Trek to Yomi Review (GugsSuggs)
Trek to Yomi is a game that holds promise underneath many issues broken at its core. Unfortunately, as the game continues, these core problems suck away every last breath of the game and every ounce of patience. Trek to Yomi is a delight with its audio and visuals, capturing the work of Akira Kurosawa with the dark edge of Kobayashi. The set pieces are also faithful to Japanese samurai films, especially in the first two chapters. The gameplay's pretty solid for the first hour and a half, even if the combat's depth is minimal and occasionally unresponsive. Unfortunately, these issues get overwhelmingly suffocating by Chapter 3 and especially Chapter 5 and beyond.
The combat from the beginning is rather simplistic, but it's passable as an introduction to the game. It's stiff, but it leaves a lot of room for expanding on as the chapters progress. The biggest problem with Trek to Yomi is that the combat rarely evolves in any beneficial way as the game continues. Sure, you get combos, but most of them aren't valuable and don't give you more of an edge than the starting attacks. Plus, killing several bandits in a row stops feeling rewarding as your combat doesn't get better with each kill. Combine all that with enemy types getting more annoying, including rangers and obnoxious boss fights, and Trek to Yomi rapidly becomes a test of patience.
The story isn't all that special, either. While the influence from Japanese films is a nice touch, it also doesn't forge its identity from them. Instead, it blends together with every samurai trope you've seen three times. While this isn't anywhere near as big of a deal as the gameplay, the story's predictability doesn't help keep the game going once the gameplay starts nosediving. It feels like the devs had a great idea for a short and sweet 2-hour game and got forced to extend it further. Unfortunately, all of its good graces fell apart by the end of Chapter 5, and it didn't recover by the end.
It's also worth noting that Trek to Yomi is surprisingly buggy. I had at least one minor softlock, and I had more than one instance where an upgrade would disappear after dying, and I couldn't recollect it. Not to mention a good chunk of dropped inputs and hit detection oddities. I've heard many other, much worse bugs happen to others. Feels like Trek to Yomi wasn't given enough QA time before getting sent to the world. I'm sure they'll iron out some of the glitches and maybe improve the combat later down the line, but I don't expect revisiting Trek to Yomi or recommending others to try it out even if they fix it.
At the end of the day, Trek to Yomi is a huge disappointment. I don't want to rag on the developers too much, as I can tell both they and Devolver Digital have the best intentions. Unfortunately, with clearly not enough QA testing and questionable design choices, Trek to Yomi falls short of its goals. There are far worse games out there, and Trek to Yomi's playable at the very least. At the end of the day, though, Trek to Yomi proves that gameplay matters the most.