No Place for Bravery – Review

Once a powerful member of the Old Order, Thorn is now content to live a quiet life in the town of Ossuary as one of the few remaining Guardians of the world of Dewr. A typical day for him and his daughter Leaf consisted of a hunt on the outskirts of town, where they competed in a friendly hunting contest, until tragedy struck. While they watched, demonic, otherworldly beings called Helwyr began their rampage through Ossuary, prompting Leaf to rush home and save her helpless mother. Leaf is kidnapped by The Warlock, a terrifying entity, before she can reach the Ossuary gates, and The Warlock disappears right in front of a distraught Thorn.

Then, suddenly, he comes to. Ten years have passed since Leaf disappeared, but the nightmares continue.

Glitch Factory’s newest creation, No Place For Bravery, combines methodical, bloody combat with a lore-filled narrative that begs the question, “How far are you willing to take this?”

No Place For Bravery’s ominous opening screen immediately sets the tone for the game. Shadowy tribal drums beat in the background as old Folk strings play foreboding melodies. You might think everything is fine because a choir is harmonising over the croons of Mongolian throat singing and a scene of a lush field with waving grass and carefree butterflies is on the screen, but you’ll soon realise that something is not quite right. As you get set to begin your journey as Thorn, a feeling of impending doom creeps up on you.

The game’s soundtrack continues this trend, giving the impression that each song is a representation of Thorn’s internal monologue. Simply put, the music is fantastic. The music and sound design of Glitch Factory’s Eduardo Zolhof capture the range of Thorn’s feelings, from bleakness and hopelessness to rage and ambition, and are featured in the game. Sometimes I’d just sit and listen to the music for a while before continuing on.

I’ll be the first to admit that pixelated visuals often appeal to my nostalgic side. I have a soft spot in my heart for games that try to recapture the glory days of the 16-bit Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis systems, which I played as a child. For example, if I hear about a game like Titan Souls by Acid Nerve or Hyper Light Drifter by Heart Machine, I’m pretty much going to buy it immediately regardless of how good it is or isn’t (it turns out they’re both good and you should play them).

The fluid, animated backgrounds and foregrounds in No Place For Bravery’s 2D sprites make every scene look stunning and full of life. Obviously, the environment and effects around it shine even brighter than what we could have imagined in the past thanks to the much higher resolutions and wider colour range available compared to titles of the 1990s. The blood is a vivid shade of red, and the colours are vivid overall.

Melee combat in No Place For Bravery is all about timing your Parrying ability against your enemies in order to wear down their defences and expose them to critical damage. The players of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice will recognise this as a common theme. If you’re a fan of games like Souls, you’ll feel right at home here, despite the two-dimensional nature of the playing field and the inclusion of a Dodge ability that grants a brief period of invulnerability frames shortly after the game’s introductory stages.

Hey, I get frustrated too when every game with a moderately challenging combat system is compared to FromSoftware’s library, but Glitch Factory advertises “Brutal Sekiro-esque 2D Combat” on the game’s Steam page. You shouldn’t kill the messenger.

Unfortunately, once you acquire the game’s third main weapon, the Arbalest, all your strategies for dealing with large groups of enemies and difficult bosses seem to go out the window. The remaining threats you face on your journey appear to be child’s play in the face of this incredibly accurate crossbow with practically infinite ammo. Upon discovering the Arbalest, I was able to easily cheese my way through what I assume to be challenging boss battles, leading me to wonder if I should have increased the difficulty. It’s a shame, because No Place For Bravery has some really exciting and satisfying fight scenes when they work, and when they don’t, well, you can always resort to using the Arbalest.

No Place For Bravery has a few annoying bugs that occasionally brought my playthrough to a screeching halt, and unfortunately, the developers’ decision to name themselves Glitch Factory hits a little too close to home.

As soon as it started up, the game was indecisive about what resolution it wanted to stay at. I play on a 2k monitor, so the native resolution I’d expect to use is 2560 x 1440, but No Place For Bravery insisted I use 4k. If I changed the resolution on the title screen and then loaded a save, the game would reset to 4k and require me to change the resolution again. There was a point where I had to reinstall and launch the game on a different monitor until I could get it adjusted and working for my primary display because of the constant switching of display resolutions between the main menu and the game world.

Sometimes I’d run into bugs that made it so I couldn’t use any of the game’s menus or control my character at all, forcing me to exit the game using the Alt-F4 key combination. After loading into a new area, I was unable to move forward in the game despite hearing the music and seeing Thorn’s idling animation. My character’s sprite was also duplicated during a cutscene and remained so even after the scene ended, blocking my progress to the next area because the camera was fixed on the duplicate instead of me.

No Place for Bravery is, at its core, a story about decisions and the results of those decisions. Everything about Thorn is a product of the decisions he’s made, both in the past and the present, and the decisions you make for him in the future. Thorn has arrived where he is, with the friends he has, and the demons that haunt him as a result of every choice he has ever made. The player is given agency in the story of No Place For Bravery, and is even given dialogue choices that could potentially end the game in that very scene. The player feels a sense of responsibility for their actions because of the significance given to each choice. Those around you suffer and even perish because you decided to keep going. You’re responsible for the plot’s subsequent developments.