I have been in a metroidvania mood recently and to be honest it feels really good. It feels great to play games from a genre I absolutely love, am familiar with, and don’t have that many problems with besides if a dev is willing to stick out. Sure a lot of people feel that metroidvanias are overdue, especially with the indie scene where dozens of creators like to take inspiration from Metroid and Castlevania coincidentally, but there has to be a good reason why so many indie developers have flocked to this genre. It’s a game formula that works and works really well if executed properly. There are so many genius design choices that the metroidvania genre makes.
Some metroidvanias start you off on a linear path, but after picking up a small handful of the major traversal upgrades the games really open up. You no longer follow the easily set up route the game had. Now you must decide where to go next, backtrack to find areas you weren’t able to get to before with your new found powers, and get lost in the process. Not get lost in a bad way where the game is putting too much onto your shoulders and you have absolutely no idea of what you are doing wrong. It’s in a good way where you really feel like an adventurer wandering through a danger and uncovering the wonder that lies beyond. It’s like an open world game, but it’s now 2D and all you have to worry about is where the horizontal and vertical axis go.
The next genius design choice is that you really get to feel your player character grow stronger as you discover upgrades needed to progress. You often start off very weak or have no equipment to defend yourself against powerful foes, but the upgrades you find expand the options you have making the combat work. 2D combat is really hard to handle since it can either be really flimsy or lack the satisfaction that a basic action game can offer. When you do find the component that makes 2D combat work though then you truly did something outstanding. You found a way to take those limitations and make an engaging system with it. Plus another aspect about upgrades in metroidvanias is that compared to an RPG or a small number of open world games, where you can’t progress because you are underleveled and need to grind to stand a better chance in a high leveled fight, in a metroidvania the reason why you might be struggling is because you failed to find upgrades in the world. Stuff that will actually help you get stronger rather than a stat boost.
At this point I’m rambling on about one of my favorite game genres. Look, I love metroidvanias and anytime spent with one is bound to bring out more enjoyment from my little face. It brings out a little bit of nostalgia from me and reminds me of the simpler days of gaming. Where we didn’t have to confuse the player with so much mindless busy work and let them just have fun through the core experience. Blasphemous, Salt & Sanctuary, Bloodstained: ROTN, Owlboy, Death’s Gambit, The Messenger, Axiom Verge, Steamworld Dig 2, all of these are amazing little metroidvanias that will hopefully stand against the test of time. Of course let’s not forget about Hollow Knight which is still one of my favorite games of all time. Recently I did a review for a metroidvania titled Ender Lilies and it blew my expectations out of the park. I absolutely loved this game, it’s now one of my top best metroidvanias, and it may be my Game of The Year choice for 2021. We don’t get magical experiences like Hollow Knight or Ender Lilies that often, and immediately once I achieved the true ending in Ender Lilies I decided to seek out more. Another experience that can hold up to the likes of Ender Lilies and offer that whimsy I felt a couple of weeks ago.
Luckily I did discover a few recommendations and one of these ended up being another soulslike metroidvania with a unique artstyle. Otherwise it was going the same approach as Ender Lilies. It did come out before Ender Lilies though, so it didn’t copy the strategy entirely. The game was known as Vigil: The Longest Night which was developed by a small team named Glass Heart Games. They decided to take influence from Castlevania, Bloodborne, Salt & Sanctuary, and combine it with the style of old chinese paper cutting. The influences are obvious not just by looking at gameplay footage, but also the influences are stated on the Steam page for the game. The game received moderate reviews from the small number of outlets that decided to try it, and it was forgotten compared to a lot of indie metroidvanias. Which is a huge shame. When I read the description for Vigil: The Longest Night as a combination between Bloodborne and Castlevania and heard it didn’t do so well I told myself, “What the f*ck that sounds like everything I want to see from my dream video game”. Take two things I love and focus on the strengths that both games had. I immediately got Vigil once I heard about it and started playing it to see if it would match up what I imagined in my head. The answer….. is yes. Vigil: The Longest Night is such a damn good video game and it feels great to play two amazing metroidvanias back to back. It’s not a perfect game, but expect this review to be a little bit biased and more positive than usual. Vigil is amazing and here is why you should play it. Can you hear the choir sing? For paleblood satellites? To watch the end of everything. On this longest night.
