Crappy on deck due to fiddly stick acceleration issues and poor framerate but on a regular gaming PC with mouse and keyboard its really good. hard as balls and punishing... but good, though i think the aim assist is broken (at least on controller where i would actually want such a feature) and opting for a framerate cap just locks it to a jittery 30FPS instead of letting me pick a framerate. also i am convinced the black jack deck is just a random number generator and isn't actually simulating a real deck of cards.

another note- its criminal that i cant buy an art book or soundtrack for this game. as an art piece this game is stunning.

Edit (August/4/2024): the game doesnt respect steam input fully. I went in and rebind everything to emulate a mouse and keyboard on my steamdeck using the triggers to shoot. When i do this not only do the track pads still have weird inconsistant snapping when used as a mouse but shooting causes the bike to accelerate. This isnt a deal breaker still as i primarily game on a desktop but its still worth mentioning as i know a lot of people buy games exclusively based on how well they perform on deck. And for those people stay far far away. The framerate isnt consistant aiming with default controls feels bad with a controller and steam input is just broken here.

I had a blast with this game. Its powerful narrative and really enjoyable gameplay make the whole experience extremely worth it, and for 13-14 euros an absolute gift.

Laika: Aged Through Blood is a Metroidvania developed by Brainwash Gang and published by the esteemed Thunderful Publishing (the studio chiefly known for its SteamWorld franchise), where you play a humanoid coyote, named Laika, as she tries to protect her village and raise her youngest daughter at the same time, in a dystopian world overrun with a fascist bird cult. Laika's world is one which straddles the line between the Wild West and a semi-modern wartime aesthetic, circa WW1/WW2. Its demo gives an unbelievable first impression of highs present and highs galore to abound in the full game. Unfortunately, the undeniably talented team over at Brainwash Gang never manages to unleash the game's full ludological and even narrative potential.

When you play the demo, you will see where the majority of the game's budget went: The main menu oozes style, inviting you with a tantalizing totem, not unlike those found in Native American tribes, throughout the continental United States and Mexico. Laika's world breathes and pulses, like a smoker's lung and a failing heart respectively. That is not to say that the world is poorly designed, but quite the contrary, the game swallows you whole into an atmosphere most bleak and will not let you out till you see the stories conclusion.
Laika: Aged Through Blood's themes are powerful, its characters believable, at once tugging on your heartstrings and sometimes masticating them to discordant bits. Laika is a transgressive work of pseudo-Western, feminist, anti-fascist fiction about hatred, revenge, maternal trauma and the resulting emotional coldness and unavailability. It presents its sordid buffet of blood, guts and nigh on constant death in a smattering of colors, bombast and beauty, that makes it beautiful to look at, like Pearl Harbor, if it was animated by Makoto Shinkai’s team. You will laugh, you will cry and your stomach will churn as you face this world, as music from an in-universe band plays through your cassette player, while you slaughter hordes of sycophantic militia. In this, Laika is a masterpiece. Now let me rip the band-aid off and talk about how it fails:
The game is seriously flawed on a ludological level. The game’s in-world representation of respawn mechanics is clever and sensible, its oppressive feeling of insurmountable odds is palpable, but part of it is due to the shoddy enemy placement, swamping you with surprise hordes or split second rockets to the cranium like a typical FromSoftware surprise gank. It isn’t good when FromSoftware does it, and it certainly isn’t good here.
The game’s visual flair and artistic beauty are wonderful, but its constant, independent camera movement, including frequent in- and out-zooming leads to many anticlimactic deaths, where you can barely see your character and end up crushing Laika under the weight of her bike, creating, throughout the entire experience, beginning to end, a ludonarrative dissonance between Laika’s skill and your constant blunders due to the camera, the wacky bike control and your character oft being blocked by foreground elements, an ungodly amount of partical effects, or blood-smearing throughout Laika’s whole body. Everything in the game, including background, foreground, enemy projectiles, the player and NPCs pop about as much as everything else, which is stunning visually, and you can tell the team are visual geniuses, but they lacked the vision to make something of proper visual clarity for a high octane gaming experience.
Another problem are the game’s sidequests, frequently meandering, often in inconvenient places, far from the game’s annoyingly few fast travel points. Some provide you with lore and important character depth, most provide you with useless materials and a slap on the wrist, all of them (without any exceptions coming to mind) are fetch quests. These quests also do not change anything about the game’s underwhelming and rushed ending. No post credits cutscenes showing the work you did for the community of “Where We Live” (the game’s main hub/town/tribe location), not even a lousy text scroll.
The game is also unbelievably buggy, when your bike isn’t spinning wildly out of control (as mentioned before) or your character isn’t falling through the ropes she should be able to drop through, a cutscene breaks, or music stops playing until you manually reset it, or a stray gattling gun bullet miraculously breaches your bike’s defenses, which should render you impervious, per the game’s rules. The final nail in the coffin for me, was the game completely breaking during the cutscene before the final boss, leaving me without any context for what was happening and whom or what I was even fighting, because reloading a save kept either throwing me out of bounds of the final area, or playing the cutscene in a fully broken and illegible state. Funnily enough, the final boss was also the only time in the entire game where the damage values of your guns meant anything, because everything else is a one-hit kill or takes flat, interval damage (mostly shooting a boss’ weakspot once, when exposed, before the fight jumps into the next, often uneventful phase).

Clearly, Brainwash Gang are a capable team of visual and sonic artists, but they are not a team of competent game designers, just passable ones, and that is a shame, cause the game comes so close to greatness, but the rushed diegesis of its third act, bizarre decisions such as a 20 minute unskippable cutscene where barely anything happens, except for you riding a ferry, areas which outstay their welcome, along with all of the aforementioned issues and many which remain unnamed here for time's and readability's sake, along with a general bugginess and lack of polish keep it from being a truly impactful masterpiece. All in all, Laika: Aged Through Blood is a good game, but is too busy reminding you of its failings on a fundamental, ludological level and dragging you down into the mire of its padding and unpolished minutia to fully stick the landing and have the incredible impact a story like this should have. Perhaps this would have been better as a minimalist gaming experience, alla Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch or Minute of Islands, where the gameplay elements are sparse, but rarely if ever get in your way, putting almost the entire emphasis on the story. As it stands, Laika: Aged Through Blood seems very much like the work of incredible artists from other fields being overambitious and going “how hard can making a game be?” A problem that is all too often palpable in many independent studio efforts today.


P.S. I also forgot to mention that the game is barely a Metroidvania, there are like two upgrades, which allow you to reach previously unreachable places, but both of them come close to the end of the game.