IndieGo #44 – False Hero and WALTO

Although False Hero and WALTO approach action from different perspectives, both make studying an opponent the first step in taking control of a fight. False Hero lets you steal enemy techniques and assemble them into combinations that can bosses on their heels. Meanwhile, WALTO links evasion to aggression, turning a well-timed dash attack into an opportunity for a punishing follow-up. Both favor learning when to press forward, with unsettling worlds and intimidating enemies giving you plenty of reasons to hesitate. Whether you’re borrowing a monster’s best move or cutting through a very unwelcoming land of rabbits, satisfaction comes from taming those formidable foes.

False Hero, Torchlight Games

Soulslikes have spent years teaching us that we need to carefully study an enemy’s attacks to survive. False Hero offers another reason to pay attention: those attacks can become yours. A legendary mask lets you acquire their combat techniques and combine them into your own moveset. Suddenly, an enemy’s most obnoxious assault becomes something you can use against others.

You play as the husk of a scholar in the mountaintop kingdom of Wisdom, where a prophecy foretells your confrontation with the spreading force of Death. Interestingly, your allegiance is flexible, since you can serve the gods of life or become an apostle of Death. Swamps, ancient cities, and deteriorating ruins give this moral quandary an interesting backdrop. Meanwhile, coarse textures and modest polygon counts offer a visual throwback you might associate with (ahem) older console generations.

Thankfully, power stealing is more sophisticated than collecting a few flashy special moves. Gathering enough Insight from fallen enemies unlocks their Combat Arts, with bosses contributing techniques of their own. Eventually, you can build a selection of dozens of different Arts and equip up to five at once. These range from a hurled book and a tentacle strike to a sweeping broadsword swing. Naturally, each technique has its own range, timing, and use. A projectile can answer distant threats, while a broad swing can batter adjacent opponents. Best of all, there’s plenty of room for experimentation and discovering Arts that complement each other.

Keeping those borrowed attacks flowing means paying attention to Focus. Combat Arts consume the resource, but successful melee Arts can restore more than they cost, letting an accurate combo sustain itself. Your intentionally weak basic sword strike is a fallback for rebuilding Focus when you’ve run short. Switching between different attacks produces faster follow-ups than repeatedly using the same input, so there’s good reason to mix things up. Stagger adds another wrinkle: filling an opponent’s stagger meter interrupts them, and the right chains can extend your opportunity to keep attacking.

But your defensive missteps can be deadly, too. In narrow areas, it’s easy to get smash-sandwiched, while projectiles arriving from outside the camera’s view can leave you caught in repeated knockdowns. The default Recommended difficulty can become brutally demanding, particularly during later boss fights, although Easy and Very Easy settings are available. Post-launch patches have thinned out some crowded encounters and adjusted boss balance, but limited visibility can still make a defeat feel unfair. Even so, adaptable combat gives the game a cool trick. Mega Man-style power pilfering makes an appealing fit for a soulslike.

WALTO, KUKUKU GAMES

A land of rabbits sounds like a pleasant place to visit. But WALTO challenges that assumption, sending you toward a mountaintop refuge with some decidedly hostile inhabitants blocking the way. KUKUKU GAMES’ 2D boss rush frames its action around a quintet of major opponents and combat that encourages plenty of frantic dodging.

One of WALTO’s most interesting design decisions is how closely survival and damage dealing are connected. Your Surge attack combines a dash with a slash, letting you evade an incoming blow while delivering one of your own. Landing Surge attacks activates Hunting Instinct, briefly allowing you to target enemies with Pursuit and deliver a succession of punishing strikes. Learning when to move through danger turns a successful escape into the beginning of your next assault, which gives WALTO a punchy rhythm.

Thankfully, the bosses give your succinct ability set a thorough workout. One encounter uses rail barriers that become passable after you strike them, while another sends out projectiles you can reflect. Remarkably, the final boss even adjusts its behavior to your aggression, responding more quickly when you press the attack and using slower, heavier patterns when you hang back. Here, recognizing an opening is only part of the solution. You’ll also have to understand how each encounter’s hazards work.

Visually, WALTO delivers an unsettling fantasy atmosphere, with eerie rabbitlike figures and movement that has a marionette quality. The developer discloses that almost all of the game’s visual assets, including illustrations, backgrounds, and bosses, were generated with AI before being edited and refined. That may be a sticking point, but the combat makes WALTO worth investigating, especially if you enjoy turning an intimidating encounter into something manageable.

The clearest limitation is the game’s scope, with much of its appeal depending on your willingness to revisit those five main battles. Individual boss challenges in the Clash menu record your clear times and offer online rankings, while the post-game Ascent mode strings together stronger versions of all five opponents. There, you have just five health points, no healing, and a restart from the beginning if you fall. At the regular US price of $2.99, it’s worth a go; the current Steam promotion drops that to $0.62 through November 8th. You might even walk away with a grudge against rabbits, which is something I did not expect.