Story
The story follows a stern woman named Leila as she returns to her hometown Maye after spending several years away training to become a Vigilant. The Vigilants have existed for years and are told to be great warriors who protect the people from any harm. Even if the harm is out of world monstrosities far beyond our own comprehension. A terrible plague broke out years before and began taking the lives of many innocent people. Not only that, but people have begun to go insane and transform into savage beasts that thirst for blood. The land is in shambles and people are doing whatever they can to fight off the infection and protect the people of the town from any outside threats. Luckily, the people of Maye recognize Leila as they respect the Vigilants and her sister Daisy is one of the most respectable citizens of Maye. Whom Leila is excited to see after all this time away from home. She is finally getting to see her little sister again. That doesn’t happen though. As Leila walks through a town literally in shambles she finds that her sister isn’t home and that she hasn’t been home for months. Daisy is missing and it’s up to Leila to find her. Some clues and questions direct her to go and explore a nearby cave, and by doing so she uncovers laboratory equipment and artifacts that haven’t been discovered by anyone else. Another missing person she was sent to look for had transformed into a hideous monster and the spirit of the slain person reveals that the beast transformed and connected to the plague spreading about. An individual known as The Doctor is responsible for the destruction of Maye and he showed up a longtime ago with weird intentions. Leila has no idea what is truly going on, but a hooded figure guides her to the town graveyard where deeper secrets lie buried beneath the earth.
Leila traverses the catacombs of the graveyard and discovers a monument possessing paranormal powers. She interacts with the monument and is transported to a nightmarish realm. Filled with suffering souls of the dead, a black hole in the background, and a hellish guardian who punishes the souls there and tries to prevent Leila from moving forward. Leila does push forward and when she does so she is sucked into a mysterious portal. She is sent right back to the outskirts of Maye, but something has changed this time around. There aren’t that many beasts wandering about like before and two patrolling hunters are unaware of what disasters have happened. It’s almost as if the plague hadn’t drastically spread yet. Leila returns to Maye and the villagers she knew greets her as if she had returned. Even though she just returned earlier. She enters her sister’s home and this time things are different once again. Daisy is here. She is actually here. Daisy embraces her sister with happiness, but Leila says that she was supposed to be missing. Daisy then disconfirms this and states that her older sister returned home faster than she thought she would. She tells Leila that a plague has begun to sprout out of nowhere and the sick have been taken to an asylum. A figure known as the Doctor has appeared and he plans to cure the sick from the current disease. That’s odd. The Doctor who was being considered a devious person earlier is now being praised as a hero for his works. Leila soon discovers that the portal she took earlier was a gateway into the past and she had been transported years before the plague started to spread. When Leila talks to the Doctor he requests her for help as he sees that she is a skilled Vigilant. He wants Leila to inspect areas that the plague could have originated and bring back any objects that can be used to analyze this. Leila then sets out to explore three damaged areas. Along the way Leila meets another mysterious figure named Hilda who states that she knows as well that everything is not what it seems. She asks Leila for her help to expose the Doctor and reveal the truth lying beneath. Leila will also discover the godly powers that wait even further and the horrors that should have been forgotten. Can you hear the choir sing? Voices fill the spires. Hymns of want still echoing. Prayers upon the lips of liars.
Gameplay
Crap. Probably shouldn’t have spent that entire introduction sequence explaining the genius design philosophy of metroidvanias. In fact I’ll just restae them briefly. 2D sidescrolling adventures that have an emphasis on exploration, backtracking, opening up new areas, and picking up upgrades that unlock a plethora of abilities to use in the field. There’s also a couple of Soulsborne elements that make Vigil classify as a soulslike, but there’s so many metroidvania elements that it feels more homage to Castlevania rather than Bloodborne. It still does an amazing job serving as a somewhat spiritual successor both though and I’m about to explain how it does so.
