It seems like the type of game you would have enjoyed a few years ago is coming back to haunt your dreams, as I’ve been experiencing the last couple of weeks. With titles like Inside and Maldita Castilla grabbing everyone’s attention, smaller unknown titles sneak in unnoticed. With July being the black hole of gaming where you’re inundated with smaller games that would drown in other months, frustration remains abound.
Cast of the Seven Godsends launched last month on Xbox One, alongside a game I recently reviewed with a similar play style. Unfortunately, this title is not on the same level as the prior game, and there are several valid reasons for that, even if both of them are one in the same. Cast of the Seven Godsends follows a young warrior princess on a quest to free her ‘new born baby’ from the clutches of an evil that is taking hold in the kingdom. The story for all intents and purposes is quite boring, and since you have to read everything while the music races in the background, you’ll be forgiven for not really paying attention. The main focus of this title is gameplay, or so I felt.
The gameplay, however, was the one part of the game that drove me to sheer madness. Unlike other games in this new ‘genre’, it failed to settle on whether it wanted to be fast paced or not, and having a gameplay experience where the difficulty spikes dramatically just add to this frustration. For instance, you would have a harder time getting to the boss fights, than defeating them. Some parts you can literally run past all the enemies, and when you do get to one of the many boss fights, you literally stand in one corner and shoot at them until they die, without having a single point taken off from your hitpoints.
But the main issue is not that the climatic mid-level encounters are wildly unbalanced, it’s that the entire game feels unpolished. Enemy sprites are inconsistent in their attacks, and there are some weird enemies that roam the maps—of which are extremely small—and you’ll be wondering to yourself, what was the reasoning behind all of this to begin with.
The game is divided into 7 different areas, of which are divided into two or three mid-levels. The game spans several locations including marches, volcanoes, and small towns. As for the design, the game shines in the visuals department, having a distinctly 16-bit look that so many indies go for. As for weapons and attack styles, the game offers the player some unique options. The game has a magic element, and this only becomes available at certain points. Loot drops—if you can call them that—appear when you kill specific enemy types or defeat them in certain instances. You can unlock additional abilities by killing targets, and unlockables include higher jumps and faster speed amongst others. The loot system is limited but serves its purpose.
It’s not that the game doesn’t have some charm to it, but its overall appeal is undone by the developer trying too hard. Another issue—amongst many—is the inconsistent checkpoint system. I burned Maldita Castilla for this same issue, and Cast of the Seven Godsends takes this and runs with it. There are zero indications when the game would actually hard save your progress, and using the ‘save level’ button doesn’t give you confidence that what you just had to endure wouldn’t be repeated. I’ve gone through so many replays of the same level, because I saved my progress, just to be met with the same level when I start the game up again, and things like these are the exact reason games such as Cast of the Seven Godsends don’t receive much attention. I would love for the developer to patch this annoying glitch, fix the unbalanced gameplay—even with the useless difficulty settings to boot—and get a better soundtrack.
Summary
Cast of the Seven Godsends, like most of these games, has a lot of potential. Inside and others have shown us that unique experiences can become mainstream, and this game is not immune to such success. But with such a broken and frustrating experience, the story fades behind the utterly teeth-gnashing music and you quitting altogether. I liked the game, but it needs more polish. A lot more polish.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.