I’m afraid I don’t have the highest quality of puns to introduce this review. I’ve had a look at Vambrace: Cold Soul, whose lead game and narrative designer described it as “a love letter to the games that left their indelible marks on us. It’s inspired by the gothic fantasy of Castlevania, the deep lore of series like The Elder Scrolls, the replayability of roguelites like FTL: Faster Than Light, and the sweeping, character-driven epics of our favorite JRPGs. It represents our effort to seize those varied elements and condense them into an interactive experience players from all walks (especially masochists) will enjoy[.]”

Well, I’m certainly no masochist. Perhaps that’s the main reason why I’ve had a particularly “icy” reception to Vambrace: Cold Soul. I say “the main reason” because the list of things I dislike about Vambrace: Cold Soul considerably outweighs the things I like about it. I’ll get to all of that in a bit. First, let me set the scene. You play as Evelia Lyric, daughter of the recently deceased, world-renowned scholar Nicolau Lyric. You were recently summoned back to your homeland to read your father’s last will and testament. Your father left you a quest in his will.

More specifically, he left you the following three items: an encrypted journal whose secrets you alone have the means to uncover, a letter instructing you to travel to Icenaire and find someone called Zaquard, and an ancient, magical piece of armor called the Aetherbrace that you cannot seem to remove by any means once you put it on. That sounds easy enough, right? Just head to Icenaire, find this Zaquard guy, and ask him why dear old Dad instructed you to seek him out. The trouble is that the city of Icenaire is in the cold grip of a curse.

A malevolent figure known as the King of Shades and his minions, a cult called the Green Flame, are responsible for the predicament in which the city of Icenaire finds itself. The curse takes the form of the Frostfall, a vast wall of magical ice that instantly kills anything that touches it. Green Flame cultists can also create smaller, more localized versions of the Frostfall to make things even more difficult for Icenaire’s inhabitants. Upon reaching the exterior of the city, however, you discover that the Aetherbrace allows you to pass through the Frostfall at will.

That means you’re the only one who has a chance of breaking the curse. It falls to you and any mercenaries you recruit to track down and defeat the higher-ranking Green Flame cultists, and eventually the King of Shades himself. When you’re not out on missions progressing toward that ultimate goal, you mainly stay within an underground settlement called Dalearch. While there, you can rest at the Lost Lady Inn, craft and purchase useful items at the marketplace, hire mercenaries to join your party on story quests, and ultimately actually embark on said quests by using an ancient relic called the Ascending Room.

While you’re on a quest, you can return to Dalearch at any time. This will allow you to keep your loot and recuperate in a safe environment, but it will also mean you’ll lose all progress you made on that quest beforehand. By “progress,” I mainly mean how much you navigated through the associated “dungeon” (for lack of a better term) and how close you were to reaching the mission’s objective. You’ll frequently need to find (relatively) safe places to make camp during missions. You can only use consumable items from your inventory while camping.

The subject of camping brings me to the main thing I dislike about Vambrace: Cold Soul. There’s no point beating around the bush: Virtually the entirety of the core gameplay loop within Vambrace: Cold Soul is, at best, a watered-down, much more monotonous version of Darkest Dungeon’s core gameplay loop. I look at comparing Darkest Dungeon to Vambrace as an embodiment of that “I’ll let you copy my homework, but change the answers a bit so the teacher won’t notice” Internet meme. Darkest Dungeon did that hypothetical homework assignment properly, while Vambrace’s attempt to copy it falls flat in many ways.

Some aspects of Vambrace: Cold Soul needed a bit more attention from its quality assurance team. To momentarily return to the subject of camping, you can have one of your party members amuse the rest of the group to help boost morale. Immediately after each time you do this, a short clip of applause can be heard. That audio clip is so heavily compressed that a low-quality Nintendo 64 game could justifiably make fun of it. I see no reason for the sudden, jarring presence of such low-quality audio in an era where games can require over a hundred gigabytes of storage space.

While you’re in combat within Vambrace: Cold Soul, you can hold down a key to speed up all the battle animations. I’m quite glad this is present, but that’s mainly because Vambrace’s combat would feel painfully slow without it. I’ve found myself compelled to keep that key held down through every battle I’ve encountered during my time with Vambrace. It’s disappointing to see a mechanic I wish were more common be implemented in such a way that it feels mandatory. That’s somewhat fitting because if I had to describe Vambrace: Cold Soul in a word, “disappointing” would be a strong contender.

A PC review key for Vambrace: Cold Soul was provided by Headup for this review.

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Vambrace: Cold Soul

$24.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Interesting story concept.
• Being able to hold a button to speed up combat at will is nice.

Cons

• Slow, monotonous core gameplay loop.
• Some aspects feel like attempts to be different for no good reason.
• Noticeable errors in in-game text.
• Jarring differences in sound quality.