Two aspects that Vigil shares with the Soulsborne franchise would be how far apart the checkpoints are spread between each other and stamina management. The way stamina works is that everytime you attack, dodgeroll, or block an attack a bit of your stamina bar is used up. It regenerates after a short period of time, but it’s not wise to use it all up at once. Unlike some 2D soulslikes though, jumping doesn’t use up stamina at all which is great because your going be traversing across tricky environments a lot. There is another mechanic though where you continue to perform actions beyond the basic green stamina meter. Rather than wear out and be forced to wait for the bar to regenerate instead your bar enters a yellow state. This is when Leila is pushing herself to her uttermost limit, and if you use up the entire yellow bar or take damage when the bar is yellow then Leila becomes exhausted. She will have a hard time breathing, won’t be able to move or dodge, and leave her more invulnerable to enemy attacks. Basically it’s a way for the game to punish the players for spamming the same commands without having to limit all the actions they can perform at once.
The checkpoints are known as Owl Statues and they work as basic checkpoints like in Soulsborne games. Refill you to maximum health, allow you to teleport to other checkpoints, swap items in and out of your storage, and rest. However, Vigil doesn’t send the player back and make them lose a bunch of items upon death. The game doesn’t frequently autosave and instead uses a classic styled save system where you have multiple hard files. It means when you die you don’t lose your experience points, but actual progress. This may sound frustrating to a lot of folks, but this is where I come to defend it. I would rather prefer a save and load system rather than what Dark Souls tries to do.It means if you screw up a certain event during your playthrough or you want to change certain choices you made which carry on later you can do so. You can fail quests in this game and the only way to redo them is to reload a save file before you fail them. In Dark Souls if you fail a quest there is no going back. Plus maybe losing progress is better than losing experience points which are needed to grow stronger. It means the player can use their knowledge of a harsh area to have an easier time without the worries of losing the resources that are necessary to level up Leila.
The combat wasn’t that bad to be honest and there is a surprising amount of build variety to be offered. There are four main weapon types and they're all fun to use. Swords, daggers, axes/polearms, and bows. Each weapon has their own moveset and when you level up you really get to expand what attacks you can perform. It’s not like Dark Souls where souls have to be spent at a checkpoint or NPC, and there are a multitude of stats to choose from which affects your gear efficiency. It’s like Bloodstained or Ender Lilies where you simply level up by killing enemies. That’s all I need. Simple leveling that doesn’t require too much thought. Your stats not only increase, but you also gain skill points. Here we f*cking go. Skill trees are a modern trend in game design today, but Vigil is doing something right by offering skills that affect your playstyle rather than give you an ability you will never use. One skill category dedicated to stats and the effectiveness of items. The skill tree for axes, which became my main weapon, had things that allowed me to adapt an aggressive playstyle. More stamina when I have an axe equipped, use up less stamina when swung, have a faster charge attack time, a cyclone spin which can be performed in midair, or speed up the rate of which the axe strikes. It’s really good and the skill trees aren’t so complicated to the point where you get like five billion useless abilities you will never use.
What are a bunch of other metroidvania or soulslike standards that can be applied onto Vigil? A clothing system that can offer stat boosts and change the appearance of your main character. Weapons can only be upgraded at blacksmiths using materials you find. You have blood vials, and this is one of the influences from Bloodborne, which are used for healing and restore enough health so you only need to use one or two. The game splits off into multiple paths and you can choose to do any of them in any order. There are side quests and optional areas outside the main story. Bosses stand at the end of each area and they are what stand between you and progression. There are specific items designed to perform spells or elemental attacks with a cooldown rate. Much more. Just like Ender Lilies or Hollow Knight, Vigil: The Longest Night borrows a lot of ideas but it does them all so well what more could you want. It’s a fun game and it works perfectly. A thousand eyes. Curse of the wise. Into the madness I descend.
Thoughts
Vigil: The Longest Night is an absolute gem of a metroidvania and it's a shame it didn’t see the light of day and get the attention it most definetly deserved, because what Glass Heart made here is a masterpiece in design, atmosphere and world building. We’ll touch upon why this game is almost a masterpiece to me, but for right now let’s touch upon what this game does tremendously right like a lot of metroidvanias. The artstyle is great. I think a lot of people can say that when they look at Vigil and its visuals. They certainly maintained the shine and finesse of chinese paper cutting and for some reason the artstyle also reminded me of some of the pop up halloween story books my mother used to read to me when I was in bed. The ones where I wasn’t paying attention as my eyes scanned from left to right. Looking at the pop up characters standing before me. Vigil looks really beautiful at times, but the animation and fluidity isn’t up there like Hollow Knight or Spiritfarer. It’s in the same area that Ender Lilies is in where they designed the individual parts of the character and attached them onto components that allow them to rotate and create an animation cycle. Rather than put in the work and actually create smooth and natural animation.
