Test Venture to the Vile

Deer, deer, open up to me…

Let's start with a very positive point, the narration of Venture to the Vile, which is certainly one of the game's strengths. The main plot of the title is centered around the search for our character's best friend, Ella, who mysteriously disappeared during a walk in the forest. Found several days after this terrible accident, our character is transformed by the presence of the Vile within his own body. Recovered by Dr. Corbeau, an eminent researcher but a bit of a mad scientist, our little being will become a bit of a beast for the strange doctor, who would like to take advantage of this unique case of metamorphosis to learn its secrets and exploit for its own benefit.

Upon your return to the city, completely transformed by the presence of the Vile, you will have to explore the alleys and outlying districts in order to find your friend. To do this, several mandatory steps will be required, in order to justify the metroidvania side of the title. It must be admitted that the plot has a soft underbelly in its development by choosing to dissociate the main path into four sub-cases, all of which must be resolved in order to reach the conclusion of the story, and we would have liked more explanations about our own character as well as the lore and customs of the city.

More twists and turns would have been welcome, reinforcing the feeling of a fairly tame story in its development, especially since it starts off rather timidly and slowly. Really try to go beyond the first hour of play to discover the full potential of the title. Also, count on 9 to 10 hours for the main story and nearly 16 to 18 hours for 100%.

Once the four locations have been visited and freed from the grip of the Vile, you can go to the heart of the forest to find your last enemy and not the least. Finally, if you follow to the letter what the game would like you to do. Because in reality, it has three different endings, one of which you can obtain by listening carefully to what you hear at the end of the adventure, before the final fight. A final ending will be available to you if you solve a fairly massive side quest asking you to collect masks in the open world.

Effectively, Venture to the Vile has (very) many side quests, not always very interesting, but always scripted. We could criticize here a certain lack of context for some, to the point that we do not really understand where to go or who to talk to to advance them. These quests, of a fairly short nature for the most part, will ask you to mingle with the inhabitants of Rainybrook in order to learn more about their daily life, their family, their wishes but also their job, and thus help them to resolve the galley which forces them to ask you for help, you, a little lost child.

A certain awkwardness then appears here, when sane adults ask you, a lost child, to find an animal's comfort blanket or the traces of one of their colleagues. Well, past this slightly strange feeling of a plot catch-all in order to inflate the otherwise not stingy lifespan of the work, we easily lend ourselves to the game of the good forty or so side quests available.

My bane is beautiful

But who says metroidvania, also says skills and incessant back and forth. It is true that Venture to the Vile takes a bit of these mechanics but manages to make the whole thing intelligent so as not to further frustrate the players. First, each of the main skills will be unlocked following boss fights. All very technical and quite difficult, they will require a certain amount of mastery and numerous attempts to be successful (we will come back to this).

These skills will equip your character with a claw, a grappling hook, a charged jump, etc., allowing the exploration of new passages previously inaccessible, even if the grappling hook arrived in our game quite late, thus decreasing its interest all the more since the wall jump also arrives quite late.

But in order to simplify the crossing of Rainybrook (all of which can be long and tedious if you do everything by the main path) and in the absence of fast travel, the developers have imagined an entire network of sewers under the city, allowing you to reach more quickly distant parts of it. But these sewers will not be just simple paths since they will constitute a new place in its own right with their puzzles, their traps, their enemies and their difficulties. A smart proposition that deserves to be taken up in more games of the genre.

It should still be noted that the game would benefit from a more detailed map (for example, a way to identify areas not yet visited is missing), the only one present allowing you to check the area currently crossed and the number of missing items to pick up. . These elements, present in the setting or appearing by killing enemies, therefore allow you to improve your skills and weapons, by inflicting more damage or shortening the time to produce a new attack. An effective (although classic) way to encourage players to explore a completely coherent city. You will need a lot to shield your little being, because overall adventure is far from being as accessible as it seems.

Yes because Venture to the Vile is not necessarily lenient in his proposal. Souls-lite in nature, the game will do you no favors from the first boss, a transformed rabbit. Each time your character's hit box hits an enemy, a quill, a projectile, etc., you will lose a fragment of life, each death taking you back to the previous camp, these being not so frequent in the levels . Fortunately, potions will allow you to recover but only twice at first. Life or potions can be increased by picking up fragments left by enemies or by activating an “easier” mode in the menu to further simplify your adventure (well, not completely anyway).

This is where we come to one of the most frustrating aspects of the adventure. It seemed to us on many occasions that some hits received were unfairly attributed to us, while we were careful not to be hit. Although it is normal to suffer damage in the event of an attack or projectile, it is true that a simple touch from the opponent (especially bosses) can be quite punitive to the extent that we could simply try to move away from them. A feeling reinforced by the extremely changing patterns of the bosses, giving us a comforting feeling of challenge but also a feeling of incomprehension at times.

When the masks fall… or not

Venture to the Vile is also distinguished by its unique aesthetic. Combining assets that are sometimes childish and charming and at the same time disturbing, we happily blend into productions in the style of the saga Little Nightmares who would have eaten a title featuring a Victorian era almost reminiscent of a work by Tim Burton or a Grimm tale, enough to increase our curiosity. But the great originality coming from the title of Cut to Bits lies in the presence of multiple shots (nearly ten in total in certain scenes), allowing a refreshing of the metroidvania structure known for its very horizontal and somewhat vertical extents but rarely in depth.

This is how in some places, the passage from one plane to another being signified by white traces on the ground, you will be able to find new passages, secrets or objects crucial to the plot, or new traps. These traps, explosions and enemies, which will come to rot (in the good sense of the term) your epic, reinforcing in passing the finicky character of the platform part of the title, all accompanied by a heavy image dominated by the dark tones of the entirety of the environments crossed.

We can't ignore the incredible work done on the day/night cycle, which really brings something to your adventure. In addition to causing pauses in the story, this completely autonomous and unscripted cycle will force you to face different variants of the bestiary but also to explore places giving rewards not available during the day or vice versa. A new sense of intelligence then shines through, energizing the plot and your movements.

We were talking about the bestiary, we must point out a codex listing all the species you will come across, and it must be admitted that they are quite numerous and sometimes unpredictable. Between ranged attacks, charged attacks, flying or rather crawling enemies, you will have to constantly adapt to the environment you are crossing, some enemies being assigned to an area of ​​the city, while others are present everywhere. It's up to you to gauge between dodging, avoiding or attacking head-on to cross the areas surrounded by Vile.

The sound design is also particularly successful in Venture to the Vile. Especially the soundtrack, with its dark and haunting melodies that blend perfectly with the disturbing atmosphere of the city of Rainybrook. The sound effects (screams, forest noises etc.) also reinforce the immersion and manage to maintain this eerie atmosphere. However, we must recognize some technical difficulties that really harm the overall experience.

Indeed, technically, Venture to the Vile suffers from some optimization issues. We encountered a lot of framerate drops and lags, even though we tried to lower the graphics quality, which did not solve the problem. The extent of these problems was such that it greatly hindered us during the first hours of the adventure for the precision of the platform phases or even our efficiency during combat phases with many enemies, making the whole thing unnecessarily frustrating.

Nevertheless, we must praise the responsiveness of the Cut to Bits teams who were able to provide regular patches following the launch of the game to increase the stability of the experience, even if new updates will still have to correct some translation errors, punctuation and other slow loading times.