance to this change, but I can’t figure out what that might be. In any case, completing this fight gives us what little reward there is to be had in this game, and the third ending.
Part 14: Rhodes, Angronn, and ???
Next time, we’ll skim over everything I did before the update came out and take a look at the new content.
A few months after the game came out, there was an update that added a few new things: A new boss, two new weapons, three new gameplay modes plus a practice mode, and most importantly, an option to restart the game without having to complete it first. I had intended just to keep trying Nightmare mode until I beat it, but when the update launched, I put that on hold to try out some of the new content. Here’s what I managed in the meantime, and the first bit of the new stuff.
Yes, that is a giant chicken.
Part 15: Nightmare Challenge take 2 and Modic
I apologize for not coming up with a decent April Fool’s thing this year. I normally enjoy those, but this time around, I was out of town all weekend doing fun things like playing Yoshi games and watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure with my mom. (For the record, she’s enjoying Stardust Crusaders but enjoyed the earlier parts more.) I’m planning to do something hopefully mildly interesting with Dark Souls once I’m done with this game, so pretend I posted something related to that. Anything other than yet another playthrough, which I recorded in one session but couldn’t manage to edit down into a single video of a length I was comfortable with. So I just chopped it in half awkwardly in the middle. April Fool’s. I’m skipping some of the fights because I either couldn’t beat them with the Pick of Chastity or found them too tedious even for an LP of Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption. It’s a really good weapon, though, in all but one respect. I just need to get used to it.
Part 16a: Yordo through Rhodes
The run ends without a whole lot of fanfare, but I think I’m getting a little better at the game. I found time to cram in a few more Modic fights, but I still haven’t unlocked the second new weapon yet. That will come in due course.
I may have to make a somewhat contentious statement: I think the Trial of Speed is a clever idea, and a nice spin on the original premise of the game. Everyone knows that the secret to success in a game of this type is to always be rolling and to use those i-frames to avoid every attack. Taking away that invulnerability completely changes the face of the game and forces you to rethink your strategy in most cases. It is, at least, a significant variation that wouldn’t be possible to emulate in the vanilla game. That said, it’s still exactly the same collection of bosses, so I’m familiar with most of their tricks by now. Let’s see how much that actually helps me.
Part 17a: Modic and Chanel through Faiz Tilus
So, at this point, I had enough faith in my abilities to record an entire playthrough in one session rather than stopping after every couple of bosses. Somehow, I continued to think that even playing in a mode that’s distinctly more difficult than the playthroughs I’ve done before. Some bosses are not significantly more difficult without dodge roll invincibility. Most of them are not in this video.
Part 17b: Yordo through Ang
I’m on record saying some pretty nice things about the Trial of Speed and what it brings to this game. For the most part, I stand by them. There’s just one problem: Some of the fights were really designed for you to roll through attacks, and it shows. Camber Luce and Chanel sort of worked that way, but Angronn and Adam are definitely in that mold. Had I not left Angronn for last, I expect that this playthrough would have been much more frustrating. That’s hard to imagine.
Part 18: ronn and Adam
This was the time when I stumbled into the Another Indie Discord server and found the method for unlocking the other DLC weapon. It’s something I really should have thought of sooner, and I’m a bit surprised it never just happened by accident during all of the earlier Modic fights. The actual weapon has some big strengths and some big weaknesses. I think I manage to cover most of that here. I really wish I’d found this weapon before the Trial of Speed, because I think it would have been a decent fit, at least in most of the fights. I don’t think it would have helped much with Angronn, but I guess we’ll see about that.
I’m notorious for making very poor decisions. Case in point, this LP. But I’m nothing if not capable of compounding bad decisions on top of bad decisions. I could, for example, have skipped posting this episode. I could have claimed that, regrettably, the raw footage was corrupted or lost and you really didn’t miss much. I could have simply skipped to the next episode, which is actually going to be better than most and probably worth watching. This episode is not worth watching. Please don’t watch it.
Part 20: Please don’t watch this one
I hope everybody took my advice and skipped the last video, so I’ll post the next one a bit sooner than I otherwise would. It’s a much stronger showing this time, as I edit the final recording of a marathon session into something resembling a highlight reel. This also means getting to see the final bit of content in the game, the most coveted reward, by far the hardest thing to get. Let’s just see how that turns out.
Part 21: Nightmare Challenge take 3: The Full Gauntlet
Don’t worry; there’s one more video to come, and then I really will be done with this game.
So, this is it. I decided to end the LP with a final comparison of how I play now to how I played at the start. Take a guess how many bosses I defeated without dying, then see how wrong you were.
Part 22: The Trial of Consequence, take one and final
So, in the end… Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption was definitely a game that failed to live up to its ambition. The actual gameplay experience is off-putting, but then, the same can be said of Dark Souls if you’ve heard anything about Dark Souls before attempting to play it. I will someday provide my video evidence that Fromsoft hates you and does not want you to play their games, but most games these days give you a tutorial area and some sense of progress before throwing you at an obstacle that you’re expected to die to hundreds of times before getting anywhere. The first Dark Souls did that. The third Dark Souls starts you at the entrance to the first boss door. I don’t think I like this trend. The tutorial in Sinner is bare bones and doesn’t cover much of what you need. If you haven’t played Dark Souls, it’s completely useless because it doesn’t equip you to deal with the situations the actual game will present. If you have, it’s completely useless because none of it is news and you’ll still need to check the control options to discover that, say, there is a run button, or that the block button also parries. If you’ve played Sinner before, it’s completely useless and also tedious.
The actual boss fights, i.e. the entire game, are mostly okay once you know how to fight them effectively. This is the worst kind of difficulty curve. Most games do something fun to hook you quickly, then require you to grow your skills or engage the game mechanics in complicated ways once you’re invested enough in making progress to put up with the less fun aspects. Sinner is a brick wall tall enough that you can’t see whether it’s got spikes or barbed wire at the top. The story, the part that often stands as a proxy reward for progress in games, is completely superficial. I’ve been through the game plenty of times now, and I still don’t understand what happened in Grauer. You probably don’t, either. You probably didn’t even know that Grauer was not the name of the kingdom Adam was from. Knowing the names of Boletaria, Lordran, Yarnham, and Darksoulstwoia are not important to those games, but at least I remember most of them after playing. I started this LP to show a game that I figured nobody else would want to play. That may still be true, but I can see what the fans like about it. If boss fights are what you like, then this game cuts out most of the chaff. Not enough of it, but more than any other game would reasonably eliminate.
The variety is almost nonexistent. You have to beat the game with the two weapons you start with in order to unlock any others, and that’s all the customization you get. (I’m not counting the weapons you get from Modic because that’s post-launch DLC, but it does at least provide that tiny extra bit of choice once you can beat a specific boss with your starting weapons.) The extra modes, which are also post-launch DLC, do offer some variety, but that’s basically just the no-invulnerability restriction. You can emulate single-life mode or all-sacrifices mode perfectly fine on your own if that’s what you really want to do. Nightmare Mode is certainly an interesting challenge, but some of the bosses are entirely different from their normal incarnations, and others are exactly the same. Training for it is an ordeal and a half.
The controls are pretty good, when they work. The fact that they sometimes don’t is a big problem. There’s a lot in this game, mechanically, that just doesn’t make any sense to me, which is really bad for a game that’s all about reflexes and reactions. At least it’s short and if you’re not terrible at video games, it doesn’t take long to get all the enjoyment you’re likely to get out of it, and then you can pretend you never heard of it. That’s what I plan to do. Thanks for watching, everyone.