The controls felt really good and Leila never felt clunky to control. They were responsive and I always had the reaction time to quickly dodge an attack or follow up with another combo. The combat and build variety has a lot more depth than I was expecting. You really get to feel more powerful as you find more upgrades and equipment. The world opens up immediately after the first two or so hours and the places you go to can be really bizarre. There is a good amount of world building and what happens later down the line in the story makes you wonder if you comprehend what is going on. It’s like Bloodborne where all your problems should be answered if you search every nook and cranny, but by the end you still have questions of what the hell just happened. The difficulty curve also ended up being really fair as the game kept me on my toes, but never got so hard to the point where I had to grind . It’s a metroidvania, so all you have to do is explore another area and come back late when you feel you are ready.
The game took me roughly around ten or more hours to beat which is a good run time especially since the game costs around twenty two dollars. There is a good amount of side content to be discovered. There are multiple endings to unlock and a new game plus mode which allows you to replay the entire game with all the unlocks you earned and have the whatever parts of the map revealed so you don’t get lost as much. Vigil: The Longest Night is a really good metroidvania and my magic crystal ball tells me that I’m going to give this game a really high review score. This wouldn't be a review without some criticisms though, so we might as well bring those up.
I think it’s weird how I have to hold the left joystick diagonally to go up or down some stairs. Half the time it doesn’t register and when you are going down a flight of stairs the game will accidentally register it as a crouch. Also jumping onto the stairs and upwards is more effective than walking up them, so you might as well just make them platforms rather than stairs. One of the endings to the game is really easy to screw up as the quests needed to achieve them can be failed without notice. Spells have cooldown rates shorter than you expect and if you centralize yourself around spells then you’ll find them very easy to spam and abuse. Basically magic in this game can be broken and make tough fights easy. If I were to choose between Ender Lilies and Vigil, personally I think Ender Lilies is much better. It does a better job at focusing on the main character and why their position matters to the plot and world. It made you feel while also keeping that sense of wonder that Bloodborne is known for.
Soundtrack for Vigil was generally good and it was similar to the orchestra of madness that Bloodborne had. It was there when it needed to be and compared to a lot of video game soundtracks I would prefer Vigil with how much care was put into it. There’s nothing to really write about home to though and there weren’t that many tracks that stuck in my head and I can hum on the fly. There’s something really wrong with the audio and sound as well. It’s very… loud. When I smash certain objects like crates and see bits of fly across the screen, the sound of the wood smashing is louder than it really should be. The main title screen has a bombastic theme and it feels like it’s blasting right into my face. Yes, I am really hyped to step back into your world Vigil, but do you have to wake me with a horn every single time? This wasn’t a major problem to me and Ender Lilies had it as well, but all the characters don’t have voice actors and are characterized through text. I like it, personally I am someone who would prefer text that I can read at my own pace rather than have voice actors spew exposition into my face. I love cinematic games with a huge emphasis on story and build up, but getting to go at your own pace and take the story for what it is makes getting confused less likely to happen. That’s why I was really excited when I heard Disco Elysium mainly relied on text rather than cinematography. Some people may have a problem with it though, because some metroidvanias like Bloodstained and Blasphemous have voice acting to characterize its world. It’s all up to the imagination really.
In the end, Vigil: The Longest Night gets a high recommendation from me and may be another one of the best metroidvanias I have played in a while. There aren’t any good reasons to hate or doubt this game, and even though it’s not entirely original what matters is substance. You can have a game like Hollow Knight or Yakuza: like A Dragon which aren’t original or innovative, but if their core design and execution of ideas are well done then there will be great execution. Vigil is amazing and if you haven’t played it go do so . I give Vigil: The Longest Night a 9.5/10 for excellence at best.
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