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.